Isaac Heller, the founder of Remco, died on March 7 at the age of 88. As reported by The New York Times, Heller was a former Navy electronics technician who got his start as a toymaker by buying up military surplus and transforming it into toys that zoom, soar, or otherwise move.
Heller was born on July 23, 1926, in Ellenville, N.Y. When he was 12, the family moved to Brooklyn, where Heller studied electrical engineering at Brooklyn Technical High School. From 1944 to 1946, he served in the Navy, where during idle moments, he built toys from spare electronics components for his shipmates to send home to their children.
Heller knew of warehouses all over New York filled with military surplus going begging, and so after his discharge, he visited each of them, buying up airmen’s earphones. From these, working in the basement of his brother-in-law’s upholstery shop, he built what became Remco’s first product and remained one of its best known: toy walkie-talkies.
Along with a cousin named Saul Robbins, Heller founded Remco in 1949. The name stood for “remote control,” and the company became associated with boys’ toys, even though it began offering dolls in later years. By the 1960s, Remco was also known for licensed products, including action figures of the Beatles, complete with mop-tops that could be combed, and Star Trek characters.
Heller and Robbins sold Remco in 1966, and afterward, Heller was an industrial-park developer and philanthropist whose causes included his alma maters and the John Kenney Child Care Center, which he founded in Edison, N.J., in 1987.
