Flying Gliders

There are two of these, and they are not the same toy. The older one is balsa: thin sheets of wood you punched out and slotted together, sold off a rack because someone walked in to buy it. The other is foam, printed with WWII fighter markings, and it mostly arrived free — a party favor, a redemption prize, a reward for sitting still at the dentist.

The balsa one has a company behind it. Paul K. Guillow, a World War I naval aviator who came home from Europe with a love of flight, set up in a family barn in Wakefield, Massachusetts, in 1926 under the name NuCraft Toys. It did not start with gliders: riding the aviation craze that followed Lindbergh's 1927 flight, its first products were a card game, The Lindy Flying Game, and a board game, Crash: The New Airplane Game. The planes came later and never stopped. By 1933 the business had moved out of the barn and taken his name; when Paul died in 1951 his widow Gertrude ran it; in the 1990s it bought up competitors including Tiger, Inc. of Los Angeles and Comet of Chicago. Guillow's turned a hundred in 2026 and still sells foam gliders of its own — the Patriot and the Falcon — but those are big hobby gliders with a price on them, not the thing in the party bag.

The foam one has something stranger: a name, but no official history. The packages read "Flying Gliders" beside a small propeller logo and the words POWER PROP, in red-and-blue or red-and-yellow bags, with the aircraft listed by number on the back. Collectors — who are the only people who ever wrote any of this down — credit the originals to Imperial Toy Corporation, the Los Angeles novelty house founded in 1969 by Fred Kort and Arnie Rubin and better known for Miracle Bubbles, and they identify a genuine bag by the Imperial logo printed on it. Other packages carry other names entirely, Couswell or Shen Shin; the planes were made at different times in Japan, in China, in Taiwan. Nobody has ever published a corporate history of the line.

What exists instead is a small, obsessive amateur archive. Because the good ones got copied, collectors sort real from counterfeit by the logo, argue over which bag came first, and catalogue the packaging's own mistakes — the numbering doesn't even agree with itself, the same plane turning up as two different numbers. That is the whole record: no founding date, no press, no company anniversary — just the people who kept the bags, reverse-engineering a toy that was cheap enough to hand out by the dozen and was mostly thrown away by dinnertime.