(WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Andrew Clayman is the founder of the Made in Chicago Museum, which tells the story of things that used to be made here.
“The enjoyable ones are all the smaller, forgotten companies where you kind of feel like you’re dusting off this information about an innovative product or an interesting person who started this little business that might have been relevant for awhile,” he tells WBBM Newsradio.
Take the Hump Hair Pin Company.
Clayman said it was “a very big deal at the turn of the 20th century for inventing this new bobby-pin.”
“They were made in Chicago and they had a huge building that was the Hump Hair Pin Building.”
Hump was almost put out of business when the bob hairstyle became the rage.
Another example of a Chicago-made product that burned brightly was an interlocking toy brick that could make structures. Sound familiar?
“There was a toy made by the Halsam Company in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and they were little plastic stacking bricks just like Lego, and they were called Elgo plastic bricks,” Clayman said.
They weren’t LEGO knockoffs, he said. Elgo existed before LEGO.
Then, from the 1930s, there’s Allied Manufacturing in the 1300 block of South Michigan.
“The son of the man who founded the company hired two of his buddies from a Chicago boxing academy to break into his parents’ home and steal his mother’s jewelry.
“He made it look like it had been a break-in by strangers, but he had organized it to try to steal from his own parents.”
The Made in Chicago Museum is mostly online. Clayman is working toward finding a new home for his exhibits.
In the meantime, he hopes people will tell him the stories of their grandparents or great-grandparents who worked in some of the many long-gone businesses.
“I’m actually interested in hearing that, and you might be surprised that other people would be, too,” Clayman said.