Remembering West Hempstead's Aurora Plastics and its model kits that entranced Long Islanders

You bought them at Korvette’s or Modell’s — boxed model kits of glue-it-yourself planes, trains and automobiles, monsters, spaceships and superheroes. And while many companies made model kits, the standouts came from Long Island — from the fabled Aurora Plastics of West Hempstead.

In its 27 years of existence, Aurora made kits of everything from the Wolfman to World War I planes, from Superman to the Seaview submarine from 1964's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea."

Enticed by box art that could have been movie posters, kids would take these kits home and put together the pieces — generally anywhere from 15 to 150 — using tubes of what was called airplane glue from companies like Revell or Testors modeling paint and brushes.

The factory,  located at 44 Cherry Valley Ave. until it shuttered in 1977, was a toy wonderland of sorts to kids in the 1950s, '60s and '70s. 

"I remember riding in the family car and passing the Aurora factory," says Leonard J. Provenzano, 69, of Mineola. "They had giant representations of the boxes out on the front lawn, rotating the box art. I'm kicking myself I never inquired about a tour."

Syosset’s Gary Lewi did get a look inside the facility in the 1970s and calls it the "epicenter of all those childhood hobby efforts," a colossal warehouse of artifacts. 

THE BUILDING OF A MODEL

  Aurora Plastics began in Brooklyn in 1950, founded by engineer Joseph E. Giammarino and Russian immigrant Abe Shikes to do injection molding for industry. John Cuomo came on in 1952 as sales chief and a 10% partner. Expanding into the consumer market, Aurora first produced toys before pivoting to model kits, starting with two 1⁄48th-scale fighter jets: the Grumman F9F Panther and the Lockheed F-90. Initially targeting a younger audience than the 11- to 14-year-olds that such established model makers as Monogram and Revell aimed at, Aurora made smaller and much less detailed models in order to sell for less, according to "Aurora Model Kits" (‎Schiffer, 2004) by Thomas Graham, a now-retired history professor. They retailed for 79 cents to 99 cents, compared with $2 or more from other companies.

Those first two models sold an exceptional 400,000 units in their first three months, reported Newsday. Seeking more space for the burgeoning company, Aurora relocated in 1954 to an initially 25,000-square-foot plant in West Hempstead that it eventually expanded to 132,000 square feet. In 1963 alone, the company produced 25 million model kits, according to a Newsday article published in 1964.

  The main things many people remember are the pop culture kits — Marvel and DC superheroes, classic radio/TV characters like the Lone Ranger and Tonto, spaceships from science-fiction TV shows like "The Invaders" and "Land of the Giants," and, among other things, such Universal Pictures movie monsters as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula and the Mummy.

"I remember doing the Frankenstein’s monster. I remember doing the Mummy," reminisces Gus Schaefer, 74, a retired Underwriters Laboratory executive who grew up in Uniondale and now lives in Illinois. He had gotten into model building thanks to airplane kits brought to him by his neighbor, Goldie Samu, who worked at Aurora. Later, Schaefer would buy Aurora models at his local Modell’s and at a hobby shop.

The monster figures "were actually simpler, a little more straightforward" than the airplane models, he recalls. "I don't think there were as many pieces with the figure models. You could do them in one day if you had a couple hours to dedicate to it."

EXPANDING A BRAND

Aurora became a pop culture cornucopia, not only for its savviness in subject matter but for box art that engaged most every kid who looked at it. "Being close to New York City, Aurora got some of the best commercial artists," says collector Thomas Vaccina, 65, formerly of Hicksville and now of Georgia. "They had very colorful, very eye-catching box art, and that drew a lot of kids at the time."

Lewi remembers the array of models displayed on shelves. "You would salivate," he exaggerates fondly. "You had a very limited budget based on your allowance and you had to choose. It was always about which artwork spoke to you."

Artists included James Bama, one of the deans of paperback book covers, who painted many of the horror-model boxes. DC Comics great Carmine Infantino drew Aurora’s 1964 Batman box. Acclaimed aviation artist Roy Grinnell depicted fighter jets for the company. And in the 1970s, Marvel star "X-Men" artist Dave Cockrum, who lived on Long Island, drew the Superboy box. That same decade, Cockrum and comics legends Neal Adams, Dick Giordano, Gil Kane, Curt Swan, Herb Trimpe and Bellerose’s John Romita Sr. variously illustrated five-page comics Aurora included with 10 heroic figures.

Like other businesses, Aurora was involved in the community. It sponsored a team in the Rockville Centre Boys Basketball League, and contributed items to local organizations. But the old guard inevitably passed: Former Revlon executive Charles Diker acquired control in 1969 through stock purchases. Shortly afterward, Giammarino and Shikes each left the company; the former died in 1992 and the latter founded an unsuccessful model company, Addar, and died in 1986. Cuomo had retired in 1967 and died in 1971 — the year food giant Nabisco, diversifying, bought the model maker.

THE END AND NEW BEGINNINGS

Yet Aurora would lose money throughout the 1970s, and the company shuttered in 1977; the general location is now a Stop & Shop. Nabisco sold Aurora’s roughly 740 massive steel molds, some weighing a ton apiece, to Monogram. Five airplane-model molds were destroyed in a train accident in upstate New York. And by late 1979, for reasons including storage costs and deterioration, as many as 500 molds had been scrapped, estimates Peter Vetri, cofounder with Rick Delfavero of Deer Park’s Atlantis Toy and Hobby, which in 2018 acquired most of the surviving molds and archive material.

Among the casualties, says Vetri, 53, who grew up in Garden City South and now lives in Kings Park, were the molds for Spider-Man, the Hulk and Tonto. The Batman and Vampirella molds survive, but Atlantis does not have them. The company did rescue the Captain America mold, but has no production license from Marvel Comics.

Fortunately, either through such acquired original molds or through coproductions with other companies with original or reproduction molds, Atlantis offers many classic kits — from historic planes, ships and cars to Ed "Big Daddy" Roth comical drag racers to the glow-in-the-dark Phantom of the Opera and The Forgotten Prisoner of Castle-Maré.

Provenzano also got started through his dad. His first Aurora model "was the WWII Japanese battleship Yamato, which my father built it for me. Planes followed — my parents had met while working for TWA and I still have a [Boeing] 707 kit with TWA livery in the original box.”

Dave Braun, of Rocky Point, got into them through his older brother. "My earliest memory of Aurora models is being introduced to them at the age of 5 when living in Melville in 1970,” says the health care worker, 59. "We lived close to a drugstore that sold comic books, candy and Aurora models. My brother would assemble the model kits and I distinctly remember a Dracula kit in all its glow-in-the-dark splendor. I can still close my eyes and see that kit," says Dave Braun, 59, a health care worker from Rocky Point.

For those fortunate enough to have built Aurora models or have held  one in your hands, that can still be all it takes.