Starting a business nowadays costs thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back in the late 1930s, Vincent Amato did it with $120 — at about the age of 14.
And what started as the project of an industrious high schooler grew into a Middletown institution that hasn’t left Main Street since its inception 68 years ago.
Like all boys back then, Amato said, he was crazy about aviation and liked to build model airplanes out of strips of wood and paper. When the local hardware store that sold materials for his hobby closed up shop, the high school sophomore decided to turn into a supplier himself.
So Amato’s father took him to the local bank, where Amato used his $120 in savings to open up a commercial checking account. He used it to buy up some model airplane material kits from a New York supplier and went to work.
It helped that Amato’s father already owned his own business; he allowed his son some space in the appliance store on Middletown’s Main Street to set up shop.
“I had a space about four feet wide against the wall and racks to hold the balsa wood and stuff, and obviously not enough money to do much with it,” Amato said. But without that little niche in his dad’s store, Amato’s Toys likely wouldn’t have existed.
As with most kids whose parents ran a business, Amato was already around the store helping out after school and on Saturdays, so his little side business wasn’t a big lifestyle switch. It also wasn’t much of a moneymaker.
“It wasn’t a big deal at the time. I’d maybe make enough money in high school to buy some candy or take a girl to the prom,” he said.
But the side business was enough of a constant to survive Amato’s time in college as well as his time in the air corps during World War II. Amato admits that it likely only survived because his mother — who did some bookkeeping for the family business — took on the management of her son’s enterprise while he was away.
When he returned home, the toy shop was waiting for him. His father continued to run the family business, but times were changing.
Amato’s father sold appliances as well as operated a plumbing business, but the 1950s started a wave of change in the home-building marketplace. Instead of plumbers working directly with individual homebuilders, the entire operation began to fall under the purview of general contractors, and independent operators like Amato’s dad began to suffer for it. And because no one in the Amato family wanted to take over the business, its patriarch let operations shrink.
Those decades had the opposite effect on the toy business. Amato’s Toy and Hobby changed locations four times, and eventually opened in three other towns: New Britain, New Haven and Waterbury, although only the New Britain branch remains. Amato used to work from early morning until about 11:30 at night with only a couple breaks for meals – but when you like what you do, he said, it’s not really a burden. And aside from his stint in the military, Amato has never had any boss besides himself.
The toy shop employs much of the family today, supplying the area with some of the kind of hobby toys its founder stocked in its earliest days.
Amato said he never expected his first foray into business would turn out to be a lifelong pursuit — if it hadn’t happened, he said, he likely just would have taken over the family plumbing and appliance business.