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VincentBotto1
As depicted on an old postcard, the Botto building at 124 North Court featured colorful neon by Balton Sign Company. In 1961, Vincent D. Botto showed a young customer how to use the new Astro-Phone.
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As depicted on an old postcard, the Botto building at 124 North Court featured colorful neon by Balton Sign Company. In 1961, Vincent D. Botto showed a young customer how to use the new Astro-Phone.
Dear Vance,
When I was a child, my parents took me downtown to a large toy store across from Court Square. What was the name of this establishment, and what happened to it?
— M.H., Memphis
Dear M.H.: My first thought was that it was one of Happy Hal’s enterprises, since the host of the kiddie TV show had several toy stores around town. My first thought turned out to be wrong, but instead of sulking about it, I did a bit of research — as much as 20 minutes, I’d say — and quickly turned up the name of the store you remember: V.F. Botto & Company. And considering that it proclaimed itself “The Toy Showplace of the South” and its ads and postcards announced that “10,000 Toys Are Shown Year-Round,” I’m surprised that I didn’t remember it as well as you did. But then again, the Lauderdales thought toys and games made children “soft.” For birthdays and holidays, we were given more useful items: canned goods, barbed wire, matches to sell on the street corner, a new tin cup for begging, things like that.
Back to Botto. The company actually has a long and rather convoluted history. And I know this because, well, I’m a Lauderdale, but mainly because I stumbled upon a dormant blog called, rather simply, “Phil’s Thoughts.” Phil happens to be Philip Botto, the grandson of the company founder, and not only did he tell the story of his family’s firm on his blog, I spoke with Phil and his wife, Anna Marie, who are alive and well and living in Collierville. So here’s their story.
The family patriarch was Vincent Francis Botto, and sometime in the 1920s he formed a wholesale liquor business. But when Prohibition put a crimp in that, he and a partner decided to try the wholesale tobacco business — selling cigars and cigarettes to grocers, druggists, anybody who would buy them. After a while, they added candy to their line of products. By this time, a son was born, named Vincent David Botto, and he became a salesman for the company, doing quite well when World War II started because he managed to get an exclusive contract with all the military installations in the area. Even though many products were rationed during wartime, according to “Phil’s Thoughts” their business boomed because “these installations had first priority in securing tobacco products as well as candy.”
An old postcard shows one of the ten showrooms at Botto, this one filled with stuffed animals of all species.
The eldest Botto, Vincent Francis (known to everybody as Frank) passed away in 1938, and by now the family included two grandsons, Phil and his brother, Mitchell. After the war, though, other companies jumped into the tobacco and candy businesses, so the Botto family looked around for a new product. They settled on toys — little things at first, like yo-yos, dolls, and windup gadgets, but then, according to Phil, “a decision was made to go into the toy business in a big way, and this was the evolution of Botto Toy Company.”
The family bought the former Railway Express Company building at 124 North Court Avenue and transformed it into a colorful fantasyland. Outside, the building was adorned with the company name spelled out in bright neon letters, surrounded by images of a boy riding a bike, a girl on a scooter, and even a jack-in-the-box, and thanks to the wonder of blinking neon, all these images seemed to move.
Inside was a magical experience for kids of all ages. Ten large showrooms were packed wall-to-wall with about every kind of toy ever made. As you can see in the two images above (a full-color company postcard and an ad from a 1960 Snowden School yearbook), the two girls are holding board games, some kind of puppets, and even a toy boat, and one room was filled with stuffed animals of all kinds and sizes.
“My daddy was kind of an overgrown child, and he considered those his pets,” says Phil Botto today, about the stuffed animals. “We had a big giraffe, lion, and tiger, and he really wanted a stuffed elephant, but the doors weren’t big enough to bring it inside.”
The 1960 Snowden School yearbook featured a full-page ad showing two girls, Charlotte Fineberg and Meg Laughlin, with the newest toys for sale at Botto.
One night when Phil was working late, he recalls that a young fellow who had too much to drink peered into the store windows and saw all those stuffed animals lined up inside. The guy smiled and laughed, delighted by the menagerie he had discovered, but just as he began to stagger off, Phil pulled a string on the big lion’s head, making it roar, “and that man took off running,” says Phil, laughing. “I think he sobered up real quick!”
V.F. Botto & Company attracted so many customers that they opened on Sundays — an unusual move in a city where “blue laws” pretty much closed the doors to everything that day. That didn’t last long; other businesses in the area complained that Botto’s customers were taking up all the parking around Court Square. Though they couldn’t remain open seven days a week, Vincent D. Botto let newspaper readers know, “I am sorry we cannot aid our customers by remaining open on Sundays, but we will continue to offer the finest selection of toys at reasonable prices.”
But they stayed ahead of the game, so to speak, in lots of ways. I turned up a 1961 newspaper clipping (left) that showed Vincent D. Botto demonstrating a new gadget called the “Astro-Phone” to a 6-year-old customer. Headlined “Voice Ray Is Straight out of Space Age,” the story explained that the gadget “is a product of satellite and missile research. An invisible infrared ray carries conversations between two phones anywhere within the line of sight.” These days, we would call these gadgets “walkie-talkies” (or, for that matter, cell phones) but nobody had seen (or heard) anything like it at the time, and only Botto carried it.
Readers may remember the colorful building, as well as the brightly painted delivery vans adorned with toy designs. Such a business, one would think, would last forever — don’t kids always need new toys? But Vincent D. Botto died in 1968, and the family decided it was time to close the doors. Mitchell had already left the firm to work for Consumers Money Order Corporation, and Philip took a job as a credit manager with the Memphis Furniture Manufacturing Company, while also teaching computer technology at State Tech.
The Botto family still has a presence downtown. Phil’s son, Tony, operates Botto Jewelry Market at 43 South Main. And the old toy company building? It was transformed into an annex for the Burch, Porter & Johnson law firm. What a shame they didn’t leave all those neon toys flashing across the facade.
Got a question for Vance?
Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com
Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 65 Union Avenue,Suite 200, Memphis, TN 38103
