Entertainment
Henry Orenstein, 98, dies; Force Behind Transformers and Poker on TV
Henry Orenstein, a Holocaust survivor who built a large American toy company, later persuaded Hasbro to launch its line of Transformers action figures, and who, in his 70s, patented an ingenious way to better to televise poker tournaments, died Tuesday in a hospital in Livingston, NJ He was 98 years old.
The cause was Covid-19, said his wife, Susie Orenstein.
A Polish Jew, Mr. Orenstein survived a hellish journey through five concentration camps and the brunt of the murders of his parents in a cemetery in Poland to become a pleasure merchant.
The Topper Corporation, which he founded in the 1950s, made the Suzy Housewife range of miniature devices, the Johnny Seven One Man Army toy gun, Betty the Beautiful Bride and Dawn dolls, Zoomer Boomer trucks, Ding-A-Ling Sesame Street educational robots and toys. Topper, originally known as De Luxe Premium and for a time as De Luxe Reading, was at one point considered the fourth largest toy company in the United States.
To market his Suzy Cute doll in 1964, Mr. Orenstein hired Louis Armstrong for a television commercial that also featured three little girls. Oh, you can bend her legs, bend her arms and bathe her too, he sang exuberantly. She has a chair, a dish, a cup. You press on her stomach, her arms go up!
Six years later, Mr. Orenstein sponsored the Al Unser Sr.s race car, which won the Indianapolis 500. The victory helped ignite sales of Johnny Lighting Toppers model cars (rivals of Mattels Hot Wheels). He gave Mr. Unser, who died on December 9, a bonus of $ 30,000 after winning.
But in March 1972, with Topper in debt, Mr. Orenstein resigned as president and chief executive officer. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the following year. He said he had lost all of his money.
He turned into an inventor of toys (he held dozens of patents) and a broker. At the Manhattan Toy Fair in the early 1980s, he saw a Japanese-made toy, a small car that could easily turn into an airplane, and recognized more elaborate possibilities.
He started playing with it and said: It’s the best thing I’ve seen in at least 10 years, remembers Ms Orenstein, who, as Carolyn Sue Vankovich, met her future husband in 1967 when she was demonstrating Suzy Homemaker at the Toy Fair. He had the glow he had when he was aroused.
Mr Orenstein struck a deal between Hasbro and the Japanese company Takara, which led to Hasbros’ 1984 introduction of Transformers, toy robots that can transform into vehicles or beasts. They would become extremely popular, spawning an animated television series and a series of films.
Ideas don’t come in small pieces, he said Newsweek in 2016. It’s inside; it’s outside. It’s there, or it’s not, he said. I was just an inventor. You needed a big company to do what I thought should be done: make real transformations from complex things to other complex things.
Alan Hassenfeld, former chairman of Hasbro, told Newsweek that Mr. Orenstein was absolutely the catalyst that made this happen. He added: To be able to take a car and, with a little dexterity, change it into another toy, it was something magical.
Mr Orenstein also sold toy makers his own ideas, one of which was Dolly Surprise, a doll whose ponytail grew more than three inches when her right arm was raised, which Hasbro bought.
Mr. Orenstein was born on October 13, 1923 in Hrubieszow, Poland. Her father, Lejb, was a grain merchant and her mother, Golda (Strum) Orenstein, was a housewife.
The Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 prompted Henry, his father, and brothers Felek and Sam (another brother, Fred, in Warsaw) to flee to Soviet-occupied Poland, leaving behind his mother and his sister, Hanka. . They spent more than two years there before returning to Hrubieszow.
But the mortal danger to the city’s Jews had intensified. The Gestapo executed his parents and other Jews in 1942 in a cemetery. In July 1943, Henry and his brothers were loaded into a cattle car and taken to Budzyn concentration camp in Poland.
Four more camps followed: Majdanek and Plasznow, also in Poland, and Ravensbrck and Sachsenhausen, in Germany. About 10 days after the start of a death march from Sachsenhausen at the end of the war, he and his brother Sam were released.
My heart began to beat with joy, Mr. Orenstein wrote in his autobiography, I Shall Live: Surviving the Holocaust Against All Odds (1987). It was true. We were free! Now we cried out with laughter and hugged each other.
Her brother Fred had also survived, but her sister was killed in Stutthof concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Felek had also been killed.
After two years in IDP camps and an apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, Mr. Orenstein immigrated to New York in 1947. He was lugging bales of cotton for a clothing company; opened and sold a grocery store in New Jersey; became a salesperson for a food company; and, with an uncle, started the novelty business that became Topper.
I think I have proven that it is always the land of opportunity, he told United Press International in 1962.
He found another opportunity in the late 1980s. He enjoyed playing backgammon, which I found boring, says Orenstein. I suggested that he get down to poker.
He started playing in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His game was Seven-Card Stud, in which four cards are face up and three face down, or hole cards, and only the holder of the hand can see them. Watching a poker tournament on television, he realized that the excitement he felt while playing was not transmitted.
He said, it’s not the game we played, said Mori Eskandani, a professional poker player who produces poker TV shows, in an interview. If everyone could see the hole cards they would see how awesome it is.
Mr Orenstein spent six months developing a table with miniature cameras mounted under each player station with anti-glare glass cutouts that allowed cameras to look upward, which would show hole cards and transmit footage to television. He patented his idea for a hole card camera in 1995 and got his first client a few years later when the Discovery Channel licensed him for its World Poker Tour.
We called the table the holy grail, Mr. Eskandani said.
Besides his wife, Mr. Orenstein is survived by a son, Mark, and a daughter, Annette. His marriage to Adele Bigajer, whom he met in a displaced persons camp in Germany, ended in divorce.
In 2003, Mr. Orenstein, a competitive player who won the 1996 World Series of Poker seven-card tournament, coaxed Jon Miller, an NBC Sports executive, to use the camera table with the cards. closed in the Poker Superstars, Poker After Dark and National network programs. One-on-one poker championship.
It revolutionized the game for a whole generation of poker fans who couldn’t see it for what it is without Henry’s creativity and ingenuity, said Mr. Miller, president of programming for the NBC Sports Group, in an interview.
Other networks avoided infringing on Mr Orensteins ‘patent by moving the tiny cameras from the underside of the table to the inside of the armrests or rails at the edge of the players’ table, making hole cards visible to cameras when the players looked at them.
Mr. Orenstein was inducted into the Poker Hall of Fame in Las Vegas in 2008.
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