On The Wagon Trail Radio Flyer Still Turning Out Familiar Red Wagons After 80 Years

For 80 years now, children have climbed into their Radio Flyers and hitched their little red wagons to a star.

Without batteries or high-tech innovations, these toys have allowed young minds to soar.

“A wagon unleashes a child’s imagination,” said Robert Pasin, president of Radio Flyer Inc. “It can be anything the child imagines it to be - it can be a spaceship, a train, a race car, a submarine.

“Every time I meet people, they always have a Radio Flyer story.”

Pasin, 27, and his older brothers, Antonio and Paul, are the third generation of their family to run the Chicago-based company, which boasts it is a market leader in sales of wooden, plastic and its signature steel wagons cranked out daily from a factory on the city’s far West Side.

“We really are the keepers of an American icon, and in one sense that’s kind of awing,” Pasin said. “It’s something that makes me really proud and makes me totally committed to continuing this mission.”

The plant itself evokes warm childhood memories despite the hot smell of oil and the clanging of machinery turning bits of steel and wood into fodder for a child’s boundless imagination.

Radio Flyer traces its roots back to 1917, when Italian immigrant carpenter Antonio Pasin began making wooden wagons called the Liberty Coaster - named after the Statue of Liberty he saw when coming by boat to America.

Ten years later, he adopted the steel assembly line process pioneered by Ford and began churning out Radio Flyers. But the company didn’t really make a name for itself until the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1933-34, when Antonio Pasin gambled on a $30,000 loan to build a 45-foot boy on a wagon.

The exhibit was a hit, and Pasin made his money back many times over by selling miniature wagons for 25 cents each.

The company was still making a splash at a recent toy convention in New York. To celebrate the company’s 80th anniversary, the Pasin brothers built the world’s largest little red wagon - 27 feet long, 21 feet high and weighing 7-1/2 tons.

(Spokane’s big red wagon in Riverfront Park, done by artist Ken Spiering in 1989, is, according to news files, 12 feet high, 24 feet long - 50 feet with the handle - and reportedly weighs 25 tons.)