Special to The New York Times, Jan 25, 1961, page 1

NEW HAVEN, Jan. 24—A. C. Gilbert, founder and board chairman of the toy company bearing his name and inventor of the Erector Set, died today in Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital of a heart ailment. He was 76 years old.

            Mr. Gilbert suffered a coronary seizure on Jan. 10 in New Haven and last week went to the Leahy Clinic in Boston for a check-up. After showing progress, he had a setback yesterday and this was followed by a massive pulmonary attack.

            In addition to the Erector Set, Alfred Carlton Gilbert contributed the American Flyer electric trains and many other toys to brighten the lives of millions of small boys and their fathers. In doing so, he blended the familiar qualities of Frank Merriwell, Theodore Roosevelt, Peter Pan and Horatio Alger heroes.

            He developed a $20,000,000-a-year business out of a shoestring start as an amateur magician. He was an outstanding athlete at Yale University, going on to set a world’s record in the pole vault at the Olympic trials of 1908. A fervent, highly competitive sportsman, he was said to have shot almost every important type of American game. Finally, and through it all, Mr. Gilbert never really left boyhood behind him.

            A trip one day on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad in 1912 proved a turning point in his career, although he did not manufacture his first toy train until twenty-six years later when he bought out American Flyer of Chicago for $500,000.

            At the time the New Haven was converting from steam to electricity. Mr. Gilbert looking out the train window, became fascinated by the network of girders then being erected to carry the power lines. What fun it would be, he thought, to build things out of miniature girders.

            Back home that night, he sat at the dining-room table cutting out strips of cardboard suitable for construction projects. Then he took these to a local toolmaker and ordered a set handmade in steel.

Solicited Business

            Soon the New Haven toy man was visiting jobbers and department stores soliciting orders for what he called “Erector, the World’s Greatest Construction Toy for Boys.” Here he was on firm ground, for as he remarked years later:

            “I’ve remained a boy at heart and only introduced items that appealed to me. I figured they would appeal to all boys.”

            Composed of various-sized pieces of miniature metal girders and wheels, the erector sets could be assembled to form bridges, buildings, vehicles and other objects. Within three years Mr. Gilbert was selling $750,000 worth of these and magic sets for a net profit of $100,000.

            In 1916 the plant changed its name from Mystro [sic] Manufacturing Company to the A. C. Gilbert Company, expanded, and was on its way.

            It added chemistry sets to magic and Erector, became a pioneer in radio, made tool chests, minerology sets, electric trains (after 1938) and even an Atomic Energy Lab that provoked much consternation among parents. In recent years, fans and other electrical appliances were added to the company’s line.

            Among facts treasured by Mr. Gilbert and his associates is that the original scale model of the Bailey Bridge, an engineering wonder of World War II, was constructed by Sir Donald Bailey with a No. 10½ Erector Set.

            Mr. Gilbert, known throughout his life as “A. C.,” occasionally as “Gil” and only to his parents, Frank and Anna Gilbert, as Alfred, was born in Salem, Ore., on Feb. 15, 1884. The father was a banker who regarded the son with puzzled pride.

            Frail as a child, Mr. Gilbert nonetheless early displayed certain lasting characteristics. He won a tricycle race at the age of 7. Anxious not to be a physical failure, the slender boy worked at it until, at 15, he was a running, wrestling, boxing, hurdling, jumping vest-pocket edition of Charles Atlas, the strong man.

Interested in Magic

            Along with all this went the boy’s preoccupation with sleight-of-hand magic, an art in which he acquired close to professional skill. At Pacific University, Forest Grove, Ore., young Gilbert met Mary Thompson, whom he subsequently married. In 1904 he went East to Yale, where he studied medicine on the theory it would help in body building.

            He excelled in track, gymnastics and wrestling, winning the intercollegiate title in the 135-pound class. The peak, literally, of Mr. Gilbert’s athletic career came in the Olympic trials of 1908 when he set a world’s record in the pole vault with a leap of 12 feet 7¾ inches. He was a co-winner at the Olympic Games in London that year. He was the author of the current article on pole vaulting in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

            Though he received a medical degree in 1909, he never practiced medicine. Instead, he borrowed $5,000 from his father and opened the Mysto Manufacturing Company here, turning out gadgets used by magicians. Within a year he opened a New York store as a retail outlet.

            “Everything in life is a game but the important thing is to win,” Mr. Gilbert once reflected. An example of the standard he set himself, often cited by friends, came in golf. When he failed to play at par, though close to it, he gave up the game because, he explained, “I cannot master it.”

            Mr. Gilbert stood 5 feet 7 inches and weighed a scant 135 pounds in his prime—which continued for many years beyond the limit enjoyed by most men. Even he slowed down with the years. In 1953 he said: “Its harder for me to think of creative things. These used to tumble out of my mind.”

Wrote About His Estate

            At 70 he wrote “The Man Who Lives in Paradise,” an account of his life on a 600-acre Hamden, Conn., estate stocked with deer, pheasants and all manner of small game. There also were two small lakes with game fish and a rustic lodge house stuffed with specimens of his big-game hunts, including several brown bears that he shot on Kodiak Island, Alaska.

            Mr. Gilbert was informal, given to old gabardine suits, rubber-soled shoes, and pipes that he sometimes absent-mindedly stuffed, still lighted, into his pockets. In business, while competitive, he was always friendly and unpredictable.

            He believed he should punch a time clock, just as did his employees. He always walked in line, chatting with his workers, to punch the clock morning and night.

            Mr. Gilbert became board chairman of the toy concern in 1956 and was succeeded as president by his son, A. C. Gilbert Jr.

            Surviving besides his son and widow, are two daughters, Mrs. Charlotte Chase of North Haven and Mrs. Lucretia Rowbottom of Hamden; a brother, F. W. Gilbert of Hamden, and ten grandchildren.