we Americans buy—about $22 billion worth—are wrought by low-wage factory workers in Guangdong Province, and that 70 percent of those toys are blow-molded or injectionblow-molded or extruded out of plastic resin. I’d read disturbing reports about the Chinese toy industry, and now when, at bedtime, I read to Bruno Eric Carle’s Ten Little Rubber Ducks—which was itself printed and bound in China—and came to the scene of the woman in the brick-red dress painting brick-red beaks with her little paintbrush, I couldn’t help but think of Huangwu No. 2 Toy Factory, where, according to the nonprofit group China Labour Watch, in order to earn the legal minimum wage of $3.45 for an eight-hour day, a piece-rate worker in the spray department “would have to paint 8,920 small toy pieces a day, or 1,115 per hour, or one every 3.23 seconds.”
Did workers make the Floatees under similar conditions? Way back at the outset of my journey, before boarding the ferry to Sitka, I’d called The First Years Inc., which had recently been bought out. The current management seemed to know less about the Floatees than I did, or pretended to. There was no way they could tell me which factory produced that yellow duck of mine, they said. I assumed that my chances of finding the factory were slim, my chances of gaining access to it, nil.
At Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s suggestion, I contacted T. Berry Brazelton, founder of the Child Development Unit at Children’s Hospital Boston, and a professor emeritus of clinical pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. On the back of the 1992 packaging of the Floatees—alongside the claims that these toys were “dishwasher safe” and conformed to “ASTM Standard Consumer Safety Specification on Toy Safety F9693,” whatever that was—there had appeared the following endorsement: “Our products are inspired and pretested by parents, for parents. They are designed in consultation with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and staff members of the Child Development Unit, Children’s Hospital in Boston. The First Years is a benefactor of the Child Development Unit.” Understandably perhaps, Ebbesmeyer had concluded that Brazelton, a celebrity among pediatricians, had designed the Floatees—understandably but mistakenly.
Brazelton had serious misgivings about his relationship with The First Years. Pediatric colleagues had criticized him for accepting donations from a corporate benefactor. In his own defense, he insisted that in lending his name to The First Years’ products, all he hoped to do was encourage the development of safe, educational toys that even the poor could afford. He played no part in designing the products, he said. Once a toy was in development, he and his staff would “sit around and discuss how a child might play with it.” And if the toy seemed worthy, then, and only then, would Brazelton bestow the imprimatur of the Child Development Unit. If I wanted to know more about the Floatees, Brazelton suggested that I contact his acquaintance Ron Sidman, the former CEO of The First Years Inc.
To my surprise, Sidman agreed to meet with me. In September of 2007, while receiving a crash course in oceanography at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, at the height of the Great Chinese Toy Scare, when every month seemed to bring news of yet another scandalous recall, I traveled from Woods Hole to Sidman’s Cape Cod home. Started by Sidman’s parents in the fifties, The First Years develops and markets safety products and playthings for infants and toddlers—rattles, teethers, plastic utensils, disposable sippy cups, bath toys. After chasing the Floatees, after recovering a pair of them from the Alaskan wilderness, I hoped to determine their origins, which I feared would be even more shadowy than their fate.
The plastic animals marketed under the brand name Floatees are no longer in production, and Ron Sidman is no longer in the toy business. In 2004, he and his shareholders sold The First Years for $136.8 million to RC2 Toys, the same Illinois company, it so happens, that in the summer of 2007, while I was messing around on boats with Chris Pallister, had recalled more than a million Thomas & Friends toy trains after routine tests detected “excessive levels of lead” in the paint. The main lesson to be learned from that and other recalls, in Sidman’s opinion, was not that the system was broken but that it had worked. “In the old days, these products would have been out there with no one knowing about it,” he said. Now the threat of “criminal and civil penalties” and the fear of bad publicity compel toy companies