A Chat with June’s Profile, Justus Bauschinger, president/owner of Lilliput Motor Co. & Deutsche Optik

CS: Were you an original founder of Lilliput Motor?
JB: Well, I had a toy store in San Francisco that went broke. And at that time I was probably the biggest Schuco dealer in the world, which didn’t mean much. Schuco was at one time the largest toy maker in the world. They made little windup toys. In fact, a lot of the stuff that comes out of China now, like a little pecking chicken and so on, was stuff that they did right after World War I. The company dates back to 1912. Anyway, in my store in San Francisco I had as much Schuco stuff as I could scrounge together. That was the “aha!” thing that all these males my age would be in the store at lunchtime playing with, because they all had them as a kid. Typically their fathers were GI’s who came back from the German occupation and had these with them and gave them to their kids. Especially a series called the “microracers,” which were little dye-cast cars that had windup motors in them. You could steer them and they were pretty fast and terrific … and I think at that time cost like a $1.75 here. They made more of those than any other single category of cars.
It turns out that there was a guy that worked for Schuco before the company went broke. He was a machinist. When the company went broke he basically asked for that tooling. And then he continued making them [microracers] on his own. His name was Nutz. In July, somewhere in the late ’80s or early ’90s, I guess it was late ’80s, he got up from the dinner table, had a heart attack and croaked. So that ended that. I found the widow and bought the tooling from her. And that was really the mainstay of Lilliput from its inception. That’s where the name came from: Lilliput for small, because these were tiny, little cars. And that’s really what started us on the path.