From Darkness to Light: The Tony Maglica Story

00:00:10 Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. In 1996, The Wall Street Journal referred to the Maglite flashlight as the Cadillac of flashlights.

00:00:21 Speaker 2: The creator of

00:00:22 Speaker 1: this flashlight that sold millions, Tony Maglica, founder of Mag Industries. Today, our own Mount Montgomery brings us the story of this Croatian immigrant who started with nothing and ended up with something.

00:00:38 Speaker 2: Tony Magnica was born in New York City in November of 1930, but with the Great Depression in full swing, his family moved back to his mother’s native island in Croatia.

00:00:49 Speaker 3: Nineteen doido. My mom went back to Europe. My father stayed here. They thought things were going to blow up in no time, so things are going to be good right away, you know. So, he said he didn’t have any money, he didn’t have any jobs. My father didn’t even have the money to send my mom back. He had to borrow money on a future job that he would get and paid it back. So I went over there with my mom, and we were supposed to go back in a couple of years. So they said about to save a little more money and this and that, and we were quite caught in the war, World War II, and that wasn’t very pleasant to anyone. It was very difficult to live under Mussolini. If they suspected that you were a communist or you were on the side, whatever side it out it is, they simply tortured you and killed you. One of the tortures there was by riching the oil Castro, and they would put a tube in your truck, and they would give you maybe a quard or so. It’s this oil, and you die. I mean, it’s just simply not immediately, but, you know, it’s just it’s a horrible way to die. There was no freedom to leave the town. We had no income. Then when the Italians got defeated, they got involved with Germans. When the Germans came in in the town, it was so frightening because they run that all the people in the town to come down to a to the town, and they put entirely down in the semicircle against a bigger wall with the three machine guns, one here, one there, and one in the center. And I was just a young man; I remember better. My mom was there, standing up, who was right in the center. So I went down to my mom’s skirt. This guy was really upset, telling us to come out. They told us to expose somebody. They said that they knew that we killed somebody in town to dispose the person who had committed his crime. Well, there was no one to commit a crime. And we, no, no, if somebody committed a crime, they said, “If you don’t say, we’re going to kill all of you.” So what are you—what are you going to do—just to point the finger on the innocent person? And the people there, even if their life was on the line, they wouldn’t do it. They won’t lie. There was a priest there, and he was begging them, saying that these people had never committed any kind of crime. And, mm, he has the priest say, “You have the power to kill us all.” I understand that. But if we tell you that this person committed the crime, we don’t know that anybody committed the crime. And in this stnge, never been pursued in jail, there’s never been anyone compete. They, you know, they believe in God by doing crime like that. So anyway, at the end of about four hours they were standing there, and you didn’t know at what point they were going to pull the trigger. It’s almost like being dead anyway, you didn’t know any second that they were going to turn around, start switter shitting. So, my mom was terrified, and of course I was terrified. I mean, we were all, the whole town was terrified. Then they let us go. He wasn’t senteen everywhere in the country, you know, or that Tom, you know they put people against the wall.

00:06:08 Speaker 1: Just shut up, and you’re listening to the voice of Tony Maglica, and he’s telling the story of his life in Croatia around World War II and letting folks know what real totalitarianism looks and feels like to a small village where he had set up until these grand inquisitions and interrogations by, well, by the Nazis, that there had never been a person in jail in his town. And yet they were looking for a murder—a murder suspect—and make one up. “We don’t care.” When we come back, the story of Tony Maglica continues from nothing to something, a part of Our American Dreamers’ story here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Tony Maglica. When we last left off, Tony was telling the harrowing story of living under both Italian and German occupation in war-torn Croatia during World War II. But if there was anything positive about this time in Tony’s life, it was his mother. Here’s Tony telling the story of what she did to help the family during this traumatic time.

00:08:40 Speaker 3: On anything. What she did, we sold it—everything that we brought it from us. We sold it: blancs, the cops, this boom, the plays, whatever we have tread it. For a corn, my mom will have, will say of the corn and the various seats of various grout, various beans, and stuff like that. And I learned something from it. No matter how hungry we were, my mom would go to the pillowcase, and she would take a cup of wheat. And I tell you, it’s hard for me to even talk about it. There is no one like a mother.

00:09:27 Speaker 2: By 1950, Tony had had enough of living in war-torn Croatia and made the decision to come back to the United States.

00:09:37 Speaker 3: Well, there was a vault that, a war board personnel board big ship, and they got it. England got it for the damage that they did. I guess they had to pay, so they took the vault and used that to transport the people I know other words like them. There was making a tourism auther. So, you had two, three classes on that boat. The toy class. It was just a shelf, like a shelf where you store your cans. There were six beds in this little closet. So, I was myself, five other people. So, I had it tough, but there were other people who had it even tougher than I did. Family was tortured. The member of the defendant had gotten killed. All these things. You have to have a desire to survive. You have to have a desire to accomplish something.

00:10:47 Speaker 2: And Tony would accomplish something, but for right now, he was just one of many immigrants arriving in New York, speaking very little English and with no money. So, his first task was work.

00:11:02 Speaker 3: When I came into New York, I went to work in a sewing company to make clothes. To make collars, sleeves, or whatever. Fifty-five cents an hour. It was a lot of money then, at least for me it was, anyway. I didn’t know anything in the interest, you know, metric. So I said, “I want to learn how to do it.” So the guy said to me, “Go to school. There’s trade school.” So I went to trade school. I was there one week. The guy said, “Look, fella, you need to go get a job. You don’t need to go to school for this, and you can teach the other guys how to do that.” I couldn’t speak English. How can I teach anybody? So I went to Denver, Colorado, and got a job in a machine shop.

00:11:56 Speaker 2: But before Tony was hired at the shop he would work at, he faced some aversion there because of his lack of English.

00:12:02 Speaker 3: They said, “How can you do this job? You can’t work.” I said, “Give me a job. If I can’t do it, you don’t have to pay me anything. I want for free.” They said, “Oh, we have a union here and stuff. We can’t do that.” And the guy says—over there was speaking Italian—so my Italian was not really good, but it was the only thing I had. And nobody spoke Croatian, so the guy spoke to me in Italian, and he said, “You really think you can do the other way?” He said, “Yeah.” So the guy said, “Why don’t you give the guy an opportunity to give him a chance?” The guy said, “Well, come on in the office. It won’t like that, that way, doing it.” He said, “Look, nobody knows anything, you know? Why don’t you just—maybe you can get a big laugh out of it.” The guy gave it to me. He gave me a machine that wasn’t running for ears. I cleaned that machine, made the slide move, turned the machine on, and I made the parts in one week, just as good as the people were doing. Now, another machine that was costing at that time probably maybe eight thousand dollars. I worked there for a year or something. But then these people said, “You know, Tony, once you go to California, it’s nice weather, and you can make three dollars an hour—three dollars an hour! My God!” You know, that was a lot of money. Three dollars an hour, more than three times one may now. And I bought a 1947 Surrey Backer, and I was at peace. I’ll tell you, the guy that I worked for, who gave me a dollar and a quarter an hour, he gave me Heath Carter Drive. That’s the first test for me in this country. The people were pleasant that wanted to help me. I felt so guilty that I had to leave by. I said, “I’ve got to get it, I’ve got to get ahead.” So, anyway, I only made it about ten miles away from Denver when my car overheated.

00:14:18 Speaker 2: Nevertheless, Tony made it to California, where he would eventually find work at the A. O. Smith Company, a manufacturer of everything from car bodies to water heaters.

00:14:29 Speaker 3: It was a really good job. I was making over three.

00:14:32 Speaker 2: Dollars now, but there was a downside.

00:14:36 Speaker 3: We had a norm that you had to produce leaves that much to keep your pay rate. And so I would make that. I would even give some parts to the people next to me who would make the same parts. I remember the inspector who would say, “This is not your part; this is Tony’s part” to the other guy. So, the guy would, you know, let it go. You know. But the one thing they didn’t like. They didn’t want me to make so many parts; they didn’t want me to shop my own tool. Very strict union. The guy said, “Look, you don’t have to make that many parts.” I said, “But look at how many people on the line are waiting to get a tool shot.” I said, “I can do it in five minutes, and I’m back to work.” The guy said, “Tony, if you’re going to do that, you’re going to get in trouble.” And it was right; I did. The people, when I went out to the bathroom, they over there saw me down everywhere I can.

00:15:46 Speaker 2: They messed with Tony’s machine and bring his ability to produce.

00:15:51 Speaker 3: I said, “My God, I was thinking about my mom telling me, ‘You work hard and do a good job.'” Why this? Why do people do stuff like that? I was really sick to my stomach.

00:16:05 Speaker 2: Tired of spending his days at a company where he was being held back, Tony decided to use 125 dollars he had saved up to make a down payment on his own machine. Soon he was able to rent a garage in South El Monte, California, and would pick up some contract jobs, initially working for his supervisor, A. O. Smith Company, who would offer him some advice.

00:16:29 Speaker 3: He said, “Tony, I heard you had a lady at home.” And he said, “What about making these chots for an?” And I said, “Sure! You’re telling me what you can do!” The guy gave me that. He said, “Tony, you know you’re doing a good job, but I need thousandths of the sports, not just fifty or one hundred.” “Why don’t you just quit your job and do this in your garage? You can make more money than you’re making here.” I said, “That was my goal, but I didn’t know where to get work.”

00:17:05 Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Tony Maglica tell the story of his journey from Croatia through Europe to the United States, from New York City to Denver and ultimately to California, where he was looking for that three-dollar-a-day job, but in the end, fellow workers were holding him back from his potential and what he could do with his life. And what happens next? Well, you’ll hear more of Tony Maglica’s story, Our American Dreamers’ story, here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Tony Maglica. When we last left off, Tony had just been given a bit of advice. He was told that he could make more money being his own boss. So in 1955, Tony founded Mag Instrument. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

00:18:30 Speaker 3: I was doing the work for Jance Bonner Clard, and I was doing also the business for Cloudy Multifler. Then used to be a calculator by division and multiplication, you know. Anyway, they did a government job, so I was doing some jobs for them, and I was doing all different kinds of stuff. The twenty-millimeter projectile, my way, so infuse bomb. And it was a very competitive job. For one penny, you can lose the job, even if you run it now, and job shop is very competitive. Business people don’t know how competitive that is. Anyway, I was doing different job shop work, all kinds of job shop work, including a component that actually took the first satellite up in space. I was making parts for everybody. Then there’s a company—a Bankei company—and they made an aluminum light. So I told the guy, “You know, I can make a light better than anything that you guys have.” So when I developed a showment, he said, “No, we want to make our own life. We don’t want your life.”

00:19:54 Speaker 2: But despite the setback, others were still interested in Tony’s flashlight, including Neil Perkins, founder of Safariland, who was looking to make a new flashlight specifically designed for law enforcement.

00:20:09 Speaker 3: And he said, “I heard that you have a flat flight. How about, ‘Let me sell your flat flights?'” “Okay, how many can you sell? Last year, we’ll sell several thousand for the whole year.” “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it a week. Couldn’t get it.” I said, “Well, if I’m going to make it for you, I want fifteen thousand a month.” He said, “Twenty—fifteen thousand a month? That’s crazy!” “Well,” I said, “I know I can make it. I can sell it. I can make it, and I can make it in production. I can make economic point off and be able to sell it.” He said, “I’m sorry telling it about the crowds. I wish you changed your—if you change your mind, if it doesn’t work, please come back.”

00:21:05 Speaker 2: So, determined, Tony took his flashlight to a trade show.

00:21:09 Speaker 3: We sold for a show thousands.

00:21:13 Speaker 2: You heard right. Tony had far exceeded expectations at his first trade show, and Maglica wasn’t just popular with law enforcement. With the introduction of Mini Mag, it became popular with the average consumer as well. Tony was making a lot of flashlights.

00:21:32 Speaker 3: I read you thousands so day, all the flashlight combined. Not just MANI mine, but many not. We sold him millions.

00:21:45 Speaker 2: Tony Maglica, who came back to his birth country, speaking no English and with very little money, he became a self-made millionaire. Tony didn’t settle down, though, and now in his nineties, he’s still working and making Maglites in America—nowhere else.

00:22:03 Speaker 3: I go to work every day. I never miss a day. I work from Monday through Saturday. Saturdays, I spend not quite a full day, but during the week I try to be here before eight, and I never leave before six, maybe seven. Sometimes, when it’s nice, when the light is on, I don’t go home until nine. Then when I come home, I eat dinner. I go right to the drawing board upstairs. People say, “Why are you doing this? Haven’t you made enough money?” Yes, I have made enough money. I want Mag to continue. I want my children to continue. I want the people that are here, that have been with me from the beginning, to continue. So what do I do now? Just kick them in the butt and say, “Go home”? You can’t do that. My conscience want to let me. When you make enough money for yourself and your family is secure, and if you can do a good thing, a good deed, there is not the biggest pleasure in the world. It’s doing that. My really go it. This is someday to have this company, before I leave the serf, that I can get good people, give him a little slice of that pie.

00:23:37 Speaker 2: For Tony, his mission is to keep his business in the country that made it possible to exist in the first place, and to continue to help the people that opened their arms to him.

00:23:51 Speaker 3: People retire, or people call me and tell me that they thank me. They tank me what I’ve done for them. One guy, I had it. I didn’t have it very much money, or they all were really struggling there, and the doctor told him he’s got a s fit working. The guy came to see me in my office, and he was crying. I said, “John, what’s the matter? I have to leave my job?” “This job,” I said. “But that’s the end of the world.” “No,” he said, “I have a heart problem. The doctor wants me to retire and stop working.” John said, “It’s okay.” “You know, I didn’t have that much money.” I wrote him a check over one hundred thousand dollars, sent them around the world. I felt good to know that I was able to do that for him. I invest in equipment. I inst invest on the people, and I didn’t want to go through not to make it. I can run through her there to try to make it. I mean to multibidion error. This is the only place in the world they can do what I did. And everybody has a data opportunity. There is no place in the world that you can have what you opportunity that you have here. I would give up all my business, everything, for this country. I would give my life for this country. You’re free to do whatever you want, slung as you say, we c