L.M. Cox, Tomorrowland & Santa Ana Diesel

L.M. Cox Manufacturing Co. models at Disneyland's Thimble Drome Flight Circle.

I've been driving past two Quonset huts at 728 and 730 N. Poinsettia St. at Civic Center Dr. in Santa Ana every weekday for sixteen years and I always wondered about their story. For most of those years, the place was called Santa Ana Diesel, a repair shop primarily for huge diesel vehicles. But in the last couple years, the buildings got a new owner: Santa Ana's Dana Harvey. Harvey made a name for himself -- and quite a bundle of cash -- making haute couture handbags out of old seatbelts. Now his business is making about 60,000 purses a year.

726-730 Poinsettia St., Santa Ana, July 2019 (Photo by author)

Harvey is converting the old metal buildings and one big concrete building next door into a combination storefront, manufacturing facility, yoga studio, loft apartments and hipster/maker/foodcourt venue, which will cumulatively continue to bear the name Santa Ana Diesel. (Three cheers! I’m all for adaptive reuse!)

But it turns out the place has another story that's even more interesting.


Sign of things to come? (Photo by author)

On land that was originally the Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad's (later part of the Union Pacific's) grounds, the two Quonset huts first appeared around the end of WWII. The timing makes me wonder if these were surplus buildings from one of the nearby military bases. On this site the map indicates, "Machine Shop and Toy Mft. Some paint spraying."

Directories tell us that from at least 1947 until 1962, the L.M. Cox Manufacturing Co. was located at this address.

Leroy Milburn "Roy" Cox (1906-1981) (Photo courtesy Radio Control Modeler)

Leroy M. "Roy" Cox learned to be a tinkerer as a child in his dad's bicycle shop in Placentia. Roy began his own entrepreneurial endeavors making photographic enlargers in the garage of his Placentia home. But scarcity of metal during WWII led him to instead make wooden pop guns in a backyard workshop on S. Garnsey St. in Santa Ana. He founded L. M. Cox Manufacturing Co. in 1946, and when metal became readily available again (after the war) in 1947 he and business partner Mike Mier began also making toy race cars. It wasn't long before their L.M. Cox Manufacturing Co. was selling as many as 60,000 cars a month, and other manufacturers began building "after market" working engines for these toys. Soon Cox began including their own engines with the cars.


Cox and Meier inspect the miniature car assembly line, Oct. 1947. (Photo courtesy Santa Ana Public Library)

But the tide of history turned again and the defense industry needed quality metal once more to build the hardware necessary to defend the free world from Communism. But even as the cost of raw materials went up, Cox found new customers in aircraft plants, Air Force and Navy depots, and various government arsenals – each requesting that he make miniaturized parts and gizmos for them with the same attention to detail he put into toys. Cox himself didn't know what some of the parts were for, but he followed the designs meticulously. By 1951, Cox was not only the leading manufacturer of miniature cars, but was also putting about 80% of their effort into defense contracts.

Floyd Summa runs a toy car parts manufacturing machine converted to make parts for defense projects, Sept. 1951. (Register photo)

But as popular as the toy cars were, and despite detours into military contracts, it was the gas-powered "Thimble Drome" toy airplane, introduced in 1953, that became Cox's signature product. The planes sold like hotcakes.

Beginning in 1957, these toy planes were demonstrated every day in the "Thimble Drome Flight Circle" in the heart of Tomorrowland at Disneyland. The planes were not radio-controlled, but used a "nearly invisible" control tether. They made a tremendous noise and drew similarly tremendous crowds of onlookers. Cox also demonstrated their motorized cars and boats at the Flight Circle.


The Cox Tee Dee .010 -- the smallest engine ever to be mass-produced

A longtime reader of (and frequent commentor on) this blog, Lee "CoxPilot" Heinly, worked at the Flight Circle for Cox from 1959 until the attraction closed in 1965 and continued working at the adjacent hobby shop into the following year. He began at the princely wage of $1 per hour. I wish I'd asked Lee more questions about his employer, but sadly, he passed away a number of years ago. In a tribute to Lee on the Daveland Blog, one of Lee's co-employees remembered, "Both the Disneyland people and the L. M. Cox people were more like family than employers. Mr. Disney, as Lee mentioned, came through the park frequently and used first names with his folks. Leroy Cox did the very same. It is easy to see why Lee, Bart, Keith, and all the other Cox folks stayed for so long."


Flying Cox planes in Tomorrowland. (Photo courtesy Davelandweb.com)

With business booming, L.M. Cox Manufacturing moved to a new factory at 1505 E. Warner Ave. in 1963. Meanwhile, Roy's longtime machinist and business partner, Mark Mier, was hired away by NASA to help them develop miniaturized machine parts for the space program.

The Cox factory on Warner Ave., circa 1968. (Courtesy Rob Richardson Collection, Orange County Archives)

Meanwhile, the old Cox Manufacturing complex on Poinsettia St. passed through a number of hands, including the Chemo Wholesale Supply Co., until finally becoming Santa Ana Diesel around 1975.


The Flight Circle had a prominent position at the center of Tomorrowland. (Photo courtesy Davelandweb.com)

With the death of his wife and health problems of his own, Leroy Cox sold his company to Leisure Dynamics, Inc. of Minneapolis in 1969. The new owners expanded the product line to include HO scale trains (1971), road race sets (1973), and eventually radio controlled versions of their toys (1975). In 1976 the company's name was changed to Cox Hobbies, Inc., and a good day would see them turn out 10,000 models.

The company was purchased by model rocket maker Estes Industries in 1996, which moved operations to Colorado. In 2009, Estes sold the remaining classic Cox stock to several private buyers, including a Canadian company which launched a “Cox International” website and eBay presence – and which continues to sell old stock, new versions of the Thimbledrome engines, replacement parts, and more.


Disney handbags on display at Harvey shop in Santa Ana Diesel, July 2019. (Photo by author)

In 2010 the Estes-Cox Corporation and the Cox name was purchased by Hobbico, which only made a few basic radio controlled planes under the Cox name. Hobbico went bankrupt in 2018 and the Estes-Cox brand became part of a separate, reorganized Estes Industries LLC, which now seems entirely focused on its line of model rockets.
Not much remains of Santa Ana’s once-great manufacturer of working vehicle models. But the buildings in which they rose to prominence will live to fly another mission.

(Thanks to Yvette Cabrera, Dave DeCaro, the Santa Ana History Room, and the late Lee Heinly for their assistance with this article.)