“Tony.”
The spry eighty-three-year-old CEO’s name is embroidered in cursive on a slightly rumpled, short-sleeved lab coat. Underneath the industrial gray uniform, his baby-blue-plaid dress shirt is unbuttoned at the collar and his cuffs are casually rolled up. His dark slacks hang loosely on a weathered but fit frame. On his feet are bright white New Balance sneakers, made in the U.S.A. His shoes need to be comfortable, because he traverses his 450,000-square-foot factory floor dozens of times over the course of his twelve-hour workday, six days a week, beginning at the crack of dawn and ending after most of his eight hundred employees have clocked out.
Tony looks like a cross between Albert Einstein and Mark Twain, with a much better barber. His olive skin is offset by a neat head of silver curls, fluffy sideburns, and a perfectly trimmed mustache. He’s intense, but not intimidating. He’s proud, but not arrogant. He’s larger than life, but stubbornly down to earth. His deceptively mundane inventions and innovations are synonymous with engineering excellence and economical value.
Like the products he made famous around the world, Tony is tough, durable, handsome, beloved, long-lasting, and lit from within.
Sitting across from Tony Maglica in the glass-encased meeting room of his Ontario, California, headquarters, I am in complete awe of the man who invented the revolutionary Maglite flashlight and founded a billion-dollar business that grew from a tiny garage. Yet I feel right at home. Within minutes of meeting each other, we are talking about his family and I need a Kleenex. “Michelle, I owe everything to my mother,” Tony says with a catch in his voice. We both wipe our eyes. He hands me a genealogy book titled O Zlarinskim Obiteljima Jurcan I Maglica—a story of the Jurcan and Maglica families’ lives in Zlarin, which seamlessly transports us back to the Great Depression and the formative childhood years that ignited his enduring passion for life, liberty, and the American Dream.
“Zlato” means gold in Croatian. The sun-washed island of Zlarin, the “Golden Island,” sits in the Sibenek archipelago of the Adriatic Sea one mile south of Croatia’s Dalmatian coast. Cars are banned on the three-square-mile territory to preserve its tranquil habitat, which boasts exotic red coral, sandy beaches, thick pine trees, and lush olive groves. Despite these ample resources, life on the tiny Mediterranean island of about three hundred inhabitants was filled with hardship and deprivation. Large families, whose ancestors came from mainland Croatia in the thirteenth century, would rise as early as 2:00 a.m., trudging several miles, along with their donkeys, through rocky hills to till their fields. Many islanders owned vineyards, but a devastating plant disease called Peronospora blighted the wine farms at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Generations of Zlarin men sought work as fishermen and sailors, often leaving their one-room stone cottages by the tender age of twelve. The wives stayed behind, harvesting and hand-making what they could to feed and clothe their children, who helped grind cornmeal and gathered figs, lentils, and wild berries. Several families would share a single kettle, hanging from the ceiling beams, to boil cabbage. It would take from midafternoon until almost midnight for each family to have its turn. To pass the time as they tended the fire, the relatives entertained each other around the hearth with treasured Zlarin songs, poems, and fables about sea creatures and fairies (called “vile and the vidine”) that roamed the hills and snatched up children.
The women and kids plastered the walls of their stone homes with pictures of the sailing ships and steamers that their male relatives worked on around the world. The men slaved away as crewmen, stokers, oilers, and coalmen in order to send money home. Many drowned at sea or fell victim to crime or disease in faraway foreign ports.
Tomicahad Maglica (née Jurcan), Tony’s mother, came from a small hamlet known as Borovica on the interior of the island. The topography consisted of pristine pools, caves, and a sandy mixture of chalk and dolomite that could be sold as clay soap. Borovica residents worked as field laborers and fishermen. The Jurcans’ early homes on Zlarin were one-room huts made of dry stone walls, fortified with stone slabs. In the most crowded cottages, some family members slept on straw mattresses in the cellar, crammed in next to wine kegs and olive oil casks. Both Tomicahad’s great-grandfather and grandfather were seamen who left home at young ages. Her grandfather later found work at a restaurant in New York City. Several of Tomicahad’s loved ones fought in the resistance movement against fascism during World War II.
The family of Jerko Maglica, Tony’s father, had lived on the easternmost part of the island, known as Ruza, dating back to the fifteenth century. Jerko had two brothers, Ive and Joso. Their father, Ante, who had been lame since childhood, was the village crier (“kredar”). He would announce news from the church or shout out the merchandise arriving from boats that came from the Croatian mainland (pots, tureens, baskets, and fish traps) or the Italian ports of Puglia, Abruzzi, and Marche (lentils, beans, and wheat). Local villagers said Ante’s cries “could make the fish jump,” but he remained mired in debt. His crier’s job paid pennies. Much of the time, he received no wages at all, but was compensated instead with a bit of fish for lunch or a small carafe of wine.
By pooling family funds, the Maglicas managed to cobble enough ship fare (“pasaj”) to sail to America. Third-class or “steerage” class tickets on the bottom deck ranged from ten to twenty-five dollars, which took months if not years for many poor families to raise. The brothers departed from Antwerp, Belgium, where an estimated 2 million European immigrants boarded the famed Red Star Line from 1873 to 1935. Among the most famous passengers of the ocean liner to freedom (which was founded in Philadelphia in 1871 by Quaker businessman Clement Griscom): Irving Berlin and Albert Einstein. After sailing the world to settle their father’s debts, brother Ive settled in New York in the late 1920s to work as a stoker for a gasworks plant. Joso and Jerko joined him soon after and found work as dockers.
In November 1930, as the Great Depression raged, Jerko and wife, Tomicahad, welcomed the birth of their only son, Ante “Tony” Maglica, in the longshoremen’s district of Manhattan’s Lower West Side. Some six thousand people in the city were out of work and on the streets at the time, desperately selling apples for a nickel apiece. With Jerko barely able to earn a living, Tomicahad decided to return to Zlarin with toddler Tony.
At first, Tomicahad survived as a subsistence farmer on a meager plot of family land. Tony was poor, but happy. As World War II erupted and closed in on the islanders, however, misery and famine encroached. Tony recalled watching his mother and her twin sister, Nata, depart Zlarin in a small rowboat, fighting strong winds and risking their lives to get to the mainland to trade any items of value they could scrape together for food. “They would be gone for days and I would be alone,” Tony told me. “My mother left me with one can of flour and told me to make it last a week.” With tummy grumbling, Tony would mix the flour with water and heat it into a barely edible paste. Each day, he’d climb the roof of his home to keep watch for the boat. Each night, he’d look out at the stars illuminating the Adriatic Sea. As time ticked away and the can of flour dwindled to nothing, Tony’s mother and aunt would finally return. The boy greeted them with a mixture of relief and anticipation. “My mother brought back beans, which I would beg her to boil right away. I never grew tired of those beans! I still love them today,” he says with a twinkle in his eye.
Young Tony was resourceful and creative. He took apart clocks, carved chess pieces out of wood, and built cradles and stone shelters for his family. Tomicahad and her sister, meanwhile, tore apart their homes—stripped the bed sheets, emptied the kitchen of plates and utensils, rustled up religious artifacts and furniture—for bartering. “My mother, God rest her soul, even pulled out one of her own gold-filled teeth to trade for food,” Tony reminisces with a pained face as if it were yesterday. She motivated him to work and study hard, to squander nothing, and to relish every opportunity. Tony’s education was rudimentary; as a teen, he apprenticed as a locksmith and shipyard worker.
The Axis annexation and occupation of Zlarin, first by the Italians and then by the Germans, brought fear and death to Tony’s village. Croats who had joined the antifascist resistance movement, including at least one of Tomicahad’s relatives, were thrown into Italian concentration camps. Mass terror took the form of daily raids, deportations, and ethnic cleansing. Islanders were executed randomly. Still visibly shaken after all these years, Tony tells me he “hid in the forest” for hours at a time, trembling as “planes dropped bombs from the sky.”
Another time, Tony, his mother, and their friends and neighbors were rounded up by German soldiers wielding machine guns. The islanders were lined up in the village square. “I thought we were going to be shot. I thought that was it.” A local priest apparently talked the bloodthirsty occupiers out of a massacre. But other Croatian villagers were not so lucky. In Dalmatia, forty inhabitants were slaughtered by Italians in May 1942 after several dozen telegraph poles near Sibenek had been sabotaged by resistance fighters. Axis forces opened up an artillery barrage on civilians in the town of Primosten after they revolted against Italian sailors. Clamping down on resistance movement revolts, Germans executed nearly 270 Croats in the mainland village of Lipa.
Through it all, Tomicahad held on to hope that she and Tony would survive. She encouraged him relentlessly to pursue his dreams of returning to his birthplace—the land of the free and the home of the brave. In 1950, with Communists overtaking Croatia, Tony made it back to New York. He returned to America at the dawn of the postwar economic boom. Tony brought the mechanical skills he had honed in Zlarin. Most important, he carried Tomicahad’s spirit of perseverance and optimism burning within him.
Back at the sprawling headquarters of Mag Instruments, Tony leads me to a large, memento-filled room on the second floor. I’m immediately drawn to a long glass case featuring typewritten, signed letters and battered Maglite flashlights of all sizes. The stylish, sturdy torches had been run over, submerged in water, or caught in flames.
And yet, like Tony himself, his inventions endured in the face of crushing adversity.
The surviving Maglite products on display at Tony’s headquarters represent just a few of the countless “amazing stories” the company has collected from first responders, soldiers, sportsmen, and ordinary housewives. The testimonials could fill an entire museum.
A police officer from New Caney, Texas, wrote:
Dear Maglite,
On December 4, 1992, one of my men was involved in a shooting incident & the Maglite® that he was carrying on duty saved his life. My officer was responding to a family violence call in progress in the city adjoining ours. Upon arrival to the residence, the officer was advised that the subject in the house had a rifle. He then requested more officers at this location & while waiting, the officer & his sergeant took up a position by the residence’s front door, & tried to get the subject inside the house to give up his weapon & surrender.
The sergeant kicked the front door of the house, allowing the officer to shine his flashlight down the hallway of the residence, [where he saw] the subject at the end of the hallway pointing a high powered rifle at him. He then backed out of the house & took up a defensive position at the edge of the doorway in front of the sergeant. The subject crawled up the hallway & fired a shot from the rifle at the officer. If not for the fact that [the] officer’s flashlight was in direct contact with the bullet first & took the impact of the bullet, I might be delivering a funeral speech for him instead of writing you this letter.
Enclosed you’ll find the picture of the flashlight that is being held as evidence. Once again I thank you for a well-built flashlight. It saved my officer’s life.
A Santee, California, firefighter took time out of his busy day to send his thanks:
I’m a firefighter and many of us, as you know, use Maglite® flashlights to see our way in the heavy smoke of a fire. While at work one day and after one of the fire engines had moved, I noticed a three-cell Maglite® flashlight on the floor. Looking closely at where it was lying, I noticed that it was in the tire tracks of the fire engine. I called one of my coworkers over and we could see where the tire track from the outside dual tire was not complete. We picked up the Maglite® flashlight and we could see where it had been pressed into the concrete floor. To our amazement, there were only two small indentations on the Maglite® flashlight from the floor. The light still worked and the body of the Maglite® flashlight was not even bent. Needless to say, we were impressed. Thank you for making such a good product.
A cop from Weber City, Virginia, related his story:
On May 4, 2001, in the early morning hours of 4 a.m., I found a house engulfed in flames. I entered the side door of the residence. The smoke was so heavy that you couldn’t see your hand in front of your eyes. I placed my Maglite® on the floor by the door. I crawled down the hall to the kitchen, where I found a person passed out. I took the person and stood up then proceeded to exit the residence. I lost my bearings. I dropped to the floor. I was very disoriented from the heat and the smoke. As I lay on the floor, I looked around and there by the door I could see the Maglite® showing me the way out of that inferno.
I want to take this opportunity to thank you with all my heart for this great flashlight that saved the life of the victim and myself. You have a great product. Again, thank you.
A soldier who served during Operation Desert Storm thanked Tony for his donation of Maglite products to the U.S. military:
In response to your items & letter that you supplied to my troops here in Saudi Arabia: The accessory packs & bulbs have really come in handy. They allowed our troops to walk around at night & not be detected. They have out-performed the bulky & larger military lights. They are really nice they strap right to our web gear & are easy to get at.
Again, I want to thank you for your support to my troops while in Desert Storm. All of my troops want to thank you. Thank you for your support. God Bless You.
A New York City office worker who escaped the World Trade Center 1 during the 9/11 terrorist attacks wrote:
A quick story: On Sept 11, 2001, 35 of my fellow workers [and I] were working 6 levels under the World Trade Center in NYC. At approximately 8:55 AM that morning, we were given a heads up that a plane had crashed into the adjacent North Tower (we had been previously involved in the 1993 bomb blast).
We ran 7 stories up the fire exit to the street level and escaped with our lives. We were unaware that one of our coworkers was left in the bathroom. The lights went out. Totally black 7 stories underground, except for his Maglite®. The technician, who has bad eyesight and bad hearing, made his way up the stairs and out of the building as the second plane hit the south side of the south tower, directly above the fire exit.
He barely made it across the street as the building began to collapse—steel, glass, people raining down on him. Without his Maglite®, he would have been buried alive. Thank you.
And another worker who survived the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center 2 Tower shared his emotional experience:
I am a Licensed Electrical Contractor in NY City. I am a survivor of the massive terrorist attack on the World Trade Center complex. We are the house electricians for the lease owners of the Trade Center. I, along with one colleague, was trapped in 7 WTC at the very time that the 1st tower imploded. Just prior, 4 seconds, to the debris that was WTC #2, the first tower to fall, my colleague & I were in the lower lobby of 7 WTC along with several different personnel from several different agencies—OEM, FDNY, NYPD, etc. We ran to safety in corridor that connected the lower lobby to the loading dock. When the tower hit ground, the smoke, soot & powdered debris not only filled the lobby & loading dock, but the enclosed corridor where we, about 25 people, were trapped.
Breathing was our greatest concern. There was no visibility. Panic occurred. One of the others screamed that we are all professionals. “Stop screaming. Does anybody know a way?” My colleague and I did.
At that time I reached into my trusty and sturdy briefcase for 2 Mini Maglite® flashlights given to me as presents. These two 2 Mini Maglite® flashlights allowed me to shine a light onto the wall that led us to the Washington Street exit of 7 WTC.
Approximately 25 people followed us to safety. This note to you at Maglite® is to let you know that the convenience of your product was essential to our escape from what was and is the ultimate disaster.
I will never be without these 2 Mini Maglite® flashlights as long as I continue to live. I do not have the serial number of the units, however I will now take these out of service, in memoriam to all of our brothers & sisters lost to the monstrous attack of the cowards among all of us. I will purchase a larger version of your product for my trusty briefcase to hold.
Long Live the USA and their fantastic manufacturers. The lives of several are intact because of your product. Letting you know this is therapy for me.
Long before he was saving other people’s lives, Tony Maglica had to save his own. He started at the bottom. Rock bottom. After arriving back in the U.S., he took a job at a sweatshop sewing clothes. The piecework paid fifty cents an hour. He worked hard to assimilate, teaching himself English from a dictionary. The Croatian community in New York City was tight-knit and maintained the culture and customs of the “old country.” Maglica’s father and uncles established a “social society” of Zlarinians who helped each other out. But economic opportunity beckoned from outside the Big Apple slums. With his wife and young child in tow, the ambitious twenty-year-old tinkerer packed up a rusted, bald-tired 1947 Studebaker and headed West. He summed up his possessions for the journey: “$150 and twenty English words.”
Machinist positions abounded in Colorado. The manufacturing sector around Denver boomed alongside the defense industry. By the mid-1950s, manufacturing had surpassed agriculture as the top economic driver in the state. Tony found work here and there, but some employers doubted his ability to comprehend schematics because of his Croatian accent. He also aroused the ire of union shop leaders who complained when he worked through mandated breaks or completed more pieces than his colleagues.
“Why were they so angry that I wanted to work? I came here to work!” Tony exclaims to me. Determined, not defeated, Tony packed up the Studebaker again after a few years and headed with his family to California, where the promise of three-dollar-an-hour jobs beckoned. The journey was literally uphill, with Tony often forced to push his broken-down car through the Rocky Mountains.
In Long Beach, California, Douglas Aircraft’s largest plant pumped out parts and planes for the U.S. military during World War II. At its peak production, workers could build a plane in an hour. After the war, Douglas produced both military transports and passenger aircraft before merging with McDonnell Aircraft. Maglica applied for a job at Douglas, but was once again rejected over his limited English proficiency.
“One man I spoke to would not even shake my hand,” Tony tells me softly. “I’ll never forget that.”
Undaunted, he secured work operating a lathe at Long Beach–based Pacific Valve Company and at A.O. Smith Water Products Company, a water heater manufacturer that had converted to production of landing gear, propellers, bomb casings, and atomic bomb project parts during World War II. When Tony learned that other workers at A.O. Smith had set up their own home shops to do contract work on the side, he decided to strike out on his own. In 1955, he rented a tiny garage in working-class South El Monte, whose motto is “City of Achievement.”
“This is where it all started,” Tony tells me, pointing to an old black-and-white photo of the garage, more of a shed, with bars on its narrow window slits, at 2218 Merced Ave. Another photo shows his young daughter, Jenny, standing at a Logan lathe adorned with a pile of metal shavings. Tony had scrimped and scraped together $125 as a down payment on the $1,000 machinery.
To hook up the lathe, he once reminisced, “I had to disconnect the stove and run fifty feet of cable to the garage. I worked the night shift at my job, because that shift paid better, and worked on this little lathe in my garage during the day. It was job-shop work, very competitive, and the hardest part was getting paid. I’ve always had to be economical. Even when my business began to get successful, I didn’t have an air-conditioned room and expensive machines. I modified the machines I had.”
The superior quality of Tony’s precision tool work won him several loyal aerospace and defense clients. He contributed critical parts for U.S. missiles and satellites. Tony worked harder, faster, and longer than other contractors to get a job done. He slept in the garage on his workbench to meet deadlines.
And he was never satisfied.
In 1960, just five years after he established his one-man Maglica Machine Shop, Tony filed an application for his first patent on a machine tool device. Accompanied by three pages of meticulously detailed sketches, the document certainly put to rest any questions about Tony’s ability to communicate. “There are a number of important considerations in operating machine tools on a profitable basis,” he explained, “and two of the most important are set-up time and accuracy,” particularly for smaller lot sizes. To avoid time-consuming disassembly and reassembly of work piece machinery, Maglica invented a rotatable lathe tool holder for threading, facing, form, and cut-off tools. The tool holders that existed before his improvement were expensive, difficult to manipulate, and “[did] not firmly hold tool holders and cutting tools to the extent required by the close tolerances presently practiced in the fabrication of components for missile and weapons systems.” Tony’s special tool table featured a piston, expansion chamber, cylinder body, and pressure fluid that could be moved, aligned, and readjusted based on which of several tools built into it was needed for a work piece.
Obsessed with both the aesthetics of industrial design and the cost efficiency of the manufacturing process, Maglica continued to patent improvements on precision tool devices and incorporated Mag Instrument in 1974. Work poured in as his reputation for fine craftsmanship and integrity grew. A few years later, while fulfilling orders for a long-defunct flashlight parts manufacturer, a proverbial bulb flashed in Tony’s head and the era of Maglite dawned.
Before Tony Maglica came along, flashlights were ugly, flimsy objects. They were called “flash lights” because the carbon filament bulbs were inefficient and could not produce a steady stream of light. Made of cheap plastic, they broke easily and required frequent replacement. Like Tony, the inventor of the original electric hand torch, Conrad Hubert (born Akiba Horowitz), was an Eastern European immigrant and serial entrepreneur. After arriving in America in 1891, he opened up a cigar shop, restaurant, jewelry store, and novelty shop. Hubert worked with fellow inventor and battery specialist Joshua Lionel Cowen, the eighth of nine children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, to market lighted knickknacks such as electric tie tacks. Cowen had created an “electric flowerpot” illuminated with a slender, battery-operated tube with a lightbulb on one end. The novelty item flopped, but Hubert continued to tinker with the lighting system, which he believed held great commercial promise. Cowen sold the patent rights to Hubert and moved on to other projects, establishing the famous Lionel Train Company in 1902. Hubert, meanwhile, was fashioning the first portable flashlights out of crude paper and fiber tubes. He hired engineer/inventor David Missell, a battery expert, to help him perfect and patent the portable, tubular lamps. They marketed the devices to police officers, and the torches became a national sensation. In 1906, Hubert went on to found the Ever-Ready Battery Company, which advertised the flashlights using the biblical phrase “Let There Be Light.”
Dissatisfied with the state of flashlight design by the late 1970s, Tony innovated a strong, sleek torch of anodized aluminum powered by D-cell batteries. The anodized aluminum, an alloy of aluminum, magnesium, and silicon, resists corrosion inside and out. After extensive research and design experimentation, Tony came up with a better flashlight that sported “a pushbutton switch instead of a slide switch, and an adjustable beam, so you could go from flood to spotlight,” he explained. Tony described how he added “contacts inside that are self-cleaning—when you push the button, the contact revolves and scrubs against the other part. It takes the oxidation off the metal, so you get a better connection.” The torch’s three seams are sealed with O-rings for water resistance. U.S. Patent 4,286,311, filed by Tony in 1978 and approved by the Patent Office in August 1981, ushered in a new age of heavy, rugged flashlights with powerful beams.
Tony’s obsession was and remains: quality, quality, quality. “Why would you want to be associated with something that wasn’t the best?” Tony put it bluntly.
Mag Instrument initially targeted the public safety sector, and as the ever-increasing mountain of letters of gratitude at the company headquarters shows, Tony won fiercely loyal clients among police officers, firefighters, and other first responders. But consumers embraced it, too, as much more than a tactical device. It became a household necessity. Admirers dubbed his torch “engineered light” and a “work of art that works.” Industrial design expert Jennifer Garrett explained why she kept one in her designer purse: “The light is bright and focusable, the power use is efficient (batteries last amazingly long), the construction is solid, they double as weapons and hammers, and they come in an array of sizes and colors. What more could you ask for?”
As important as the design and function of each and every Maglite flashlight is the price and customer value. Tony stubbornly insisted on keeping production costs and retail prices as low as possible. Distributor prices for the company’s legacy incandescent flashlights have remained steady or even declined. Until 2013, the wholesale price of a standard, 2 D-cell incandescent Maglite remained under twenty dollars, just as it was when it revolutionized the marketplace in 1979. Tony also included a spare bulb in the tail cap of his flashlights and offered limited lifetime warranties on his products. Over the next decade, Tony took the consumer goods sector by storm with the successive introduction of the Maglite® Rechargeable Flashlight System™, the Mini Maglite® AA flashlight, and the Solitaire® single AAA-Cell flashlight. Tony noted in his patent application for the miniature flashlight that no one before him had applied optical improvements and variable light dispersion to small, handheld torches. His bright beams of light became a staple not just on the belts of police and firefighters, but in millions of American homes, purses, and key chain holders. Fortune and Money magazines ranked Mag Instrument® products among the top one hundred products that “America makes best.” Former CEO of Apple Computer Gilbert F. Amelio told the Wall Street Journal that his company aimed to be “essentially the Maglite® of computers.”
With success came competition, of course. And while imitation may be the best form of flattery in some instances, for an inventor, it can be the worst form of theft. Maglica came too far and worked too hard to sit back and watch his intellectual property be stolen from him. He made a principled decision to fight patent infringers every step of the way as they flooded the market with their inferior knockoffs.
“We have worked hard to earn our reputation,” Maglica explained. “We must protect it.”
Maglite first won a pivotal case in 1978 against American retailers selling foreign ringers. The company made the stores rid their shelves of the imitations and forced them to stock the real deal. Several years later, a jury awarded the company $3.1 million in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Streamlight, Inc., which had been selling inferior rip-offs. Scores of companies around the world tried to do the same. In 1989, the U.S. International Trade Commission blocked importation of all foreign infringers who had attempted to steal Tony’s small aluminum flashlight and component designs. Overseas, the company won rare design protections in Japan after an Osaka court banned Asahi Electric Corporation from making and selling Maglite look-alikes. The Japanese judicial body ordered Asahi to destroy all the remaining imitations and ordered payment of compensatory damages. Mag Instrument is proud of its aggressive patent and trademark stance. The company explains that Tony views his hard-fought and hard-won battles as integral not only to the success of Mag Instrument, but also to the success of a free enterprise system:
Mr. Maglica believes that all American manufacturers benefit from the aggressive defense of intellectual property rights against any and all infringers. By protecting its technical innovations and its trademarks, an American manufacturer protects the American workforce that makes and sells the products that embody those technologies and bear those marks.
To date, Maglite has spent more than $100 million battling intellectual property thieves and their enablers. The company has never lost a lawsuit.
As Tony and I watch his newest products roll off the assembly line, he says resolutely: “You have to defend what is yours and what is right.”
Design anthropologist Dori Tunstall has dubbed Tony’s Maglite “the Jason Bourne of flashlights.” “It will still work after being twenty thousand feet underwater, run over by a semi truck, washed in two cycles of laundry, and dropped into vats of acid. What is most remarkable is that the flashlight is unabashedly ‘Made in America.’ ” After relocating to his current headquarters in Ontario, California, in 1982, where he now employs close to eight hundred highly paid, skilled workers, Tony insisted on state-of-the-art, U.S.-based automation to maintain high quality and competitive costs. He doesn’t just build flashlights in America. He builds many of the machines that build those flashlights. And he boosts other American businesses by using their products—like the aluminum from Kaiser Aluminum, which supplies miles of aluminum tubing every year for Maglite’s famed cases.
Tony has continued to improve and perfect his designs over the last thirty-five years, securing some two hundred other patents as his lamps have evolved from using xenon and krypton incandescent bulbs to LEDs. He leads me to an empty lab room where he had been developing new, revolutionary incandescent bulb parts. The machinery is dormant. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency forbade him from producing the bulbs in the wake of the government’s incandescent bulb ban that went into effect in 2014. The federal ban, passed as a top-down energy conservation measure, has sent thousands of jobs to China, decreased consumer choices, caused more environmental headaches because of the mercury content of compact fluorescent light (CFL) alternatives, and stifled innovation by private enterprise. He had planned to hire more workers to make the new products. Those plans are off. “That was such a shame,” Tony tells me, shaking his head. “Such a waste.”
Agitated, Tony takes his glasses off for a moment and rubs his eyes. “Government doesn’t innovate. People like me do. Government doesn’t create jobs. We do. What is happening to our country, Michelle? I came here with nothing. If I can do it, anyone can! This is America!”
From day one, Tony vowed to manufacture products that were 100 percent American. “Politicians always talk about supporting American manufacturing. I have done it,” Tony says. We stroll his factory floor, where employees call out cheerful greetings and come right up to give their boss a hug. He tells me he refused to grant licenses to foreign companies and he refused to move his facilities to Mexico as so many other southern California companies were doing. When Mag Instrument needed a certain battery clip, it refused to import the part from China. Tony designed his own clip and spent $1 million tooling up his plant to manufacture the parts in-house and in-country.
The company “puts its money where its mouth is.” And its mouth is where Tony’s heart is. Maglite has defiantly refused to outsource workers because, as the company explains:
For one, it would offend against his faith in the American free-enterprise system, and against the spirit of giving back. Mr. Maglica knows that Mag Instrument got where it is by being an American company. And he deeply believes that Mag Instrument could not have happened anywhere but in America—that nowhere else but in the U.S.A. could somebody who started with as little as he had ever build from scratch a company such as Mag Instrument has become.
To “outsource” flashlight manufacturing jobs would also offend against Tony Maglica’s commitment to quality. . . . His approach to continuous product improvement entails walking the factory floor—observing, teaching, listening to suggestions, praising what is done right and correcting what is not. . . . Mr. Maglica knows the difference between good quality and great quality, and he knows what makes that difference—an abiding commitment to real, true product excellence. Further, he understands that quality is not a goal but a process; not an endpoint but a dogged, relentless pursuit—all day, every day.
Mag Instrument’s entire line of products is manufactured in the U.S. But because Maglites require a minuscule number of tiny parts that are only produced outside the country, the state of California forbids Tony from carrying the label “Made in the U.S.A.” Every other state, plus federal law, allows Maglites to bear that label. But only in California is 99 percent American not American enough. Tony mounted a challenge to the archaic, arbitrary, and capricious law, but the politicians didn’t listen.
No matter. To anyone who knows Tony’s story, the red, white, and blue that runs through his veins is unmistakable.
Tony firmly believes the fate of Maglite and the fate of American manufacturing are inextricably linked, which is why he won’t give up on his workers or leave crazy California. In what little spare time he has, Tony lends his philanthropic support to U.S. law enforcement, the U.S. military, and the land of his ancestors back in Croatia. He has donated tens of thousands of his products to aid rescuers during the Oklahoma City bombing, Hurricane Katrina, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the Japanese tsunami in 2011.
At eighty-three, he hasn’t taken a vacation in more than a decade and doesn’t plan to any time soon.
“Michelle, I still believe in the American Dream,” Tony the torchbearer tells me as we sit in his sun-bathed company cafeteria eating lunch, surrounded by employees from all walks of life.
“As long as I’m alive, I will never give up.”
