Tinkering with toys

For one man, legal work pays the bills, Popping Eye Frog feeds a passion

The garage is a legendary birthplace of small ideas that grow into big businesses.

The tinkerers who nurtured their dreams into Apple and Hewlett-Packard, to cite two examples, started in garages. HP ended up on the Big Board. Apple became a cultural icon.

Taylor Arnold, a North Raleigh family man, has a garage in which he tinkers. The similarities almost surely stop there.

But maybe not. Arnold might yet become rich and famous. It's not likely, though, simply because he invents toys, not technological devices. In fact, he doesn't really think of himself as an inventor. Arnold winces at the word, which carries a Ludwig von Drake, nutty professor kind of vibe. Arnold prefers to call himself a designer.

His daytime clients have a different word for him. They call him abogado -- lawyer.

Like an uncountable number of people in the Triangle, Arnold leads a bifurcated life. He has a job, and he has a dream. The 9-to-5 job is what pays the bills and provides for the family. The after-hours dream is what keeps Arnold creatively fresh and hopeful that the future holds something more than an endless series of days tethered to a desk.

Maybe that sounds like you. Or somebody you know.

If there's an Everyman in the Triangle, Arnold might be him.

He's a professional in an area that is rich with professors, lawyers, physicians, bankers and bureaucrats. He's a designer and inventor in an area where the phrase "research and development" has practical application on a daily basis. He's a suburban family man in an area where the suburbs stretch over the horizon, and family life still commands respect. He's an entrepreneur in an area where virtually every garage houses a dream next to the lawn mower.

Wait, there's one more thing: Arnold has a low-key personality and an appearance of such unremarkability that a career in bank robbery might make the short list of possibilities if his other two choices don't pan out. (Who could pick him out in a lineup?) The Triangle, and specifically Raleigh, has a well-earned reputation as the White Bread Capital of the World, but one that disguises an endearing vitality -- which Arnold also possesses.

So if Arnold isn't Everyman, he's doggone close to it.

Arnold, 35, was born in Kansas, moved to Charlotte while in middle school, then attended Wake Forest University, where he received a history degree. But there's a certain misdirection behind that classic liberal arts education: Arnold had a vocational soul right from the beginning.

"I was interested in making and building things," he says.

But guys with history degrees generally are not makers and builders. After getting his history degree, Arnold -- establishing a pattern that has held true to this day -- decided to indulge the maker/builder part of his brain for a while. He enrolled at N.C. State University to study mechanical engineering and joined a campus club for people interested in designing and creating toys.

Making toys was fun. Arnold liked it. In fact, he left N.C. State before getting his engineering degree and in 1999 opened Controlled Mindstorms, "a brainstorming-slash-design studio," as Arnold describes it.

In 2001, Arnold got married.

In 2002, he got worried.

Problem was, Arnold and his business partner were unprepared for the up-and-down life of an entrepreneur. A Seattle toy company provided initial nurturing -- lots of moral support and encouragement, along with a little financing -- and for a while "things were looking very good," Arnold says. But when a few months went by with few products of promise in the pipeline and no discernible improvement in fortune, nervousness set in.