Henry Orenstein, a Holocaust survivor who built a major American toy company, later persuaded Hasbro to start its line of Transformers action figures, and who in his 70s patented an ingenious way to better televise poker tournaments, died on Tuesday at a hospital in Livingston, N.J.
The Topper Corporation, which he started in the 1950s, made the Suzy Homemaker line of miniature appliances, the Johnny Seven One Man Army toy gun, the Betty the Beautiful Bride and Dawn dolls, Zoomer Boomer trucks, Ding-A-Ling robots and Sesame Street educational toys.
To market his Suzy Cute doll in 1964, Mr. Orenstein hired Louis Armstrong for a television commercial that also included three little girls.
Six years later, Mr. Orenstein sponsored Al Unser Sr.’s racecar, which won the Indianapolis 500.
He refashioned himself as a toy inventor and broker.
“He started playing with it and said, ‘This is the best thing I’ve seen in at least 10 years,’” recalled Mrs.
Mr. Orenstein put together a deal between Hasbro and the Japanese company, Takara, which led to Hasbro’s introduction in 1984 of Transformers, toy robots that could turn into vehicles or beasts.
“Ideas don’t come in little pieces,” he told Newsweek in 2016.
His father, Lejb, was a grain merchant, and his mother, Golda Orenstein, was a homemaker.
1, 1939, prompted Henry, his father and his brothers Felek and Sam to flee to Soviet-occupied Poland, leaving his mother and sister, Hanka, behind.
In July 1943, Henry and his brothers were loaded onto a cattle car and taken to the Budzyn concentration camp in Poland.
Four other camps followed: Majdanek and Plasznow, also in Poland, and Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, in Germany.
After two years in displaced persons camps and an apartment in Stuttgart, Germany, Mr. Orenstein immigrated to New York in 1947.
His game was seven-card stud, in which four cards are face up and three are face down, or hole cards, and only the holder of the hand can see them.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Orenstein is survived by a son, Mark, and a daughter, Annette.