Mr. Potato Head's birthday.(toy)

On the eve of the Toy Fair last week, Hasbro gave a party at the company's Chelsea showroom to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the birth of its first toy, Mr. Potato Head. Guests included a couple of dozen four-to-seven-year-olds from the nearby Educare Early Childhood Center. They were greeted by Hasbro's chairman and C.E.O., Alan G. Hassenfeld, and a battalion of his aides, who helped the kids with their name tags, Mr. Potato Head T-shirts, and cone-shaped party hats. The aides presented the little guests with "Collector's Edition" gift tins containing kits for "Face-changing Fun with 17 Interchangeable Parts!" The guests promptly and seriously, as one, sat down on the floor, opened the tins, and started decorating six-by-four-inch plastic potatoes. (The original Mr. P. H., in 1952, consisted of only a few parts, including a pipe, to stick on a real potato.) Mr. Hassenfeld, a relentlessly cheerful gentleman with a pudgy, jowelly face that bore a resemblance to Mr. P. H.'s, sat down on the floor with the kids and selected a nose or a hat from a tin and offered it here and there.

"I'm the third-generation Hassenfeld in the business," he said. "My dad introduced Mr. Potato Head to the world."

The kids nearest to him didn't seem to hear. Their name tags identified them as Mia Ramirez, Ahmad Ibrahim, and Justin Alexander.

"My dad loved him," the C.E.O. said.

"He got no neck, only feet," Mia Ramirez said.

"He was the first toy to be advertised on television," Mr. Hassenfeld said. "We've sold more than fifty million Mr. Potato Heads since 1952."

"Can I peel him?" Justin Alexander asked, holding up the plastic potato.