Excerpt: "It's Almost Alive!"

I miss my Super Ball. It was red and blue with swirls of yellow thrown in, just like the colors in Superman’s costume and it really could leap tall buildings at a single bound. Of course it was eventually lost down the streetside sewer, or more likely, bounced to oblivion; but the memories of playing with it are as vivid as those colors. So, when I tracked down the man responsible for my favorite boyhood ball, I tended to call him “Sir” out of sheer appreciation and respect, but he would have none of it.

“First of all,” he said in a friendly voice, “call me Norm.” Unlike the high-bounding ball he created, Norm Stingley is incredibly down-to-earth. If you ask him, he will graciously share how 40 years ago, he had this idea. “We were in the oil industry,” he said of his time at Bettis Rubber Company. “You’ve seen an oil well in the movies where they strike oil and it gushes? Well, you put one of our [rubber, molded] blow-out preventers on there and it won’t do that, but that’s another field.”

The intersection of the oil field and the toy field describes the story of the Super Ball. Whenever a company developed a new polymer, Norm was given first shot at trying to find applications for it. “One day they brought this material to me and after they left, I thought, ‘Hey you know what, I bet this stuff could sure make a good ball,’” Norm said. “I mean, you could cut a piece of it off the bale [the name for a block of rubber material after it was processed] and it would bounce like crazy, just in its raw state.” Norm compressed the material to see if his hunch was right. Using a mold that Bettis had on hand to make part of an oil line valve, he took the auspicious leap into the toy field with explosive results.

“The first ball I made blew up!” he said with a laugh. “I compressed it under 2,500 pounds per square inch because that was the regular line pressure [Bettis used] for molding the valve parts. As soon as I opened the mold this stuff immediately tried to get out and tore itself to pieces! I later got patents on the molding procedure because you had to do it correctly. You have to just barely fill the mold.”

Amazed at the bounce the finished ball delivered, Norm took his invention to his boss at Bettis who called the ball “interesting,” but questioned its commercial potential. “He had a young salesman there and he gave him a half dozen or so of the balls I’d molded and told him to take them out and try to sell them,” Norm recalled. “But he couldn’t interest anybody in them.”

Despite the poor response Norm still believed in the ball, so he boldly sought a release from his employer. Bettis decided to focus on their business at hand and handed the rights to this new ball over to its creator. “Oh, I thought it would be big,” Norm recalled.

The Table Trick

Through a friend in the toy business, Norm and his rubber ball were introduced to the guys at WHAM-O. “I went over there and met with Spud Melin. I bounced it first to show him and then he took it and bounced it too hard and it hit the ceiling!” Norm recalled. “But what really sold him on it was the table trick.” Eventually depicted on nearly every Super Ball package, Norm had discovered the nifty feat while throwing the ball under the heavy lab tables at Bettis Rubber. “There happened to be a low table there [at WHAM-O] and I threw it under the table and made it come back to me. Spud asked ‘Can you do that again?!’ and I said, ‘Sure, I can do it every time.’ So I did it again and he said ‘Sold!’”

Although future WHAM-O packaging would show the ball flying over buildings, it started off as the ball that would fly apart, crumbling after too many bounces. Norm collaborated with WHAM-O’s product development chief Ed Headrick on adding vulcanizing agents and making the ball more stable. “We worked on it over a period of three or four months,” Norm said. Once perfected, the WHAM-O marketing machine did the rest.

It was actually made of a polymer called polybutadiene, but they dubbed it “Zectron,” a zingy, space-age “exotic material.” It bounced so incredibly high that it seemed immune to the earth’s gravitational pull. Beyond its ability to bounce back 92 percent of the height from which it was dropped, the Super Ball had what WHAM-O scientists called “an extremely high coefficient of friction.” This meant that if you bounced a Super Ball to a friend 15 or 20 feet away, instead of sliding when it hit the ground at an angle, the Super Ball gripped the surface and picked up an incredible topspin. When it hit the ground a second time its rubbery spinning body acted like a tire on a dragster, propelling the ball forward, shockingly fast. Millions of kids soon had a love/hate relationship with the Super Ball’s “second bounce.” The accompanying welts they suffered while playing with this new leaping, lurching ball did nothing to slow the ball’s sales. Six million Super Balls were reportedly sold by the end of 1965, and kids everywhere had them — in their pockets, lunch boxes, junk draws and bedrooms.

“Oh, heck yes,” Norm recalled. “My kids did. All kids did. In fact, I remember when the kids in our neighborhood found out who I was. We lived at the end of a cul-de-sac and many times they’d meet me as I pulled into it after work. They all wanted Super Balls. There’d be 10 or 12 of them yelling for me. I’d always have a few with me and I’d just throw them out the car window and let the winner take ’em.”

With the Super Ball’s bounding popularity it wasn’t long before other manufacturers produced their own inferior imitations. Balls like Hi-Bouncer, Jet Ball, Ski-Hi, and Zoomball, all cut into the original’s action. By the end of 1976, sales had declined so sharply that the Super Ball was taken out of the WHAM-O line.

What happened next?! Did the Super Ball bounce back? Find out in Timeless Toys!

ISBN: 0-7407-5571-4
AUTHOR: Tim Walsh