Parents' Choice Profiles The Playmakers

The Parents' Choice Foundation will be running some excerpts from The Playmakers. From their site:

As we finalize plans to preview the thousands of new product offerings at Toy Fair 2005, we can think of no better way to set the stage than to highlight a chapter from The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys -- a celebration of classic toys and a tribute to the people who brought them to life. The Playmakers author, Tim Walsh, is no stranger to toys and games. Tim is the co-inventor of the boardgames TriBond and Blurt! The story of Radio Flyer is the first of three profiles Tim has generously agreed to let us reprint.

Read the first of three excerpts here.

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

Excerpt: Wire Walker

Slinky is the most unlikely toy, encircled with the most unlikely tale of steps and missteps. In 1943, while working on a ship, Mechanical Engineer Richard James saw a coiled pile of metal move in the most interesting way. Hired by the Navy to create a system by which sensitive equipment could function on rough seas, James thought that torsion springs (springs with no tension on them) were the answer. During a trial run on a boat from Philadelphia’s Cramp Shipyard, he experimented and rejected many sizes of springs. One such rejection sat on a desk motionless until he accidentally knocked it off its perch. Instead of landing in a heap, the spring became a marvelous thing. James watched it bounce, and then for one brief moment actually appear to walk. A few trial pushes off a stack of books later and James knew that the incident was no fluke. The discovery intrigued him, so he took the spring home to show his wife, Betty.

The Slinky story may not start with Betty James, but it certainly ends with her. I had the wonderful privilege to interview Mrs. James and found her as fun and endearing as the toy she made famous. Her stories often end with a chuckle and her positive spirit is at once apparent, although she recalled her immediate reaction to Richard’s idea was anything but upbeat.

“When Richard came home with this spring, I thought ‘Oh, Boy. Here we go again.’ You know, he had a lot of ideas.” She told me of the time he created a compressor that pumped soda from their basement and into their kitchen refrigerator. “You could push a button and get an ice-cold Coca-Cola anytime. That was one of his good ones.” But this time, when Richard the dreamer predicted, “I think with the right properties in the steel and the right tension in the wire, I can make this spring walk,” Betty the realist, was unconvinced. After working on it off and on for about a year, James showed his wife. “It walked alright,” Betty said. “But I was still doubtful it could be a toy until we showed it to some neighborhood children and they absolutely loved it. That’s what convinced me.”

When it came time to name it, Betty combed through a dictionary looking for the perfect word to describe this “stealthy, sleek and sinuous” plaything. The word she found was Slinky.

With $500 in borrowed money, they formed James Industries and had 400 springs made by a local machine shop. The 80 feet of twisted wire was then hand-wrapped by Betty. “Richard would bring the Slinkys home at night from the shop and I would roll them up in this yellow paper that had instructions printed on one side,” she recalled. “That was our packaging! Oh, it was dreadful.” When I asked her if any of those rare original Slinkys still exist, she said no. “We were trying so hard to just get enough money to keep going—we never thought to keep any. We sold everything we had.” But not right away.

For all the lasting charm that it possesses today, in 1945 it was just a fat spring––a circular pile of coiled wire that sold for $1.00. Richard and Betty had little luck convincing toy stores to buy their new creation. Slinky was a hands-on toy. It walked only when pushed and it made a “slinkity sound” only when handled. It was a product that begged for in-store demonstration. After some begging of his own, Richard convinced Philadelphia-based Gimbel’s department store to place an order.

Alongside a sloped board he had fashioned, Richard piled those first 400 Slinkys, wrapped in their bright yellow paper packaging. Before long he sent a few loose ones on their way, down the board and into the hands of astonished Gimbel’s customers. Ever the pragmatist, Betty planned to surprise her husband by visiting the store with a friend, both of whom would buy a Slinky, assuring Richard of at least some success. They needn’t have worried. Gimbel’s elevator doors opened to a crowd of customers waving their own dollar bills and clamoring for the few Slinkys that remained. In less than 90 minutes Richard sold all 400!

After Slinky’s amazing introduction, Richard and Betty formed James Industries and opened shop on Portico Street in Philadelphia. Slinky left its paper packaging behind for a modest tan box with red lettering that looked conspicuously hand-drawn. Betty took the orders while Richard perfected the engineering behind a machine that could transform 80 feet of wire into a 2 1/2-inch column of 98 coils in about 10 seconds. By 1950, James Industries was so successful that they had to build five more coiling machines to keep up with demand. Slinky appeared in newspapers across the country and Richard James became something of a celebrity, appearing on TV shows and telling the world about his toy. Just 10 years from its humble introduction, over 100 million Slinkys had been sold. But despite skyrocketing sales, all was not well inside James Industries. At the height of its success, Slinky was pushed to the edge of peril by the very same man that invented it.

In 1960, like Slinky, Richard James simply…walked. Leaving his wife, six kids and the company he founded, he went to Bolivia and joined what Betty James described as a religious cult. In the months leading up to his departure, Richard forwarded a considerable amount of “charitable contributions,” leaving Betty both in shock and thousands of dollars in debt. “It doesn’t bother me now,” she told me. “I think in the early days of Slinky, he was given a lot of press and really felt important. So when the business started to go down and he wasn’t getting the same applause, I think that outfit made him feel important again because he was giving them so much money.” Why Richard James didn’t feel that being a husband and father was important enough, we’ll never know. “He said he was going and asked if I wanted to sell the business or run it,” Betty recalled. “Without any hesitation I said I’d run it.”

Find out how Betty James saved her company and solidified Slinky as a permanent part of our pop culture! Read Timeless Toys!

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

Excerpt: Good, Clean Fun

Cans of it are in preschools, nursery schools and tucked away in kitchen cupboards and family playrooms around the world. Recipes on how to make it continuously pop up in magazines and on the Internet as its maker, Hasbro, fights to keep its name from becoming a generic label for all “modeling compounds.” Its status as one of the most beloved toy products ever created makes its origin one of the weirdest of all toy stories. Play-Doh, that moldable stuff from childhood -- sold in 75 countries in the staggering quantity of 95 million cans a year -- was first invented as commercial wallpaper cleaner.

The legend of Santa Claus leaving lumps of coal in the stockings of bad little children has given the fossil fuel a bad reputation. Yet it was because of coal, or more accurately the messiness of heating with coal, that Play-Doh came into being. From 1885 until about 1950, coal was our nation’s most widely used heating fuel. It produced four times the energy of wood at about half the cost, with the only downside being the sooty mess that coal furnaces produced. Non-washable surfaces like wallpaper presented a particularly troublesome problem. Spring-cleaning time found homemakers kneading a dough mixture of flour, water, salt and borax and rolling it up and down their papered walls to pull off the coal soot. Soon companies began offering premixed wallpaper cleaner. Play-Doh’s off-the-wall journey from cleaning compound to modeling compound began in 1927, at a dying Cincinnati soap company called Kutol Products.

Cleo McVicker was just 21 years old and working for Kutol Product’s parent company in Chicago when he was told to drive down to Cincinnati, sell Kutol’s inventory and shut the place down. In peddling the remaining supply of powdered hand soap, McVicker had enough success to convince the parent company to allow him to stay in Cincinnati and try to turn the failing business around. He hired his brother, N.W. McVicker, as plant manager and maker of their various cleaning compounds, and hit the road as a soap salesman. The turnaround came in 1933. “That’s when Cleo went to Kroger grocery stores and asked to bid on their wallpaper cleaner,” Bill Rhodenbaugh, former Kutol president and McVicker in-law said. “At the time Kroger bought private label wallpaper cleaner, so they asked him ‘Do you know how to make this stuff?’ and he said ‘Oh yeah, we can make it.’ Cleo was so gutsy.”

According to Rhodenbaugh, Cleo signed a $5,000 performance bond against the order, which meant that if he didn’t ship 15,000 cases of wallpaper cleaner on time, it would cost Kutol $5,000, enough to put the brothers out of business. “Cleo came back and told his brother about the order and N.W. asked, ‘Well how do you make it?’ and Cleo said, ‘Hell if I know! That’s your job!’” Bill laughed as he told the story. N.W. figured out how to make the cleaner in time to get the order out. Amazingly, the brothers made this nontoxic, malleable stuff for another 20 years, eventually bought Kutol and became the largest wallpaper cleaner manufacturer in the world.

Tragedy and the collapse of their core product line struck Kutol after World War II. Cleo McVicker died in a private plane crash in 1949. His widow, Irma, inherited the company and hired her son Joe McVicker and her son-in-law Bill Rhodenbaugh to help fill the void that Cleo’s death had created and to try to reverse the company’s plummeting sales. “After the war, conversion furnaces (powered by oil or gas) came out and the soot problem was gone. Then vinyl wallpaper was introduced, which could be washed with soap and water. All of a sudden there wasn’t much market for wallpaper cleaner,” Rhodenbaugh said. “The business was not in good shape.” As Kutol faced a major financial crisis, Joe McVicker had a much bigger concern. He was 25 years old and had just found out he was dying.

Did Joe McVicker survive? How did Kutol Wallpaper Cleaner become Play-Doh? WHY DOES PLAY-DOH SMELL SO GOOD?! The answer to these questions and more are the pages of Timeless Toys.

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

Excerpt: The Toy that Keeps on Giving

In the 1982 movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a little boy named Elliot tries in vain to describe Pez to the little guy from space. You don’t need to be from another galaxy to wonder what on earth were they thinking?

Try to explain this humanoid candy cylinder to the uninitiated and the world of Pez rears its peculiar head. First you take Snoopy or whatever lovable cartoon character that adorns the top of your dispenser and pull his head off his body. Next you take the 12 candy bricks (which look for all the world like a spinal column) and insert them into his stemlike body. Now, just bend Snoopy’s head waaaaay back and viola! The candy is pushed out from his throat area. Welcome to earth, where over 3 billion of these little candies are sold each year.

With the momentum of 76 years on the market and a fan base that spans generations, Pez has triumphed over its weirdness as the first interactive candy. Yes, the long road to Spin-Pops and Pop Rocks was paved by all those Pez candy bricks. The cool dispenser stands as the first toy that gave you candy, and to a kid, what could possibly be better than that? Truth is, the phenomenal popularity of Pez has always been more about the toy dispenser than the candies, and, as E.T. discovered, taste more like Rolaids than Reese’s Pieces. Any big league pitcher or stand-up comedian will tell you; it’s all in the delivery.

Austrian Edward Haas III didn’t intend for his mint to become a candy, much less a toy. In 1927, Haas was a successful food company executive in Vienna when he developed an inexpensive way to make compressed mints from peppermint oil and sugar. They were originally formed in their classic rectangular shape so that they could be wrapped quickly and easily by machine. Marketed as a strong breath mint for adults and used as an alternative to smoking, these little rectangular treats sold in pocket tins named Pez, after the abbreviated German word for peppermint—PfeffErminZ.

In 1948, Haas engineered his first dispenser. It resembled a cigarette lighter and could be operated with one hand (like a cigarette lighter). Pez Inc. touted its “easy, hygienic” properties. Today, these dispensers are known to the Pez collecting community as “regulars.” What was next for Pez was anything but that.

In 1952 Pez came to the United States, but the American palate was not ready for such an intense peppermint breath mint (years later, the very successful Altoids proved that Pez was just ahead of its time). To crack the American market, the company did some consumer research, and the resulting changes meant a major makeover for the mint. After repositioning it as a candy, the company made Pez in fruit flavors.

To fit their new younger audience, the “cigarette lighter” had to go, and someone at Pez (no one knows exactly who) decided that topping them off with big plastic heads would do the trick. It’s reported that Edward Haas didn’t approve of this direction, but regardless of his concerns, these new character dispensers made his candy line an international success.

Pez is the Rolling Stone cover of the cartoon world. Characters that have been immortalized in polystyrene over the years read like a virtual comic Hall of Fame: there’s Daffy, Dopey, Droopy, Snoopy, Tweety, Speedy, Winnie, Wile E., Bozo, Pluto, Zorro, Dumbo, Leonardo, and Mario. From Spider-Man to Wolfman, Captain Hook to Captain America. If yanking a candy brick out of a cartoon character’s throat wasn’t weird enough, the Pez company topped that by a long shot in 1956.

What strange product did the Pez company introduce? Find out in Timeless Toys!

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

Excerpt: Bringing Down the House

If ever there was proof that no one can predict what will be successful in the toy industry, this runaway hit of 54 wooden blocks is it.

A single Jenga block holds no immediate allure. It measures approximately 3 inches by 1 inch by 1/2 inch, each humble hunk of wood from the game unrecognizable from any other. But stack 54 of them up, 3 to a row, 18 rows high, and they’re transformed into a surprisingly suspenseful and addictive game.

Since Jenga’s breakout year in 1986, it’s become one of the most popular games in the world, at times second only to Monopoly in global sales. With such an amazing following, you might think Jenga was launched with a multimillion dollar TV campaign by a major U.S. toy company. But in fact, this stacking game had a much quieter debut over 30 years ago in Africa.

The Game from Ghana

Leslie Scott was born in Tanganyika and raised in Kenya, East Africa, before moving with her family to Ghana in 1972. In 1974, just before the 18-year-old was about to graduate from high school, her parents brought home a set of children’s building bricks they had purchased from a wood craftsman in the nearby city of Takoradi. Wood was plentiful and inexpensive there and the bricks, a simple gift meant for Scott’s little brother, changed her life.

“I don’t remember when we first started playing with the bricks as a game,” she says. “The bricks were slimmer back then and we stacked them three across, spaced apart from each other.” The rules were fairly basic at first. Everyone simply took turns removing bricks from somewhere in the middle of the tower until a player made it collapse. The Scott family named their game Takoradi Bricks after the city in which it was made. “My family had many more sets made in Takoradi over the years to give to friends,” Scott said. “I even took a set with me to England.”

Scott enrolled in Oxford to pursue a degree in teaching. She later dropped out and started a career in marketing, working first for a fledgling company called Intel and later for a business that made trade show booths. During those five years, Scott introduced her game to friends and colleagues. She improved upon it by adding a rule where removed blocks had to be placed on the top of the tower. Now as play proceeded, the tower grew increasingly tall and more unbalanced. The new rule added even more the fun and suspense to the game, which by then Scott had renamed “Jenga.”

“I grew up speaking Swahili in East Africa––it was my family’s second language,” Scott said. “We would often give our pets or things that were special to us a Swahili name. The word Kjenga means ‘to build.’ Jenga is the imperative, which means ‘Build’ or ‘Build it!’ So it’s a strong name.”

In 1982, after further encouragement from her friends and colleagues at the trade booth company, Scott decided to market Jenga. “We had a carpentry shop there and I asked one of the joiners if he could help me come up with a way to produce the Jenga bricks in a more mass-produced way,” Scott recalled. “We designed a template that could be attached to a machine that would produce them much faster.”

Banking on the Bricks

She copyrighted the rules and commissioned Camphill Products (a workshop that provided handicapped workers with employment) to produce and package 500 games in time for the London Toy Show. “At that stage I took samples to the bank to get a loan,” Scott shared. “I had quit my job, which was just so incredibly optimistic!” Scott credits her “naive enthusiasm” and the British government’s willingness to subsidize banks that helped small businesses, as two crucial points in Jenga’s journey.

“You can’t go to a bank today and tell them ‘I’ve got this idea,’ and show them a pile of wooden bricks and get a loan,” Scott said. “I thought that I’d take these games to the show in London and then have hundreds of thousands of orders. Of course it doesn’t work like that. By the end of it I owed the bank quite a lot of money.”

“I spent two or three weeks in December leading up to Christmas exhibiting the game in one of Harrods rather busy halls,” Scott recalled. “It would fall down and I’d be crawling around in this crowd picking up stray bricks.” The demonstrations worked and Harrods sold hundreds of Jenga games. With that success, Scott set her sights on America.

“At the time Europe was less accessible than other English speaking countries. Also, America was easier because I had a brother living over there and he and his wife were happy to keep stock in their house for me,” Scott said. She ran ads in several prestigious U.S. magazines, but received a lukewarm reception. Convinced that more stores would buy Jenga if she had a line of games, Scott did the unimaginable.

“I sold my house to keep Jenga going,” she said. “It was a huge risk I realize now, but when you’re younger you don’t think negatively.”

How did Jenga carry on from this humble beginning to become one of the most successful games on earth? Read Timeless Toys and find out!

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