THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (2 page)

Most dolls were made of terra-cotta until the seventeenth century, when wooden dolls were introduced. Peddlers sold them throughout Europe; by 1800, they became popular in America. On the Continent, some dolls became vehicles for displaying women’s fashions.

Games, though an ancient institution, generally do not become an important part of play activity until a society reaches a fairly advanced stage of sophistication. But four of the classic board games in the world—chess, backgammon, go, and kalah—all date back thousands of years.

The relation of a game to its cultural origins is no accident. Game experts agree that strong corollaries exist between the play elements of classic games and the societies from which they emerged.

For instance, chess originated in India some five thousand years ago. Essentially a war game, it differs from other such contests in the rigid definition of the rank of the pieces. In the Middle Ages, the game spread to Europe, where the “Rajah” became a “King”; but the class (caste) system implicit in chess remained the same.

The game of backgammon, unlike chess, is democratic in philosophy. It can be traced to about 4000 B .C. in Palestine and Egypt, and also later found favor with the Romans. Basic backgammon strategy requires a player to solidify his position and protect his men, all of which are equal in value. When the opportunity appears, the men are rushed home to win. This suggests a culture in which each person is potentially equal and, though faced with adversity, may well succeed if he bides his time and husbands his resources. This underlying attitude has survived in one form or another throughout the course of Western society.

In America, games other than outdoor sports only came into their own in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Toys, however, date as far back as the sixteen-hundreds, when Colonial whittlers carved wooden dolls, animals, and carts for their children. Pioneer children played with rag dolls and dolls made from cornhusks; corncobs, which they used to build tiny log cabins; and even corn kernels, useful as game counters. The Indians introduced the settlers to a pacifier that is still popular today as a manufactured crib toy—the Cradle Gym. Squaws would hang wooden hoops and other enticing objects over their infants’ crib to attract the baby’s eye and groping hand.

The first important American family of toymakers was the Crandall clan, beginning with Asa Crandall in 1820. At one time or another, there were eleven Crandalls making toys. The most famous were Jesse, who invented a host of toys and gadgets, and Charles, father of one of America’s first fads.

Charles M. Crandall invented a puzzle called Pigs in Clover, which became a national craze. Bankers, lawyers, and stockbrokers wasted hours of company time trying to solve it. In Washington, one legislator brought it to the Senate and caused such a stir that a page was soon sent to the nearest toy store to buy more Pigs in Clover for the eager Senators.

The first organized toy factory in America (as distinguished from smaller artisan operations) is believed to be the Tower Shop, later Tower Toy Co., of South Hingham, Massachusetts. William S. Tower, a carpenter who made wooden toys, persuaded some of his craftsmen friends to join together into a kind of loose guild to sell a combined line of toys. The firm got off to a modest start in the late eighteen-thirties but by 1878 was big enough to exhibit in the Exposition Universelle Internationale of Paris—one of only four American firms to do so.

In the same category, George S. Parker opened a factory in 1888 in Salem, Massachusetts. By the turn of the century, Parker had his first nationwide hit: Ping-Pong. His company later became one of America’s two greatest game firms, Parker Brothers.

Not far away, in Springfield, Massachusetts, a man named Milton Bradley bought a litho press. He was persuaded by Samuel Bowles, a publisher-politician, to run off a portrait of a young lawyer who was then little known by the general public. Bradley agreed, and, while the “run” was still on the presses, the same attorney was nominated as Republican candidate for President. Suddenly everybody wanted a copy of Milton Bradley’s picture of Abraham Lincoln. It was the first successful product in the history of the Milton Bradley Co., Parker Brothers’ chief competitor in the game market.

Early games produced by Parker and Milton Bradley reflected the underlying Puritanism of nineteenth-century America. They published such titles as the New Game of Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished, and the Checkered Game of Life. Toymakers also tended to sermonize, packing with their products fulsome little verses exhorting children to be good. Scripture history, literature, and nature study were used as themes for heavily didactic games. Adults seemed to look with suspicion on the activity of play, and did their best to divest it of any element of fun.

But by the turn of the century, other toys were becoming popular—suction-cup arrow sets, water pistols, cork guns. At the Plymouth Iron Windmill Co., company founder Clarence Hamilton brought a metal target rifle he’d designed to a board of directors meeting. His partners were enthusiastic and one declared his pleasure in a then-popular colloquialism: “Clarence, it’s a daisy!” Without knowing it, he had just renamed the company. Today, Daisy Manufacturing is the nation’s number one producer of BB guns and other target toys.

Toy weapons began to attract a few consumer complaints about this time, but it was not until 1914 that parents and teachers lodged a comparatively large-scale protest against war toys.

The first famous toy of the nineteen-hundreds is also America’s favorite: the teddy bear. It was named after President Theodore Roosevelt.

Roosevelt went South in 1902 to settle a border dispute between Mississippi and Louisiana. While he took time off for a hunting trip in Mississippi, a bear cub appeared in the President’s rifle sights, but he refused to shoot it.

A newspaper cartoon depicting the incident was seen by Morris Michtom, then the owner of a small Brooklyn toy shop. He made a brown plush bear with movable limbs and button eyes, put one in the window, called it Teddy’s Bear— and wrote the President, asking permission to use his name in selling the toy. Roosevelt replied that he couldn’t imagine what value his name would have in marketing toys, but Michtom was welcome to it.

Michtom’s first bears were sold in 1902. It took a few years for them to become popular, but once they did, teddy bears outsold all other toys. Competing toymen copied the idea, and by 1906 the country was saturated with teddies. Michtom did very well, despite the fact that his idea was pirated, and went on to found today’s gigantic Ideal Toy Corp.

It is hard to imagine a more innocuous toy than the teddy bear. Yet at the height of the craze, which outlasted Roosevelt’s term in office, one Michigan priest denounced the teddy as an insidious weapon leading to the destruction of the instincts of motherhood and eventual racial suicide.

By 1900, some five hundred toymakers were operating in the United States. In the period from 1910 to 1914 alone, extant catalog sheets and mail-order listings show quantities of steam engines, telegraph sets, Flexible Flyer sleds, Matador building blocks, Harbutt’s plasticine modeling outfits; games like Fish Pond, Blow Football, and Lasso-, musical instruments from trumpets to Metalaphones and Bell Revotinas; Bell’s Clever Mechanical Toys; and miscellaneous magic tricks, toy stoves, and tool chests.

By this time, American toymakers were faced with a major problem in the shape of foreign competition. Though annual retail sales rose from $20 million to $30 million between 1900 and 1910, at least a third of the business was being done by overseas manufacturers. The situation temporarily improved during the first world war, but after the conflict ended, German toy suppliers flooded the United States with so many inexpensive toys that several domestic firms went under. Eventually, American toymakers had to petition Congress for a protective tariff.

It took a 75 percent tariff and World War II to end the domination of foreign toys in America. Though the duty was subsequently reduced, and importers again entered the United States market, they never again gained so large a share of the market as they held before the war.

After the second world war, materialism—and the money with which to acquire material goods—increased dramatically in America. By the nineteen-fifties, more than a billion dollars was being spent each year for toys.

Even greater impetus to toy selling had come with the emergence of new manufacturers like Mattel, a firm begun in 1945 in a converted garage, only to grow into one of the world’s largest toy producers. Mattel helped put an end to the strongly seasonal character of the toy business by becoming the first manufacturer to advertise the year round on network TV, an idea so wildly successful that all other major suppliers copied Mattel’s lead.

In the late nineteen-sixties, the toy business began its current trend of merger and acquisition. Quaker Oats, General Mills, Victor Comptometer, Bethlehem Steel, and other giants began purchasing toy companies, large and small. Simultaneously, parents, teachers, and other consumer spokesmen began taking a careful look at toys, and charges of militarism, materialism, and social snobbery were hurled at various manufacturers.

To a certain extent, this seems a chicken-or-egg issue. We have seen that toys, historically, mirror the society in which they flourish. Thus if one toymaker decides not to make a highly marketable but potentially objectionable toy, it is all but certain that some other, less scrupulous, manufacturer will fill the void. Where there is a need in the marketplace, there will always be a supplier to fill it.

While this hardly excuses those toymakers who manufacture toys they know to be “bad,” the indictment of contemporary society is, surely, much more serious. In an era of shallowness and oversimplification, popular art cannot help reflecting superficial standards.

It was part of a great American tradition: Lionel trains at Christmas. Dad under the tree monopolizing a simple oval of track around which a locomotive, two passenger cars, and a caboose endlessly circled. There were more elaborate layouts—there
had
to be, because the catalogs showed them. But for most kids, even the thought of owning more than one track was out of the question. And two transformers, switching points, cars that loaded tiny milk cans and logs? Tunnels, telephone poles, signalmen that came out of houses and waved flags at passing trains? No, no—that was all the stuff of dreams.

Lionel trains. An essential part of childhood, a poignant bit of Norman Rockwell Americana. Lionel’s story, reflecting as it does that relatively carefree era, is a perfect distillation of the flavor and fervor of times gone by.

It begins on August 25, 1880, when Joshua Lionel Cowen was born in New York. The son of a real estate agent, Joshua showed a talent for tinkering as early as seven, when he made a model locomotive out of wood. Unfortunately, he also tried to fit a steam engine in the hand-carved train car. It exploded, taking most of the kitchen wallpaper with it.

Joshua’s next major attempt at gadgeteering took place several years later at Peter Cooper Institute, where he developed an early version of the electric doorbell. Electricity was then little understood, and he was told there was no practical value to the idea.

By the time he was eighteen, Joshua Cowen’s ingenuity began to yield more practical results. His new kind of fuse to ignite the magnesium powder used by early photographers attracted the government’s interest as a foolproof way for detonating mines. Invited to Washington to demonstrate his invention, he returned with a contract in his pocket to equip twenty-four thousand mines with his fuses.

Safety precautions were not terribly stringent in those days, so Joshua was able to stock enough explosives in his plant to blow up the entire southern end of Manhattan. He eventually delivered the modified mines to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and then began to cast about for a new and exciting product to make and sell.

Months passed; idea after idea came and went. One seemed especially promising at first: a thin battery fitted into a tube with a light bulb at one end. Installed in flowerpots amid the greenery, it would light up the plant.

A restaurant owner named Conrad Hubert liked the gadget so much that he gave up his business to go on the road for Joshua Cowen, selling electric flowerpots. But Cowen began to doubt that the light-up pots had much long-range sales potential, and when Hubert offered to take over the rights to the device, the inventor agreed. Soon afterward, Hubert got the notion of taking the tubes out of the pottery and selling them on their own illuminatory merits. The name he gave to this new piece of merchandise was the Eveready Flashlight. It made Hubert a multimillionaire.

Meanwhile Cowen kept thinking up and discarding ideas for inventions, hoping to hit upon the kind of product that would make his fortune. He found what he was looking for in a tiny electric motor. In itself, it wasn’t much to build a future on—the motor obviously had to be used in conjunction with something else.

Miniature electric trains were just appearing on the market. Perhaps recalling his early interest in locomotives, Cowen decided to try his new electric motor in a model railroad flatcar. A miniature train car could carry the motor with a battery in its undercarriage.

He set to work designing and building a prototype, and then the toy itself. When he was done, the item was just as he imagined it: a single motorized flatcar packaged with thirty feet of track. Retail price, $6. For an additional $2.25, Cowen decided, he could sell a second, unmotorized, car that could be pulled by the first. He christened the train “Lionel”— though why he chose his middle name is a mystery.

Initial sales were encouraging. The first customer was a Cortlandt Street novelty dealer named Robert Ingersoll who sold out his stock almost immediately and quickly placed an order for half a dozen more Lionel sets. From New England, a huge order rolled in—twenty-five sets.

Leaving Harry Grant, his first employee, in charge of the plant, Cowen decided it was time to learn the selling side of the business. He went on the road in the best self-made-man style, telling anyone who would listen about his trains. Soon, orders began to pour in so fast that Grant was obliged to hire two solderers to keep up with the work. Eventually Cowen returned to New York to develop his line of railroading toys even further. “To stand still,” he would tell his staff, “is to move backward!”