THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (3 page)

The company did indeed grow, but in the early nineteen-hundreds, two factors were restraining Lionel from a major sales rise in electric toy trains. Batteries were not yet too dependable, which meant that Lionel had to contend with dissatisfied retailers returning faulty merchandise, and the number of homes in America that had been converted to electric power was still limited.

If expansion was less than meteoric at first, it was nonetheless steady. Each year, Lionel added outlets to its customer roster. In 1903, the company published its first catalog. It described and showed such toys as an electric trolley with reversible seats, various switches, a derrick motor car and trailer, and a locomotive. Still more accessories were included in the following year’s listing.

By 1907, increased business necessitated a move from Murray Street in New York to larger quarters at 4 White Street. After the move. Lionel became a beneficiary of the new economies and efficiencies available through automation. When new power presses were installed, mass production was on its way.

Three years later Cowen had to move his manufacturing plant to still bigger facilities at New Haven, Connecticut. The catalog that year, 1910, was a thirty-six-page extravaganza listing a sophisticated line of equipment: new engines, passenger and Pullman cars, gondolas, cattle cars, boxcars, cabooses, coal, oil, and baggage cars. The first scenic accessories, tunnels, and train stations, were also included.

Expansion during the next decade was interrupted only by the first world war. Like many manufacturers, Lionel became an enthusiastic home-front contributor to the war effort. Production of electric trains slowed to a trickle as factory space and labor were devoted to filling government contracts for compasses, periscopes, binnacles, and so on.

Even with war production preempting Lionel’s time, the company continued to grow and by November 1918 the firm had become so big that a new corporate structure was necessary. A few months before the Armistice, the company was re-formed as the Lionel Corp. with Joshua L. Cowen as president.

Electric train production was resumed as quickly as possible. Wanting to reach those boys who had grown up during the war years deprived of Lionel trains, Cowen supervised a heavy promotional campaign. By 1921, an estimated million Lionel train sets were in operation in American homes.

The postwar period was also a time of new competition for Lionel. The most energetic challenger was Ives, a corporation that tried for about seven years to gain control of the train market. In 1928, Cowen, determined to end competition by controlling it, bought out Ives. He ran it for two years, then discontinued it. He then had all the Ives dies dumped into the Connecticut River—“in the public interest,” as he put it.

In 1940, Lionel repeated its 1917 wartime performance, reviving several products produced in the first world war, in a more modern form. Oil-filled compasses designed by Lionel’s research and development department replaced the old alcohol-filled instrument. In two frantic weeks, the company completed a contract to develop replacement transformers for radar equipment that had already been shipped to Africa. After the navy asked for and got primers for 16-millimeter shells, as well as fuse-setters for anti-aircraft weapons, the Chemical Warfare Service enlisted Lionel to make tail cup assemblies for incendiary bombs, and the company became one of the nation’s biggest producers of these devices.

Waste could not be tolerated in wartime. When Cowen learned that compass bowls had to be painted with egg whites as a binder, he energetically applied himself to the problem. A flock of chickens was bought, and Lionel set about to raise them and collect the eggs. After the albumen had been separated, the rest of the eggs went to the company cafeteria. Omelets became staple fare on the lunchroom menu.

Vegetables grown in the company’s victory gardens were also used in the cafeteria, but most of them went directly to employees’ homes. The company also raised a few pigs to eat the cafeteria table scraps. Some eventually became table scraps themselves.

When the war was over, the government lavished praise on Lionel for its part in the victory. In an impressive ceremony, the U.S. Maritime Commission presented its “M” flag to the firm as an award of merit in the achievement of completing wartime schedules in the making and shipping of needed components.

It would be gratifying to end the Lionel story at such a moment. Unfortunately, life has a way of reducing drama to anticlimax, and the changing order of American society and national purpose has written an elaborate finis to the grand old days of Lionel trains.

In the postwar years, both Lionel and its chief competitor, A. C. Gilbert, began to face unabating financial pressures. In the nineteen-sixties, Gilbert went out of business and many of its toy lines were bought piecemeal (most of them by Gabriel Industries). Lionel itself purchased the Gilbert American Flyer train line, but never manufactured it. To this day, the Gilbert dies lie packed away gathering dust.

The original Lionel company still exists, but it is no longer a toy-manufacturing company; the train line is now produced under the Lionel name by a hobby products firm, Model Products Corp. A walk through the New Jersey Lionel train plant is like passing through a ghost town. Except for one floor of production activity, a plant once filled with acres of people and machines is now an empty vault.

Of course, there is still plenty of production going on at Model Products’ Michigan facilities. And a nationwide network of nearly five hundred service stations—dealerships that repair Lionel trains—still exists. Railroading hobbyists support trade magazines, sponsor conventions, and write regularly to Lionel asking for minutiae of model railroad information. And they buy every single piece of equipment that the company manufactures, year after year.

The product is as fine as ever, and the customers are still there. What’s missing is the mystique, the old glamour. It’s not just that the electric train has become more of a hobby item than a toy. Youngsters used to thinking of transportation in terms of fast cars and intercontinental aircraft, not to mention space travel, have simply grown out of touch with the tradition of the American railroad. Fewer and fewer kids know what a train is, let alone crave to run one around a toy track at Christmastime.

The people that still love to do just that are growing older. For them, there is still a special excitement to the railroad, large or small. That is why Lionel trains are still around, even though the company that first made them is not. But neither is the American dream which the old Lionel used to represent.

It brought riches to an impoverished Philadelphia salesman.

It saved a New England manufacturing firm from bankruptcy.

It convinced countless thousands of housewives, farmers, laborers, businessmen, and teachers that all they had to do to get rich quick was to invent a new game.

It was Monopoly.

Not only did Parker Brothers’ familiar real estate trading game with the Atlantic City street names on the board enable its originator to retire a millionaire at forty-six, but Monopoly went on to become the all-time best seller of all copyrighted board games.

And it wouldn’t stand a chance if it were invented today.

“We didn’t even think it was any good back in the Depression, when it was first brought to us,” said a Parker Brothers executive. “Monopoly breaks just about every rule of what a good game is supposed to be!”

The fact that the game requires a four-page instruction book to explain it would be the first strike against Monopoly if it were introduced in the nineteen-seventies. Even though many contemporary “educational” and/or “adult” games require books—literally—to explain rules of play, a mass-distribution family game is usually expected to avoid complexities.

What’s more, the average Monopoly game can take several hours to play. (In the nineteen-forties, punsters used to call it Monotony.) And originally, the only way to buy an unowned property was to land on it—auctioning off appears to have been an afterthought designed to speed things up. Parker Brothers officials maintain that a game of Monopoly need not take forever, but some gamesters actually like to stretch it out with their own rules. “To many players,” said one executive, “Monopoly is almost a mystical, ritualistic thing.”

The creation of Monopoly is generally attributed to Charles B. Darrow, but game historians point to the Landlord’s Game, patented in 1904 by Lizzie J. Magie and featuring purchasable properties, including utilities; a “public park” corner corresponding to Monopoly’s “Free Parking,” and a “Go to Jail” space. Darrow evidently added several new elements to the pattern of the Magie game.

After the 1929 crash, forty-year-old Darrow’s business as a sales rep for engineering firms plummeted to nearly nothing. To keep a little money coming in, he produced jigsaw puzzles in his workshop for his neighbors and did any odd jobs he could find. He also devised a contract bridge score pad that gave players the proper hand valuations, bids, and responses in concise form for easy reference. Then, in 1930, Darrow began to turn an idea around in his mind for a game that would involve “plenty of money for the player to invest or speculate with.” Real estate interested him, so he chose that as the theme. On the other hand, borrowing and credit were excluded, because Darrow personally didn’t believe in them. “I buy everything with cash,” he once told a reporter. “If everybody did, I guess the country would go broke, but that’s the way
I
buy.”

The first version of Darrow’s game was rather primitive. The board was hand-drawn on a round piece of linoleum and colored with any paint samples Darrow could find at a local paint store. He typed the title cards on cardboard and fashioned the houses and hotels from remnants picked up at a nearby lumber yard. There were no dice or tokens at first, and the game didn’t even have a box.

Just before the crash, Darrow had taken his wife, Esther, on a vacation to Atlantic City. It seemed so pleasant in his memory—in contrast to the times that followed—that the seashore resort took on a special significance in his mind and he decided to name the properties in his game after Atlantic City streets. When designing the game board, he tried to keep the streets in the consecutive sequence from the Inlet to Park Place at the Boardwalk. But he ran short of interesting names, so he had to go out of sequence and borrow one from nearby Margate (Marven Gardens, which he altered to Marvin Gardens). A second naming problem involved railroads. He needed four, one for each side of the board, but could only find three that serviced the resort: the Pennsylvania, the B & O, and the Reading. So Darrow added the Short Line, actually a freight bus company running between Philadelphia, New York, and Atlantic City.

At first, Darrow had no plans to sell or make “the game,” as he called it. He and his wife began playing it just for fun, sometimes inviting friends to participate. Soon their acquaintances began requesting copies to take home. “It was a funny thing,” the inventor once remarked, “but almost invariably the winner wanted a copy, while the loser was convinced that he could win the next game—so he’d frequently want a game, too. Well, I hadn’t anything better to do, so I began to make the games. I charged people four dollars a copy.”

It took him a whole day to make up one game. The materials cost about $2.25, so he was realizing about $1.75 profit on each—not bad money in the early nineteen-thirties. As more and more people, friends of friends, began asking for Darrow to make up copies of “the game,” he found his time increasingly taken up with typing title cards and painting linoleum pieces. Finally, Darrow made an arrangement with a printer friend to take over the production of the game. Darrow was somewhat afraid that he might be unable to pay for the service, but his friend assured him that the printing firm would wait until Darrow’s customers paid him.

By this time, orders were coming in from more and more distant places, and some department store buyers were also starting to stock up on Darrow’s real estate game. Darrow never spent a penny on advertising. The fame of Monopoly spread entirely by word of mouth—even from as far away as California, orders trickled in.

In a very short time, the former salesman was amazed to see that the pastime he’d drawn on his kitchen table had sold seventeen thousand pieces. In order to meet the number of orders still arriving in the mail, he realized he’d either have to borrow money and go into game manufacturing himself or else sell out to an established supplier. He chose the latter course. “Taking the precepts of Monopoly to heart,” he said, “I did not care to speculate.”

Parker Brothers was the first supplier Darrow approached, and the response was not enthusiastic. In the firm’s opinion, a good game took only a few minutes to learn, and the rules had to be easy enough for a nine-year-old to absorb quickly; furthermore, the longest time any family game should take was about an hour.

The company founder, George Parker, had been intrigued by the idea of a financial game as far back as the eighteen-nineties, when the first important governmental investigations of trusts and monopolies were in progress. A genius in the areas of game invention and marketing, George Parker had turned what fellow New Englanders considered a frivolous pastime into a highly successful business in just five years. According to a booklet published by the firm, the idea of a game named Monopoly occurred to him at the time of the investigations, but he merely filed the name away in his mind for the future.

Parker Brothers did not recognize Darrow’s game at first, but Darrow persisted. He gave personal demonstrations of his game in department stores in Philadelphia, and it became extremely popular there. Then New York’s prestigious F. A. 0. Schwarz sold two hundred sets out of a printing of five thousand. On this sales evidence from two key East Coast cities, Parker Brothers—very reluctantly—agreed to take the remainder of the printing on consignment.

By Christmas of that year (1934), Parker Brothers had sold every single piece. Darrow was delighted, but the company executives merely sat back and breathed a sigh of relief.