THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (4 page)

This period of relaxation for Parker lasted exactly ten days. Before 1935 was more than a few days old, a veritable tidal wave of orders began pouring in from all parts of the country for more Monopoly sets. Demand quickly reached colossal proportions, and the firm’s Salem, Massachusetts, headquarters was almost buried under sacks of mail. Laundry baskets were hauled to the plant to contain the mountains of paper. A Boston office-machinery company was called in to handle Parker’s increased bookkeeping. The account executive took one look at the laundry baskets crammed with orders and positively refused to take on the job, no matter what the price.

Naturally the company reconsidered its earlier opinion of Darrow’s game, and in a very short time Monopoly’s creator signed a contract turning over his interest in the game to Parker Brothers on a continuing royalty basis. His very first check was for seven thousand dollars, and soon Darrow could retire for life.

As for Parker Brothers, twenty thousand Monopoly sets a week were leaving the factory by mid-February of 1935. Three years earlier, the company had been on the verge of bankruptcy; when Monopoly began to climb in 1935, sales reached as much as eight hundred thousand dollars a week. By the next year, sales topped $1 million and the firm was solidly back on its feet.

The craze has shown little sign of abating since then. For a time, the game began to level off into a steady yearly seller. But as soon as the economy gets the least bit rocky, Monopoly takes a sharp upward swing. Most games tend to sell better during times of economic setback, since games give the consumer more hours of enjoyment than, say, movies or other one-time-only forms of entertainment.

However, the record year for Monopoly sales was not in the thirties, the period usually associated with the “Monopoly craze,” but in 1971. And that year capped a steady fourteen-year growth pattern.

Foreign-language and other overseas editions of Monopoly account for part of this growth. In England, the game is called Trafalgar Square, while in Germany, it’s Wienerstrasse. Other versions are sold in fourteen other languages, including Flemish, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and Hebrew.

Monopoly appeals to all age groups and is often played in flabbergasting collegiate marathons. World records have been set for the longest games played in an elevator, in a tree, and on a gigantic replica board. At De Anza College in Cupertino, California, students played Monopoly for twelve hours while submerged in a swimming pool, using special diving equipment hooked up to a respirator and weighted game pieces supplied by Parker Brothers so the play components would not float up to the surface.

The longest single Monopoly game yet documented was played from noon on Wednesday, July 21, 1971, to 4 P.M. of Tuesday, August 24—a total of 820 hours—by twenty players in Danville, California. Another impressive Monopoly event is the annual Detroit tournament held in formal evening clothes. Sponsored by the USMA—United States Monopoly Association—the event invites competition for “the Davis Cup of the board-game playing world,” the Stein-Fishbub Trophy.

Possibly the wackiest “happening” in Monopoly history occurred in Pittsburgh when some college boys played an endurance game that lasted for days. At last it became obvious to the participants that the bank was about to be “broken.” They sent a wire to Parker Brothers explaining that $1 million was desperately needed to ward off another

Depression. Parker, which prints about $2.4 billion of legally counterfeit bills daily for its games, took speedy action, packing up a million dollars of Monopoly money and sending it by plane to Pittsburgh. Meantime, a wire had been sent from Salem to the Pittsburgh branch of Brink’s. When the airplane landed, an armored car received the money and rushed it to the fraternity house under escort.

There is only one major country in the world where Monopoly is not a popular game. Predictably, the game is banned in the Soviet Union as “too capitalistic.” Yet even behind the Iron Curtain, it is possible that a few gamesters may enjoy bargaining for Boardwalk and Park Place. During the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, scene of the Nixon-Khrushchev “kitchen debate,” six Monopoly sets were placed on display. By the time the exhibit was ended, all of the sets had been stolen.

The true mystery of Monopoly lies in its continued popularity. Why should a game that defies the major criteria for a good family game maintain its position as “number one”?

Initially, of course, the timing for introducing Monopoly was perfect. People out of work loved playing tycoon, and men who were homeless needed to build dream castles.

But the game has far outlived its period, and it shows no signs of dwindling in appeal. Perhaps the reason for Monopoly’s long-term success is simply that the game is just great fun. It provides opportunities for fantasized speculation, acceptable miserliness, and interpersonal conflict. Furthermore, Monopoly maintains an unusual balance between luck and freedom of judgment.

Could a hit like Monopoly ever happen again? That is the question that impels would-be millionaires in American towns, cities, and rural districts to keep trying, year after year, to come up with the game that will make them secure for life.

The odds are pretty small. Darrow himself tried to repeat his success a few years later with Bulls and Bears, a stock-market game. It went nowhere.

With the competition of company inventors and professional freelancers to consider, a conservative estimate of the odds confronting today’s amateurs might be about five thousand to one. Yet the pot of gold at rainbow’s end is too alluring to ignore.

Besides, it stands to reason that somebody has to come up with another Monopoly someday—and Parker Brothers is patiently waiting for it to happen. The company welcomes the thousands of ideas submitted each year; each suggested game is reviewed and many are played before the company reaches a decision.

For one of these days, Parker hopes to need those laundry baskets again.

What city produces more cars than any other in the whole world?

If you think that Detroit is the answer, you’re wrong. There’s one factory in eastern London that makes the Michigan setup look like the Little League.

In an average week, Lesney Products & Co. Ltd. turns out close to
five and one half million
cars, trailers, trucks, buses, and other vehicles. There’s just one catch: you could pick up any three Lesney autos in the palm of your hand and have room left over for half a dozen paper clips and a wad of bubble gum.

The output of this remarkable British company is the successful “Matchbox” series of miniature toy vehicles, each one small enough to be packed into an empty wooden-match carton.

Throughout the ages, toy vehicles have been popular as children’s playthings; in fact, a history of transportation could probably be written just by studying the toys of other eras. Nowadays, there are more toy cars and trucks than any other kind of toy—one trade magazine estimates that there are twice as many vehicular toys as any other plaything. An examination of the available products shows an immense range of quality and type, all the way from poorly made “stocking stuffers” with dangerously sharp metal edges, chiefly imported from the Orient, on up to precision-engineered, safety-tested, accurate scale models from companies like Tonka and Corgi.

But who would ever want a dinky little toy car like the ones Lesney makes? “Fits in a matchbox?” retailers asked when they first saw the line back in the nineteen-fifties. “Why, they’re nothing but trinkets!”

The public disagreed. Literally hundreds of millions of “Matchbox” toys have been sold since their first introduction, and demand for them is now so widespread that they can be found in stores in 132 countries, making “Matchbox” the most widely distributed toy in the entire world.

The amazing thing about “Matchbox” toys is their incredibly high quality in terms of durability and the wealth of detail included in each miniature. It seems reasonable that they would sell for a few dollars each, but their price has never even risen as high as a dollar a toy. The first models in the nineteen-fifties sold for about forty cents. Today, they are priced in America at seventy-nine cents apiece—still quite a bargain.

Detailing on “Matchbox” cars is so precise that even the tire treads are duplicated. When a specific model of automobile is being reproduced in miniature, it is compared with the original every step of the way. If the full-size auto has tires with the manufacturer’s name on them, Lesney will even put that on the model.

With so much money sunk into designing each new car, it would seem necessary for Lesney to restrict the number of toys in the line. On the contrary, there are always seventy-five models in the “Matchbox” series, and though not every number is changed each year, a big turnover still takes place. New ambulances, dragsters, tipper trucks, pony trailers, beach buggies, and many other kinds of vehicle are brought in regularly to keep the product mix rotating for the eager shopper. In addition, Lesney puts out two lines of larger-size models: Super Kings (industrial vehicles such as tractors, bulldozers, harvesters, and building transporters) and Speed

Kings (police cars, camping cruisers, etc.). Finally, Lesney has a special “Matchbox” assortment called “Models of Yesteryear,” which includes classic cars like the 1928 Mercedes Benz and the 1909 Thomas Flyabout.

One season, faced with strong competition from Mattel’s Hot Wheels and other gravity-powered autos, Lesney decided to turn “Matchbox” vehicles from stationary objects to moving toys. But even though “Matchbox” soon returned to its customary format, the Hot Wheels lesson taught Lesney that it was vulnerable as long as it made only one product. Today, Lesney also makes Steer ‘N’ Go, which enables the child to “drive” a small car over various kinds of model terrain; a game called Carpow!, and a nonvehicular game, Cascade. In addition, the company also has entered the preschool toy business.

It all began at the close of the second world war, when two buddies in the British military service decided to go into business together. They were John W. Odell, a twenty-seven-year-old engineer, and Leslie C. Smith, twenty-nine, a marketing specialist. The only assets the two had were native ability and their respective war gratuities. Pooling their service money, they opened up a pressure die-casting factory to provide various goods for industry. They set up their first plant in the bombed-out ruins of an old pub in Tottenham, North London.

Although the new operation brought in a steady, if modest, income, the pair decided to look for a sideline business, mainly to keep the factory in full operation. In 1949, the ex-servicemen decided to manufacture a toy, a sixteen-inch State Processional Coach with a team of horses.

Their efforts seemed doomed from the start. The Korean War had just broken out, and the supply of zinc was curtailed. An important material in die-casting, zinc was no longer permitted for use in making toys.

But Odell and Smith continued planning. In 1952, Queen Elizabeth II was about to ascend the British throne. What could be more logical than to bring out a model of the royal coronation coach? The old sixteen-inch toy was just the thing—except that it was too big for “impulse” sales. The Lesney executives decided to reproduce it in miniature. Without sacrificing a single detail, the coach and horses were produced at a size little more than five inches long.

In the coronation year of 1953, Britons bought over a million Lesney coaches. Flushed with their first success, Odell and Smith mapped out a scheme for manufacturing a whole line of tiny motor vehicles, each small enough to fit into a box of matches. Then the pair followed the idea one step further and decided to actually package the toys in replica matchboxes.

The conception was perfect, and the Lesney toy line suddenly acquired a name, an identity, and a unique look. Today, the matchbox package is used sparingly, and more than 70 percent of the models sell in blister-pack cards. But the memorable name has remained.

Lesney started out by producing three miniatures: a cement mixer, a dump truck, and a road roller. But the initial reaction was discouraging: the buyers didn’t take “Matchbox” cars seriously. To them, they were just more junk for the bargain counters.

Smith and Odell had to press hard to get retailers to carry the miniatures at all. And yet, despite this resistance and the fact that Lesney did no advertising in those days, the “Matchbox” toy began to gather sales momentum in Britain by word of mouth. In the United States, similar troubles arose in selling “Matchbox” to buyers, and even veteran toy salesman Fred Bronner was forced to work exclusively with small wholesalers; the big ones weren’t the least bit interested.

But the public
was
interested in the accurate, inexpensive little cars. Children enjoyed them as toys. Adults bought them as decorative knick-knacks. By 1955, barely a year after they were first put on the market, “Matchbox” toys were being bought in quantity by the same toy buyers who had at first shaken their heads in derision. The line was so successful that Lesney had to expand its manufacturing quarters.

The company went public in September I960, and the initial stock offering was oversubscribed fifteen times. Today, its manufacturing facilities are located both in London and Essex; total floor area amounts to more than one million square feet. In addition, Lesney has operations in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. More than sixty-five hundred people are employed by the company, and 80 percent of all “Matchbox” models made in London are earmarked for export, earning the firm several Queen’s Awards to Industry for export trade. “It’s gotten so prestigious to be made by Lesney,” a company spokesman said, “that major auto makers are constantly suggesting we pick their new cars for patterns and eventual ‘Matchbox’ versions of their originals.”

The technique of producing any single “Matchbox” model is extremely demanding. The first stage is design, which includes research and development, tool and pattern making.

In this early stage, the scale of the model is laid out to conform with the “Matchbox” format. Initial design and development can take many months. On some models, it has even stretched as long as two years—far more time than the “Matchbox” price structure would seem to warrant. But Odell and Smith are sticklers for accuracy.