THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA (8 page)

How does it work? The company’s chief engineer. Hubert “Dixie” Dean, calls it a self-contradiction. Chemically it is a liquid, but it resembles a solid. The molecular structure will stretch if the substance is slowly pulled. But if tugged, it snaps apart. The toy has a rebound capacity of 75 to 80 percent (a rubber ball has only about a 50 percent bounce-back). On top of all that, it picks up newsprint, often sharper than the original. A silicon derivative, Silly Putty won’t rot; it can withstand temperatures from —70 degrees Fahrenheit to hundreds of degrees above zero.

Despite the company’s seeming willingness to talk about its first love, there is considerable secrecy involved in the manufacture of the product. The location of the chief plant facilities remains under wraps, even after two decades. The only manufacturing details Hodgson will release about the toy substance is that it is produced somewhere near New Haven, Connecticut, in thousand-pound batches.

The secrecy is understandable, considering the amount of industrial espionage in the American toy business. Since the constituents of Silly Putty are an open secret, the only thing the firm can protect is the know-how involved in making the toy as good as it is. In this field Hodgson boasts that Silly Putty engineers are at least five years ahead of any competition.

A testament to the product’s superiority was printed a few years ago in a Chicago newspaper that had run a contest of letters from kids at camp. The winning entry came from a boy who got angry at his parents for sending him a knock-off of Silly Putty. “I wanted Silly Putty,” he wrote them, “because you get twice as much and it’s more fun.”

Ironically, the “fun” product is the offshoot of second world war military production. In 1945, General Electric was running a series of experiments at its New Haven silicone division. In answer to the war effort, the company hoped to come up with a viable synthetic rubber.

Silicone, a substance refined from sand, was in great abundance at the laboratory. One day, a Scottish engineer named James Wright dropped some boric acid into a test tube containing silicone oil. When he examined the resultant compound, he found, to his amazement, that it bounced when thrown on the floor.

Accident number one:
Silly Putty is born.

Meanwhile. Hodgson, a native of Montreal, was exploring the infant marketing profession. Shortly after the 1929 crash, Hodgson left his family home in Norfolk, Virginia, and joined the Navy. After his hitch, he came to New York to work as an advertising copywriter and later headed a research team for
Look.
As he learned the techniques of marketing, Hodgson had the opportunity to sell everything from a presidential candidate (Wendell Willkie) to beer, food, and tires. After an unsuccessful stint as an independent marketing research consultant, he went to New Haven to join an ad agency. Six months later the job collapsed, and so did his marriage. It was the nadir of his career.

Accident number two:
a New Haven toy shop hires Hodgson to publish its catalog.

America had almost nothing in the way of a modern toy store before World War II. Instead, playthings were sold primarily in department stores. However, with the first crop of war babies, shops began to spring up selling toys and other supplies to nursery schools and parents. One such store was the Block Shop in New Haven, then a one-woman operation run by the late Ruth Fallgatter, an Antioch psychology master who later became an executive at Creative Playthings.

The Block Shop, Hodgson recalled, was already doing a vigorous business. Military families on the move kept subscribing to the store’s catalog, giving it a worldwide following. Ruth Fallgatter introduced Hodgson to the toy business and left the new catalog up to him. While he was preparing it, he got the notion of including a page of toys for grown-ups.

Meanwhile, GE’s mystery goo was becoming a conversation piece at local cocktail parties. Ruth Fallgatter saw it, thought it amusing, and showed it to Hodgson.

“Everybody kept saying there was no earthly use for the stuff,” he explained, “but I watched them as they fooled with it. I couldn’t help noticing how people with busy schedules wasted as much as fifteen minutes at a shot just fondling and stretching it. I decided to take a chance and sell some. We put an ad in the catalog on the adult page along with such goodies as a spaghetti-making machine. We packaged the goop in a clear compact case and tagged it at two dollars.”

At year’s end, Hodgson found that Silly Putty, at twice its present price, and even without a picture, outsold every toy in the catalog but one, a box of crayons. He suggested that his employer should manufacture it, but she wasn’t interested. Hodgson obtained a release from her and decided to put it on the market himself. It was not rash speculation, he later declared, for the figures were right in front of him and he was convinced that Silly Putty was a winner.

Borrowing $147, Pete Hodgson ordered a batch of the putty from General Electric and hired a Yale student to help him reduce it to one-ounce dabs. But now they were faced with the problem of how to pack it.

Accident number three:
Economic necessity forces Hodgson to encase his product in plastic “eggs,” which would be cheap and easy to ship in inexpensive cartons from the Connecticut Cooperative Poultry Association.

Later, when the company was able to sit back and take a second look at its packaging, another container was briefly tried. But top toy buyers protested loudly, and Hodgson went back to the egg format. Something about the brightly colored eggshells seemed to label the stuff inside as “fun.”

Of course, it takes more than just a good idea in attractive wraps to make a buck in the hard-nosed toy business. Hodgson had sunk all his capital into the operating costs of the business, and there was no surplus for advertising. It took a lot of arguing to get Silly Putty into any stores at all. Neiman Marcus in Dallas tried it for Easter. Then in St. Louis, Doubleday ordered a few dozen Silly Putty eggs on trial. A few weeks later, a second order came for a gross—then the order was changed to two gross. The next day, the order was changed to four gross. A week later, the manager of the New York Doubleday—who had turned the toy down at first—reluctantly ordered “four dozen of those Silly Putty things.” One week after that, the store was selling five hundred a day and asking for more.

With the celerity with which fads catch on in New York, Silly Putty—sitting in the Doubleday windows at Fifty-second Street and Fifth Avenue—became the “in” thing. But the real boom was yet to come.

One afternoon, a writer for the
New Yorker
dropped into the bookstore to buy a present for a friend. He noticed the oddball substance on display, bought a piece and began playing with it He found it a fascinating way to relax and became so enthralled with the product that he wrote almost a page of copy about it for his magazine

When that issue hit the newsstands, Pete Hodgson’s telephone began to ring. Three days later, when it finally quieted down, Hodgson found a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of orders sitting on his desk, some of them from as far away as Seattle and Havana.

Hodgson thought he was about to have the last laugh on industry pundits, but he still had some rough roads to travel. For one thing, chemical engineers familiar with the new technology of silicones were still scarce. Then a more serious thing happened to the company: the Korean War. The government suddenly clamped down on all defense-priority materials. By that time, silicone was usable as synthetic rubber and there was some fear that America’s rubber source might be cut off. So Hodgson was left with fifteen hundred pounds of Silly Putty on his hands, tons of unfilled orders, and no immediate prospect of getting more raw material. By 1951, he was practically out of business.

But just when toymen were sure they’d seen the last of the crazy glop, silicone was released for industrial use once more. By then, the market for Silly Putty was absolutely dead.

“It took me two years to rebuild a demand for the toy,”

Hodgson said, “but I was damned well decided that I was going to do it again. People still wanted Silly Putty, but they couldn’t find it in stores. I realized that if I was going to sell the buyers I’d first have to get people coming into their local toy stores asking for Silly Putty.”

Hodgson and his sales representatives started going directly to the people. Region by region, state by state, retailers would be contacted by mail. Then a field representative would go into the various stores and demonstrate Silly Putty to customers. The staff worked long and hard, and Hodgson figures he must have traveled to every state in the Union, many of them twice to demonstrate the substance.

Eventually, the market picked up again, and Hodgson was able to supplant store demonstrations with local TV advertising. But the new Silly Putty, to Hodgson’s surprise, was being bought mostly by children. The customer percentage at first was 80 percent adults, the rest kids. Then it turned completely around. According to Hodgson, children—some of them practically infants—would walk into toy stores and ask for Silly Putty by name.

This reversal of market led to the toughest single problem the toy had to surmount: quality control. It took ten years to solve.

The trouble was that parents couldn’t trust kids to put the putty back into the eggshell container. Consequently, it was getting into everybody’s hair—not to mention their clothes, rugs, and sofas. A gob dropped onto fabric would soak into the fibers and become absolutely inseparable.

Hodgson’s engineering staff worked on the stickiness problem throughout the nineteen-fifties. At last, in 1960, they cracked it, and the new nonsticky Silly Putty has been sold ever since.

Today’s Silly Putty, backed up with network and local TV ads, is a perennial favorite, accounting for a little better than 1 percent of annual sales in the average retail toy store. The company itself records about $6.5 million in sales per year.

In the usual sense of the term, competition is no problem to Hodgson, thanks to his staff’s half-decade head start in technology. “Nothing else is Silly Putty,” he says. “That’s our biggest advertising slogan. But on the other hand, everything that competes for the consumer’s time and dollars could be considered as a form of competition. This means anything from toys to Cadillacs to blondes. It is up to those products to find their proper markets and stay out of ours. And vice versa.”

Today Silly Putty has become a household world. Newspaper critics have likened Buddy Hackett’s physique and Michael Pollard’s face to it; talk-show hosts often allude to it, and some keep it handy to play with. A sportscaster once referred to it in describing a badly mauled boxer. And Paul Krassner, editor of
The Realist,
once presented his world vision, eschewing philosophical jargon, in terms of Silly Putty.

Probably the most illustrious role Silly Putty has played in recent history was aboard the Apollo 8 mission. A woman in Dallas who wanted the astronauts to have unusual Christmas presents purchased three gobs of Silly Putty in sterling-silver eggshells from Neiman Marcus at seventy-five dollars apiece. She thought it would give the spacemen something to do in their spare time while in the rocket, and also provide a convenient substance for sticking tools in place during weightlessness.

The volume of free publicity Silly Putty has received over the years is so huge (Hodgson estimates it would total millions of dollars if bought) that the firm is extremely sensitive to the danger of the product’s name becoming generic. The company’s public-relations agency spends plenty of time guarding against use of the toy’s name in lower case, even to the extent of sending offenders wry letters in which everything
except
Silly Putty is uncapitalized. “The day that Silly Putty loses its identity,” says the agency, “is the day that the product loses its trademark.” And the day it loses its trademark is the day any firm can call its product Silly Putty.

Why has Silly Putty become such a phenomenal success in the crowded toy field, with gimmicky, expensive new playthings dazzling the youngster’s eye at every turn?

The answer is elementary: Silly Putty is as near as one can get to a perfect toy.

“I’ve spent my life trying to define what a toy is,” said Hodgson, “and I don’t think I’m any closer to finding out the answer. But whatever it takes to make a great toy, Silly Putty has it!”

There is, of course, one obvious advantage that Silly Putty has over much of the competition—simplicity. Without having to worry about complicated instructions, any child can pitch right in and pull, yank, mold, or pound his glob.

“All you have to do,” said Hodgson, “is pop open the shell and go to it. It’s the toy with one moving part!”

Where are the dolls of yesteryear? Can they compete with Barbie? And should they?

This has been the issue in a kind of informal debate among American consumers during the past few years. Proponents of women’s liberation assail the traditional baby doll for relegating women to a subordinate role. Other critics, defending the baby doll as a natural vehicle for the emulation of Mother, attack the fashion doll as a concrete example of the “Cinderella syndrome.”

Both sides of this sometimes bitter dialogue recognize the influence of dolls in forming character and social values. Throughout history, the doll has occupied the star position in the catalog of toys from its beginnings as a religious totem, to its later use as a fashion model. At the same time, dolls fill children’s need to imitate their parents’ behavior toward their offspring.

The importance of the doll in shaping character is illustrated in the case of the black doll. “About seven years ago,” said Herman L. Thompson, sales and marketing director for Shindana Toys, “a prominent black psychiatrist did a study on black children’s image of themselves. He placed black and white dolls in front of black children, and they invariably chose the white dolls. Bearing in mind that one who has no self-love is incapable of giving or receiving love, the effect of this obvious manifestation of self-hatred spells nothing but disaster for the black community in its attempt to help itself.”