Free THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA by Marvin Kaye Page A

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