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

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