The creator of the Frisbee, Superball, Hula Hoop, Slingshot & Silly String

An excerpt from the "Good Old Days" newsletter I subscribe to:

"Richard Knerr passed away on January 17 at the age of 82.
You don't recognize the name? If not, I'll bet you remember these names: Hula Hoop®, Frisbee®, Superball®, Silly String®.

If you were a youngster living in southern California in 1958, you might have noticed an odd pair on your playground demonstrating a new toy. They were Richard Knerr and his childhood friend, Arthur "S Aug 23, 2012 pud" Melin, and the toy they had reinvented and renamed was the Hula Hoop.
Rich and Spud had founded the Wham-O® Company ten years earlier in 1948. Their first try at toy stardom was the slingshot, a Y-shaped stick with rubber straps to shoot small stones or other such missiles toward a target (see the old Wham-O advertisement below).
They had developed the slingshot because they were falconers and needed something to shoot meat into the air to train their birds. "Wham-O" came from the sound they imagined the shot made when it hit its target. Richard and Spud thought their slingshot might be a popular toy for post-War boys.
Boy, were they right! I wonder how many kids got into trouble after breaking a window with the ubiquitous slingshot? And, if you couldn't afford to buy one, you were always on the lookout for just the right forked branch to which you could affix inner tube strips and make your own.
After their early success with the slingshot, Knerr and Melin spent the next decade looking for a new "hot" product. Their inspiration came in 1957 from an acquaintance who had visited Australia and told the two entrepreneurs about children twirling bamboo hoops around their waists in gym class.
Knerr and Melin experimented with toys themselves and often tried them out directly on potential buyers. After a few months with the Hula Hoops on the playgrounds, they knew they had a hit. Wham-O sold more than 100 million Hula Hoops in the first two years of production. The Hula Hoop is now widely recognized as the biggest fad of the '50s.

Then there was the Frisbee, a flying disc that Wham-O introduced in 1958. The plastic disc was originally called the Pluto Platter -- so named because of widespread fascination in the United States with Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Wham-O bought all rights to the disc design from Walter Morrison, who had applied for a patent for it.

Wham-O marketed the Frisbee as a sport, and dozens of game variations were developed over the years: Frisbee Golf, Disc Football, Disc Baseball, Frisbee Soccer, Ultimate Frisbee, etc. The games made the Frisbee one of the favorite family toys of the 1950s through the 1970s, the time period when a professional Frisbee league was established.

The 1960s brought Wham-O's Superball and the Slip 'N Slide. In 1962, when the limbo dance was popular, the company marketed a limbo party kit complete with dance instructions. It was Rich and Spud's goal to stay on the cutting edge of amusement.

In 1982, Wham-O was sold to Kransco Group Companies, and in 1994, the giant toy-maker Mattel purchased it from Kransco. In 1997, Wham-O became independent again when it was purchased by a group of private investors in California.
That same year, Richard Knerr was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times. "If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun," he told the newspaper. "But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it.""

Q. Where did the name "Frisbee" come from?
A. Wham-O's Frisbee was originally known as the Pluto Platter, but some credit the design of the flying disc to the Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Conn. The company made pies that were sold at many New England colleges. It seems that students discovered that the empty pie tins (see illustration below) could be sailed through the air and caught. It was cheap entertainment.
Rich and Spud had heard of the phenomena of the flying pie tins when they bought rights to the Pluto Platter. They initially offered the toy under its original name, but in 1958 the Frisbie Baking Company went out of business. Coincidentally, Wham-O renamed and reintroduced its flying disc as the Frisbee that same year.

If you would like to read more about the development of the Frisbee, click here to go to the About.com inventors page on "The History of the Frisbee."
If you would like to visit Wham-O's official Web site on its history, click here." -- Ken Tate