Memorials/Richard Knerr

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Richard Knerr
b. 30 June, 1925

-

d. 14 January 2008

Wikipedia page

Richard Knerr was an innovative toymaker who co-founded famous toy company Wham-O with his friend Arthur Melin. Wham-O produced such memorable products as the Hula Hoop, the Frisbee, and the SuperBall. Knerr died of complications from a stroke on January 14, 2008, at the age of 82.

Table of contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Richard Knerr

Richard Knerr was one of the greatest toymakers of the 20th Century, whose company, Wham-O, brought us the Frisbee, the Hula Hoop, and the SuperBall. When we think about the games industry and the IGDA, we tend to think only about videogames. In fact, even though the IGDA is called the 'International Game Developers Association', we don't tend to think of board games, card games, and other paper-based games, the millennia-old ancestors to Spacewar! We also tend to not think of toys, even though games and toys are fundamentally related through play and design, and often from the casual play of toys can arise the structured play of games.

Richard Knerr designed toys, not games. Yet he created toys that developed game environments, toys that suggested games and contests. The Frisbee is a toy, but it is used to throw and catch, and so easily developed into a sport. But beyond this emergence of game from casual play lies the importance of play itself as a necessary activity, a pastime, something that we do to relax. And Richard Knerr gave us a lot of that.


[edit] Richard Knerr, Arthur Melin, and Wham-O

Knerr was born in San Gabriel, California, where he would in 1948 co-found the now legendary toy company, Wham-O, with his friend Arthur “Spud” Melin. Knerr and Melin were boyhood friends who developed a lifelong friendship after meeting by chance outside a Pasadena movie theater. It was a deep and heartfelt friendship that lasted for over half a century and lead to the creation of many toys loved the world over. Together they attended the University of Southern California, where Knerr earned a degree in business.

Wham-O began as a falcon-training business where Knerr and Melin would train falcons by launching meatballs into the air with a slingshot. When one of their customers became more interested in the slingshot than the falcons, the two friends began hand-manufacturing them out of old orange crates in the Knerr family garage using a power saw purchased from Sears with a $7 down payment. This was one of the first times that anyone had ever manufactured slingshots, and the two sold them through mail order in outdoor sports magazines such as Field and Stream. The venture was a resounding success, soon earning the two over $100,000 a year, allowing them to move to a building in San Gabriel. The name of their company, Wham-O, came from the sound the slingshots made.

Their business soon expanded to include many other unusual sporting goods such as crossbows, boomerangs, and tomahawks, but their first major breakthrough came in 1955, when Knerr and Melin met Walter Frederick Morrison, an Air Force pilot who was selling flying discs he called 'Pluto Platters.' Wham-O quickly bought the rights, and after Ed Headrick, Wham-O's head of research and development, modified the design to be more aerodynamic, sold the device as the Frisbee.

The most likely source for the name of the Frisbee came from the Frisbie Pie Co. tins that Yale students played with due to their surprising aerodynamics. According to Knerr in a 2002 New York Times interview, the name 'Frisbee' came from a comic strip character called Mr. Frisbie, though this source seems doubtful, suggesting the explanation was a prank (no images from said strip have ever been produced). In fact, in an interview published in the book Frisbee (Stancil E. D. Johnson, 1974), Knerr was quoted with saying the name 'came from a promotional trip he took through Ivy League campuses, when he heard Harvard students talk about Frisbie-ing' (Judith Ann Schiff, “The Frisbee Files”), so the Yale story seems to be true.

No matter. The Frisbee was a resounding success, selling more than 100 million in 30 years and becoming a free from of play still popular around the world. Wham-O went on to promote Frisbee as a sport through Ultimate Frisbee and the Frisbee Dog World Championships, even releasing a “professional” model in 1964, underscoring their design as being more than just a toy – it produced a game environment.


[edit] The Hula Hoop

Though the Frisbee remains popular today, Wham-O's most phenomenal success came in the form of a large plastic ring known as the Hula Hoop, a toy that has since become eponymous with the American fad. Knerr and Melin designed the Hula Hoop after an Australian fitness instructor told them about a strange bamboo hoop that children twirled around their waists in gym class for play and exercise. They reportedly designed the hoop without seeing one of the originals.

Wham-O did not invent the Hula Hoop: Egyptian children had been playing with hoops made from dried grape vine as long as 3000 years ago, and the toy had survived to the present through many different cultures. However, they did trademark the name by which hoops are commonly known today and reinvented them out of Mylex, a lightweight durable plastic invented by Phillips Petrolium. In 1958, they began selling hoops for 98 cents each, and the Hula Hoop quickly became the most famous toy of the decade, selling over 100 million in only two years.

Yet the Hula Hoop was a short-lived but phenomenal smash hit, the greatest fad America has ever seen. It was 'the standard against which all national crazes are measured' (Richard Johnson), and this 50s-era hoop has been used in comparison with anything else deemed a fad – including the videogame. Fads combine innovation with culture, cheap, mature technology with abrupt, dramatic changes in society. The Hula Hoop coincided with the development of cheap plastics and the grinding dance of Elvis Presley rock 'n roll, a liberation of the body that was beginning to emerge in American culture at the time. According to Douglas Martin, the Hula Hoop 'virtually defined frivolity in postwar America.'

A large contribution to the Hula Hoop's success was Wham-O's maverick marketing strategies: employees disseminated the hoops via word-of-mouth, 'seeding the market' in an early form of guerilla advertising. The hoops were first introduced at a Pasadena elementary school where students were told they could keep the hoops if they mastered them, and Wham-O gave hoops away for free in neighborhoods across the country, generating curiosity and buzz. Company executives were even required to take them on airplanes so people would ask about them. Due to this technique, Wham-O was able to generate an incredible amount of excitement through what Knerr called the 'wow factor': “You're...showing it off and everybody says, 'What's that? What's that?” Before long, Wham-O was selling 20,000 hoops a day – 25 million in only four months – and by the end of 1958, 40 million hula hoops had been sold with 100 million through 1959.

Yet despite such sales, Wham-O would only make $10,000 off the Hula Hoop: by the end of 1960, nearly every household had two or three copies of a product that would last for years. As a result, millions of unsold hoops sat in warehouses due to over-manufacturing and business inexperience – and perhaps also too much optimism. This pattern can be seen repeated again and again in many other new industries, such as Atari in the early 1980s and the dot-com boom of the 90s – though unlike the videogame, the Hula Hoop never again became nearly as popular as it was in the late '50s, though it remains a cult toy.


[edit] Wham-O and the Play of Innovation

Wham-O has been described by Boing-Boing as “a perfect blend of California entrepreneurship, space-age optimism and postwar manufacturing methods...in short, the best toy company ever.” With the company motto 'Our Business is Fun,' they solidly combined both fun and innovation to prove this point.

Wham-O's strategy was simple: maintain a continually evolving line of around a dozen simple and inexpensive products that can be sold at a price five times the cost of manufacturing and promotion. To achieve this level of creativity, the company relied on in-house invention, encouraging innovation through a playful creative design environment, but also by soliciting ideas from the public. Designers would continuously refine and test toy prototypes until the product was perfected, providing just the right amount of fun. “[Knerr and his partner Melin], and everyone they worked with...were like the Rat Pack and characters from MASH, with oversized personalities, said his son, Chuck Knerr. “If it wasn't about fun, he wasn't interested.”

Their playful nature allowed Wham-O to discover products through sheer accident, such as the SuperBall, an extremely elastic ball made from Zectron, which resulted from an accident when a chemist, Norman H. Stingley, was trying to devise a way of producing plastics more cheaply. Yet employees' serendipity and hard work also led to pranks: at one point, Wham-O employees dropped a giant SuperBall from the top of a building, which reportedly bounced back up several stories before demolishing a car and damaging a shop. Whether it was on purpose or by accident, the incident would have certainly advertised the product – as well as reprimands.

Wham-O toys were manufactured in the summer, when most toy industry workers were laid off, giving them a readily available workforce. As a result, many of Wham-O's toys are perfect for summer fun, such as the Slip 'N Slide. Due to the toys' cross-genre classification, Wham-O could sell their products through a wide range of stores and departments, as opposed to other toy companies with specified products who were limited to selling through one or two locations. This ability allowed Wham-O to achieve maximum distribution.

In this fashion, Wham-O was able to produce over 230 different products, which in addition to the Hula Hoop, SuperBall, and Frisbee, included such memorable toys as the Slip 'N Slide (1961), the Limbo Game (1962), the Wheelie Bar (1964), which was used to stabilize bicycles, the Air Blaster (1965), which could blow out a candle from 20 feet away, Silly String (1972), a giant set of plastic shark teeth to match the Jaws craze, a giant bubble wand called Bubble Thing, the Huf'n Puf blowgun which shot rubber darts, and the Hackey Sack (1983), produced after Knerr sold the company.

Yet, any company producing so many different whacky products is bound to have its share of failures. Some of the more interesting Wham-O flops include mail-order mink coats for $9.95, a do-it-yourself bomb shelter for $119, and Instant Fish, a species of African fish whose eggs would hatch only when rain comes: just add water and you've got instant fish! The fish became so popular that the fish simply couldn't lay eggs fast enough to meet the demand. It was cases like these where it was simply impossible to tell if a product will be successful or not. Said Knerr, “You can't tell whether the fish will bite if you don't drop a line in the water.”

In 1982, Knerr and Melin sold Wham-O to the Kransco Group Companies for $12 million. Kransco later sold the company to Mattel in 1994, who in turn sold it to an investors' group in 1997. Wham-O is still designing toys.


[edit] Knerr and the Spirit of Play

To Knerr, play was not something childish or frivolous, something to be shunned by 'serious adults,' but an activity that people of all ages could enjoy and which was essential to the human and creative spirit. Though the games we play and the entertainment we pursue as adults is often different from what we did as children, we all need a little play in our lives, fun to break the patterns of the everyday and exalt in friendship, the senses, and the imagination. Play helps define culture, and is part of what makes us human.

“Toys that make it big say a lot about the societies that love them,” says John Schwartz, author of the New York Times article “The Joy of Silly.” And indeed, our toys tell us what we enjoy and how we express our playful natures when the boss isn't looking, what gives us joy and release, and what fascinates us the most about our world. And they also give us a connection between the generations, from parent and grandparent to child and grandchild, a piece of some of the play we enjoyed when we were young and the opportunity for those experiences to be shared and live on in our loved ones. “It's more than a shiny new SuperBall,” says Tim Walsh, author of The Playmakers, “You give your grandkid or your kid a piece of yourself.”

And yet, as much as our toys define our culture, the toys we make are themselves defined by the creativity and possibilities inherent to the underlying structure of the cultures from which they derive. The freedoms and spirit of America and the underlying ideology that anyone can pursue their dreams in many ways describes the playful creativity of Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin. “If Spud and I had to say what we contributed, it was fun,” said Knerr in a 1994 interview with the New York Times. “But I think this country gave us more than we gave it. It gave us the opportunity to do it.” And we have to give thanks to both Richard and America for that.


Richard Knerr died on January 14, 2008 from complications of a stroke in his home in Arcadia, California, at the age of 82. He is survived by his wife Dorothy, his daughters Melody Knerr and Lori Gregory, his son Chuck, stepson Richard Enright, stepdaughter Jeanne Stokes, and 8 grandchildren. Arthur Melin died in 2002, aged 77.


The company motto was 'Our Business is Fun,' and that really describes both Dad and Spud [Arthur Melin]. They were two boys who just loved to have fun. - Chuck Knerr

- Biography/Eulogy by Devin Monnes

[edit] Works

  • Co-founder of Wham-O Inc.
  • Co-Inventor of the Hula Hoop
  • Sold the original Frisbee

[edit] Links

[edit] About Wham-O and Wham-O Toys

[edit] Books

  • Richard Johnson. American Fads (1985)
  • Tim Walsh. The Playmakers: Amazing Origins of Timeless Toys (2004)

[edit] Comments

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