A Baby Boomer Phenomenon
While we were born too early for Teddy Ruxpin or video games to be toys of our youth, we were around for the start of one of the most enduring toys of all time – the ever-popular Frisbee.
Legend has it that the Frisbee actually dates back to the late 19th century when students at Yale and other New England universities began playing catch with the used pie plates made by the nearby Frisbie Baking Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They yelled “Frisbie!” to warn passersby away from the spinning discs.
This practice continued right up through the Second World War, and in 1948, Walter Morrison and his partner Warren Franscioni, took their inspiration from this activity and created a plastic version of the pie plates to sell at county fairs. The airfoil at the outer edge, called the Morrison slope, gave the toy its lift in flight.
Hoping to cash in on the then-current fascination with UFOs after the 1947 sightings in Roswell, Morrison called his creation the “Flying Saucer,” then the “Pluto Platter.” But the toy never really caught nationally until Wham-O founders, Arthur “Spud” Melin and Richard Knerr (creators of the Hula Hoop), bought rights to the toy in 1955. Learning of the origin of the flying disc, they renamed it “Frisbee” in 1958, and that’s when sales finally soared… like a Frisbee!
Early in the 1960s, Baby Boomers embraced the Frisbee as their own. Wham-O’s first “professional” Frisbee followed in 1964. Just three years later (1967), the International Frisbee Association was founded. One year later, the first Frisbee Golf Tournament was held in California. Also in 1968, teenagers at Columbia High School in New Jersey invented Ultimate Frisbee, a game played by over 5 million Americans today.
While Wham-O could trademark the name Frisbee, they couldn’t get a patent on its design. So, countless other manufacturers have created their own “flying discs,” while the name Frisbee has become almost a generic term for the toy in the same way that Kleenex is used to refer to any “facial tissue" (but is still a trademarked name belonging to the Kimberly-Clark Corporation).
Frisbees now come in all kinds of sizes and colors but will always be one of the great contributions the Baby Boomers made to worldwide popular culture!
