THE STORY OF MONOPOLY, SlLLY PUTTY, BINGO, TWISTER, FRISSBEE, SCRABBLE, ETCETERA Read Online Free PDF Page A

one for each side of the board, but could only find three that serviced the resort: the Pennsylvania, the B & O, and the Reading. So Darrow added the Short Line, actually a freight bus company running between Philadelphia, New York, and Atlantic City.
    At first, Darrow had no plans to sell or make “the game,” as he called it. He and his wife began playing it just for fun, sometimes inviting friends to participate. Soon their acquaintances began requesting copies to take home. “It was a funny thing,” the inventor once remarked, “but almost invariably the winner wanted a copy, while the loser was convinced that he could win the next game—so he’d frequently want a game, too. Well, I hadn’t anything better to do, so I began to make the games. I charged people four dollars a copy.”
    It took him a whole day to make up one game. The materials cost about $2.25, so he was realizing about $1.75 profit on each—not bad money in the early nineteen-thirties. As more and more people, friends of friends, began asking for Darrow to make up copies of “the game,” he found his time increasingly taken up with typing title cards and painting linoleum pieces. Finally, Darrow made an arrangement with a printer friend to take over the production of the game. Darrow was somewhat afraid that he might be unable to pay for the service, but his friend assured him that the printing firm would wait until Darrow’s customers paid him.
    By this time, orders were coming in from more and more distant places, and some department store buyers were also starting to stock up on Darrow’s real estate game. Darrow never spent a penny on advertising. The fame of Monopoly spread entirely by word of mouth—even from as far away as California, orders trickled in.
    In a very short time, the former salesman was amazed to see that the pastime he’d drawn on his kitchen table had sold seventeen thousand pieces. In order to meet the number of orders still arriving in the mail, he realized he’d either have to borrow money and go into game manufacturing himself or else sell out to an established supplier. He chose the latter course. “Taking the precepts of Monopoly to heart,” he said, “I did not care to speculate.”
    Parker Brothers was the first supplier Darrow approached, and the response was not enthusiastic. In the firm’s opinion, a good game took only a few minutes to learn, and the rules had to be easy enough for a nine-year-old to absorb quickly; furthermore, the longest time any family game should take was about an hour.
    The company founder, George Parker, had been intrigued by the idea of a financial game as far back as the eighteen-nineties, when the first important governmental investigations of trusts and monopolies were in progress. A genius in the areas of game invention and marketing, George Parker had turned what fellow New Englanders considered a frivolous pastime into a highly successful business in just five years. According to a booklet published by the firm, the idea of a game named Monopoly occurred to him at the time of the investigations, but he merely filed the name away in his mind for the future.
    Parker Brothers did not recognize Darrow’s game at first, but Darrow persisted. He gave personal demonstrations of his game in department stores in Philadelphia, and it became extremely popular there. Then New York’s prestigious F. A. 0. Schwarz sold two hundred sets out of a printing of five thousand. On this sales evidence from two key East Coast cities, Parker Brothers—very reluctantly—agreed to take the remainder of the printing on consignment.
    By Christmas of that year (1934), Parker Brothers had sold every single piece. Darrow was delighted, but the company executives merely sat back and breathed a sigh of relief.
    This period of relaxation for Parker lasted exactly ten days. Before 1935 was more than a few days old, a veritable tidal wave of orders began pouring in from all parts of the country for more