Good morning, Whitewater
There’s no school today, and tomorrow, in the district, to allow for parent-teacher conferences. Our town fathers will have to be on heightened alert for the presence of juveniles, loose in town. For the stodgiest of residents: lock your doors, take food and water into a small, secure room, and wait until Monday morning.
It’s a proud day in American history, a day harkening to America’s creative past — on this day in 1963, the Hula Hoop was patented. The History Channel’s website has offers detail:
On this day in 1963, the Hula-Hoop, a hip-swiveling toy that became a huge fad across America when it was first marketed by Wham-O in 1958, is patented by the company’s co-founder, Arthur “Spud” Melin. An estimated 25 million Hula-Hoops were sold in its first four months of production alone.
In 1948, friends Arthur Melin and Richard Knerr founded a company in California to sell a slingshot they created to shoot meat up to falcons they used for hunting. The company’s name, Wham-O, came from the sound the slingshots supposedly made. Wham-O eventually branched out from slingshots, selling boomerangs and other sporting goods. Its first hit toy, a flying plastic disc known as the Frisbee, debuted in 1957. The Frisbee was originally marketed under a different name, the Pluto Platter, in an effort to capitalize on America’s fascination with UFOs.
Melina and Knerr were inspired to develop the Hula-Hoop after they saw a wooden hoop that Australian children twirled around their waists during gym class. Wham-O began producing a plastic version of the hoop, dubbed “Hula” after the hip-gyrating Hawaiian dance of the same name, and demonstrating it on Southern California playgrounds. Hula-Hoop mania took off from there.
The under-rated, under-appreciated film The Hudsucker Proxy, starring Tim Robbins, Paul Newman, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, revolves around the efforts of the fictional Norville Barnes to market something that looks, well, much like a Hula Hoop.
