Betty James, Keeper of the Slinky, 1918-2008

Slinky.

The original Slinky, 60 years later: "Nothing to wind ... nothing to wear out."

Just mention the word, and almost everyone holds out his or her hands, palms up, and bounces them up and down, imagining Slinky’s back-and-forth motion and the shifting “slinky” sound. Its 80 feet of coiled steel spring jiggles, shuffles, bounces and stretches back and forth between the hands. It “walks” down stairsteps, with the momentum of its weight propelling its shiny coils end over end.

I mention this after reading this morning that Betty James, keeper of the Slinky, the first real Baby Boomer toy, died Thursday in Hollidaysburg, Pa., where Slinkys are still made. She was 90.

Although it’s been sold in all sorts of variations and materials, the basic Slinky remains virtually unchanged. It is the perfect toy, self-contained, easy to manufacture, inexpensive to buy and endlessly fascinating to children and adults alike.

When Gil Asakawa and I began writing The Toy Book in 1989, we flew to New York in February to attend the Toy Fair, the annual gathering of toymakers. And there we met Betty James. She was 71 at the time, bright and clever and full of life. Several of her sons, salesmen for the company, were there with her. I don’t remember anybody else we met that day in the halls of toy companies, but I will never forget Mrs. James.

She told us the story of how her then-husband, Richard, a civilian naval engineer working for a shipyard in 1943, noticed a torsion spring aboard a ship he was inspecting fall off a table and wiggle and bounce back and forth.

Amused, he took it home to study it. He figured he could make the spring bounce down stairs and perhaps manufacture one and sell it as a toy. It took two more years before the Jameses formed James Industries. When the spring was perfected, it needed a name. Betty flipped through a dictionary and stopped at a word she thought suited the coiled spring.

The toy didn’t sell well until the Gimbel Brothers set up a sloping board that allowed Slinky to “walk” in the front windows of their department store. They haven’t stopped selling since.

In 1959, Richard James became a missionary in Bolivia, leaving Betty, her six children and James Industries to fend for themselves. Betty told us how she took over the company, and she was still running it forty years later. “We get calls to buy the company almost every day,” she said with a knowing smile. She was proud of the fact that Slinky was the perfect toy — simple, inexpensive and imaginative – and that it had provided her family with a good life.

We needed a starting place for The Toy Book, and we walked away from our meeting with Mrs. James with exactly that. The place to begin a book about baby-boom toys was with Slinky, which came on the market in 1945, arguably the first year of what became known as the Baby Boom, and with entrepreneurs like the Jameses. Technology was reshaping American life after the end of WWII, and Slinky, like Silly Putty (a byproduct of the effort to find a synthetic substitute for rubber), Frisbee and Hula Hoops (both made of the new post-war material, plastic) were perfect examples of that shift.

James Industries was finally sold — to POOF Products in 1998 — and Betty James was deservedly inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame. You might not remember her name, but you will remember her toy.

What walks down stairs, alone or in pairs
And makes a slinkity sound?
A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing,
Everyone knows it’s Slinky.
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky.
For fun it’s a wonderful toy,
It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky
It’s fun for a girl and a boy.