Fred Morrison, Creator of a Popular Flying Plate, Dies at 90
By Margalit Fox - Published: February 13, 2010 - NY Times
Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90.
The cause was cancer, said Phil Kennedy, the author with Mr. Morrison of “Flat Flip Flies Straight: True Origins of the Frisbee”(Wormhole Publishers, 2006).
Beloved of man and dog, the Frisbee has for more than half a century been the signature product of Wham-O, a toy and sporting-goods manufacturer based in Emeryville, Calif. The company has sold more than 200 million of the discs since acquiring the rights to Mr. Morrison’s Pluto Platter, as it was then known, in 1957.
At least since antiquity, mankind has been hurling flat, round objects — or flying discs, as they are known in aficionados’ parlance — aloft. But Mr. Morrison is widely credited as having designed the first commercial flying disc expressly manufactured and marketed as such.
Wham-O changed the name to Frisbee in 1958, influenced by the Frisbie Pie Company in Connecticut, whose tins Yale students hurled for sport. A Westerner whose plainspoken ways could be mistaken for gruffness, Mr. Morrison deplored the change.
“I thought the name was a horror,” he told The Press Enterprise of Riverside, Calif., in 2007. “Terrible.” (Before perfecting the Pluto Platter in 1955, Mr. Morrison had called earlier incarnations of his disc the Flyin’ Cake Pan, the Whirlo-Way and the Flyin-Saucer.)
But as his royalties mounted — he would realize millions of dollars over the years — Mr. Morrison revised his position on “Frisbee.”
Walter Fredrick Morrison, known as Fred, was born on Jan. 23, 1920, in Richfield, Utah; he moved with his family to Los Angeles as a teenager.
In 1937, Fred attended a picnic held by the family of his girlfriend, Lucile Nay, known as Lu. Before long, the fateful popcorn lid was thrown. The young couple soon discovered that Fred’s mother’s metal pie tins were far more durable. Mrs. Morrison’s reaction is not recorded.
As they tossed the tin on the beach one day, a passer-by offered to buy it for a quarter. The tin had cost five cents, and soon a thriving resale business was born, with Fred and Lu selling their Flyin’ Cake Pans at Southern California beaches and parks. They earned enough to marry.
In World War II, Mr. Morrison flew P-47 fighter-bombers in Europe, increasing his knowledge of aerodynamics. Returning to Los Angeles after the war, he worked as a carpenter, in his spare time putting his flying disc through successive refinements.
In 1948, he and a partner, Warren Franscioni, manufactured the Flyin-Saucer, the first plastic flying disc. It sold fitfully, and the two men parted company in 1950. The Pluto Platter was Mr. Morrison’s most refined disc. Flat and round, it had a raised central hub, with the names of the planets in raised plastic around the rim. The instructions, molded into the underside, were written by Lu Morrison and read like a Zen koan:
Play catch — Invent Games
To Fly, Flip Away Backhanded
Flat Flip Flies Straight
Tilted Flip Curves — Experiment!
Mr. Morrison was awarded United States patent No. 183,626 for his “Flying Toy” in 1958. In 1967, Ed Headrick Wham-O’s head of research and development, patented alterations to the disc’s shape that improved its aerodynamic ability, resulting in the familiar Frisbee of today.
For Wham-O, Mr. Morrison also invented the Crazy Eight Bowling Ball and the Popsicle Machine, a plastic form that could be filled with juice and frozen. Neither matched the success of the Frisbee, but by then it hardly mattered. In later years, he bred racehorses and flew airplanes.
Mr. Morrison’s marriage to Ms. Nay ended in divorce, as did several later marriages. His survivors include a son, two daughters and grandchildren.
Today, heirs of Mr. Morrison’s flying disc are everywhere, used in backyards worldwide and in organized pastimes like disc golf, a game standardized by Mr. Headrick in which discs are thrown at targets or into baskets, and the team sport known simply as Ultimate, modeled partly on soccer and using a heavy plastic disc.
All this sprang from the Pluto Platter that Mr. Morrison and his wife hawked at midcentury fairgrounds. As it sailed through the air straight and true, Mr. Morrison, a born showman, assured the crowd that his disc was gliding along an invisible wire.
To prove his point, as he recalled in interviews afterward, he offered to sell fairgoers 100 feet of the wire for one dollar. He threw in a Pluto Platter at no extra charge.
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