Millions Pursued His Trivial Questions

Associated Press - Trivial Pursuit co-creators Chris Haney, left, and Scott Abbott.


Chris Haney was the co-inventor of Trivial Pursuit, one of the best-selling games ever and one that has inspired a raft of trivia questions based on its own success. What game has the highest per-capita sales in Iceland? Which one has had its questions printed on Pringles chips? And what game was, at first, titled "Trivia Pursuit," until its inventor's wife suggested the name as a sly joke?

Mr. Haney, who died Monday at age 59 after a long illness, came up with the game one evening in 1979 while sharing a few beers with a friend and fellow Canadian journalist, Scott Abbott, and discussing what a great business Scrabble must be.

"We had spent a lot of time sitting in taverns ruminating about weird facts," Mr. Abbott told Britain's Express newspaper in 2004.

After producing a rudimentary Parcheesi-like board design and scraping together investment funds from friends and family, the two set about producing 6,000 trivia questions that would be the heart of Trivial Pursuit. Initial categories included geography, entertainment, history, art & literature, science & nature, sports & leisure.

"It got so all-consuming that we couldn't sit down at lunch without reading the ketchup bottle label," Mr. Abbott said in an interview.

In 1980, Mr. Haney quit his job as photo editor at the Montreal Gazette and traveled with a pile of reference books to Spain aboard a ship—flying made him nervous. He spent nearly a year on the Costa del Sol writing questions. Back in Canada in 1981, the two inventors began producing the game as Horn Abbot Ltd., combing Mr. Haney's nickname with a version of Mr. Abbott's last name. But, the start-up process had proven stressful for Mr. Haney, who spent the months leading up to Trivial Pursuit's official 1982 release in seclusion. Business conversations gave him panic attacks, which he could control only by copious amounts of brandy and up to four packs of Camel cigarettes a day, he told Canada's Globe and Mail in 1983. After a slow start, Trivial Pursuit took off as had no game in recent years—Monopoly was introduced in 1930 and Scrabble in 1952 (each game had predecessors).

In a guerilla marketing coup, the game was mailed gratis to celebrities who appeared as answers to Trivial Pursuit questions. This helped spark a trivia craze, and in 1984, Trivial Pursuit sold 20 million copies in North America. Total sales are over 100 million around the world, said Hasbro, which bought the brand from its inventors in 2008 for $80 million. The game has been translated into dozens of languages, a process that involves coming up with entirely new lists of questions to suit local knowledge. In the wake of Trivial Pursuit came a new wave of adult-oriented board games.


Q: What does Trivial Pursuit have in common with two other popular board games of the 1980s, Pictionary and Balderdash? A: Their creators were all Canadians (Yahtzee— originally "The Yacht Game"—was also a Canadian invention).


Profiles of Mr. Haney, a large man who sported a scraggly handle-bar moustache, frequently noted the cigarette holes burned in his jeans even while he was getting rich on game royalties. He described himself to the Wall Street Journal in 1984 as "just a beer-swilling blue- jeaner."


In the late 1980s, when Mr. Haney found himself unable to get a tee-off time at his golf club, he once more teamed with Mr. Abbott, this time to build an extravagant Country Club called Devil's Pulpit. The course features two 18-hole golf courses with views of the Toronto skyline in the distance. When it was preparing to open in 1989, Mr. Haney announced a series of Trivial Pursuit-style factoids: that his course at $19 million to construct was the most expensive in Canadian history; that it took the most sod of any Canadian course (80 acres); and had the largest sand trap (a 250-yard beach) .

By STEPHEN MILLER

Fred Morrison, Created Popular Flying Plate

Wormhole Publishers - Fred Morrison in 1957 with his disc, then called a Pluto Platter.

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.