On May 13, 1959 Arthur Melin applied for a patent for the Hula Hoop and Wham-O trademarked the name.  He received U.S. Patent Number 3,079,728 on March 5, 1963 for a Hoop Toy. The Hula Hoop became a fad in the 1950s and was one of the most popular toys of the decade!

Richard Knerr and Arthur "Spud" Melin, boyhood best friends, founded the Wham-O company which helped popularize another toy, the Frisbee.  In 1948, Knerr and Melin started the Wham-O company from a garage in Pasadena. The men were marketing a 75 cent wooden slingshot using a jigsaw they purchased on a monthly installment plan from Sears, Roebuck & Company. This slingshot was named "Wham-O" and it became the company's name! The company's name came from its first product, the "Wham-O Slingshot" and the sound made when a pebble hit a target. As its mail-order business grew, Wham-O in 1957 added a flying disc toy called the "Pluto Platter" which became the Frisbee to their product line.  The next year, they introduced a simple Australian amusement, the "Hula-Hoop". 

Arthur Melin, right, and his company partner, Richard Knerr

Richard Knerr (1925-2008)

Arthur "Spud" Melin (1924-2002)

These two men invented a treasure chest of dozens of toys besides the Frisbee that often bore playful names such as Superball (so bouncy it seemed to defy gravity), Slip'N Slide and its giggle-inducing cousin the Water Wiggle and Silly String which was much harder to get out of hair than advertised!  With the Hula Hoop they ran an early test of the product in 1958 at a Pasadena elementary school and enticed their test subjects by telling them they could keep the hoops if they mastered them!  They seeded the market, giving hoops away in neighborhoods to create a buzz and required Wham-O executives to take hoops with them on planes so people would ask about them!  Guess that falls under the category of .. clever marketing.

Los Angeles children demonstrating their skills 

on 

Art Linkletter's House Party

Circa 1958

Associated Press Photo

"The great obsession of 1958, the undisputed granddaddy of American fads, the hoop rewrote toy manufacturing history".

Richard Johnson, Author of American Fads (1985)

When the phenomenal hoop craze ignited, Wham-O needed plastic tubing.  A lot of it!

Wham-O has become the most successful manufacturer of hula hoops in modern times.  They trademarked the name Hula Hoop and started manufacturing the toy out of the new plastic Marlex in 1958.  It was the first high-density polyethylene plastic.  In 1951, research scientists in Bartlesville, Oklahoma by the names of J. Paul Hogan and Robert L. Banks discovered how to make this plastic and the marketing executives at their oil and natural gas company named it Marlex.  Phillips Petroleum sales reps searched in vain for buyers of the new plastic until the Wham-O toy company found it ideal for making hoops and flying platters called Frisbees. 

Prompted by a post WWII boom in demand for plastics, Phillips Petroleum Company invested $50 million to bring its own miracle product, Marlex to market in 1954.  With a high melting point and flexible strength, the synthetic polymer would stand out from the company's thousands of patents!

The Wham-O company first used a W.R. Grace & Company product called Grex, a petroleum-based plastic produced in Pennsylvania.  In Titusville, birthplace of the U.S. oil industry in 1859, the Skyline Plastics Company worked overtime extruding Grex into the plastic hula hoops as the craze swirled across the nation.  Retired Titusville plant superintendent, Robert Poux remembers 125 employees working three-shifts, seven days a week, just to keep up!  Wham-O sold more than 25 million hula hoops in the first four months (at $1.98 each).  They sold more than 100 million in two years!  Wham-O's nationwide daily production ultimately peaked at about 20,000 per day due to their immense popularity!  There soon was not enough Grex and Phillips Petroleum's once ignored Marlex was suddenly very much in demand.  Hula Hoop plastic-extruding plants sprang up in Chicago, Newark and Toronto.  As the Hula Hoop fad eventually diminished, Wham-O continued using tons of Marlex for the production of Frisbees.  

I won a kid's Hula Hoop contest at Opryland when I was about 5 or 6.  We were there visiting and they had some kids show asking for volunteers.  I think I got a stuffed animal of some kind as a prize.  At home, I had a "peppermint twist" hula hoop and it was pink and white striped with little holes in one area that smelled like peppermint for awhile though eventually that wore off.

Mendy Hyde

Knoxville, Tennessee

"You Oughta Be Hoopin"

In August 2009 Titusville, Pennsylvania celebrated the 150th anniversary of the first U.S. oil discovery.  The parade included a Hula Hoop float from Oil Creek Plastics.

Photo by Bruce Wells

Hula Hoop Trivia:  The plastic tubing used for all hula hoops ever produced would stretch around the Earth more than five times!  And the Soviet Union said the Hula Hoop toy was an example of the "emptiness of American culture".  

In reality, the Hula Hoop was a symbol of youthful exuberance and 1950s innocence which evolved into a dance trend and a popular fitness tool.  Thank you, Arthur and Richard.  It helped make Mendy's childhood a fun experience then and to this day .. a fun memory!