LOS ANGELES — Richard "Rich" Knerr is being remembered this week for creating a multimillion-dollar company out of slingshots, flying saucers and spinning hoops.
Knerr and his partner, Wham-O co-founder Arthur "Spud" Melin, specialized in fun with products like the Hula- Hoop, the Slip 'N Slide, Silly String and the Super Ball, entertaining countless people from one end of the world to the other. They showed dogs a pretty good time, too, with another iconic Wham-O product, the Frisbee.
Knerr, who retired from the toy-marketing business when he and Melin sold Wham-O in 1982, died Monday after suffering a stroke at his home in suburban Arcadia. He was 82.
Melin, his partner and lifelong friend, died in 2002.
"The company motto was 'Our Business is Fun,' and that really describes both Dad and Spud," Knerr's son Chuck said Thursday. "They were two boys who just loved to have fun."
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They let the whole country in on the fun in 1958 when they began selling round, plastic hoops at 98 cents apiece. People snapped them up by the millions, as seemingly everyone in America that summer attempted to spin the things around their waists, hips, necks or knees.
"No sensation has ever swept the country like the Hula-Hoop," Richard A. Johnson wrote in his 1985 book "American Fads."
Just as quickly, however, the fad ended.
"By the time September rolled around you couldn't give them away because every household in America had two and they lasted forever," Chuck Knerr recalled his father saying.
It didn't matter because not long after that the Frisbee, which had been introduced the year before, began to catch on — and not just with people. Dogs loved to play with it too.
One such animal, Ashley Whippet, became a celebrity in the 1970s because of his astounding ability to chase and catch the things.
Because dogs tended to chew up Frisbees and people tended to lose them, they proved a much more lucrative product for Wham-O than Hula Hoops had.
Knerr and Melin went into business for themselves in 1948, making $2 a day selling slingshots made out of old orange crates in Knerr's garage. They named their fledgling company after the sound Melin made every time he fired a slingshot.
The pair went into business together because Melin raised falcons and they used homemade slingshots to fire meatballs at young birds to teach them to dive for prey.
