The Monopolists Read online

  Ralph asked Mrs. Stevenson to stay on the line so that he could ask her more questions when the show wrapped. Off the air, she didn’t have much to add to what she’d already told him. She had no last name for Joanna. No address. No phone number. They hadn’t stayed in touch. And no idea where Joanna could be all these years later.

  She did provide Ralph with one important detail, however. She told him that Joanna had studied engineering at New York University during the 1940s.

  Given the attitudes about women in that era, Ralph wondered if Mrs. Stevenson’s memory was faulty. It seemed unlikely that New York University had allowed women into its engineering program in the 1940s. But upon calling the school, he learned that the school had taken women into its aeronautical program when there was a shortage of men during World War II.

  Ralph asked if there were any Joannas in the university’s database. The researcher on the line said that the university had lost the records of its female aeronautical students from that time.

  Ralph went to the New York Public Library and scoured aviation journals, hoping that the name Joanna would pop out at him from the piles of academic publications on propellers, pistons, and planes.

  Nothing.

  Next, he sought out helicopter companies that did business in the New York area. Among them was a company in New Jersey. He picked up the phone and punched in the number.

  A man on the other end said that a Joanna had once worked at the company. Astonished and elated, Ralph begged for her contact information, or even her last name. But the man said that while he remembered Joanna fondly, he didn’t have her contact information and couldn’t recall her last name.

  It was good to know that she existed, Ralph thought as he hung up the phone, but he was still far from finding her or from finding out what she may or may not have known about Monopoly. Seeking out early players of the game was proving to be a tricky, exhausting, and fruitless endeavor. He was getting nowhere.

  Stalled, the Anti-Monopoly team redoubled its efforts to try to find other elderly people who had played the game. Droeger suggested placing a classified ad in the Christian Science Monitor saying that they were seeking information about the game’s pre-1935 origins. It was akin to looking for the loathsome needle in a haystack, but it was worth a try.

  Droeger placed the ad. Then they waited, Droeger with little hope.

  An agonizing couple of weeks passed without a nibble. Had anyone even seen the ad? Were any of the early Monopoly players even still alive?

  •

  Meanwhile, Ralph and his legal team found something else of interest. Anti-Monopoly was not the first game to come into Parker Brothers’ crosshairs. Through their review of the records that Rubin had summoned from court clerks, Ralph learned that Parker Brothers had regularly sent letters to other financially themed board game producers, accusing them of infringing on its Monopoly trademark. The practice looked as if it dated back as early as the 1930s.

  Parker Brothers had sent a letter to a company called Transogram, which sold a game called Big Business. It removed its game from the market immediately. Letters were also sent to the makers of Sexopoly, Space Monopoly, Black Monopoly, and Theopoly, a game designed by priests. All stopped using those names at Parker Brothers’ request. Parker Brothers also voiced an objection to a real estate advertising campaign in Florida called “Park Place” and to an Oregonian marketer’s wish to name an apartment complex Marvin’s Garden.

  Before his sudden death, Rubin had discovered the 1936 Parker Brothers case against Texan Rudy Copeland, but had never gotten around to doing much with it. The file sat cast aside, along with the rest of his unfinished business. Droeger revisited it and read about the Inflation case. Both he and Ralph were shocked at its eerie parallels to their own case.

  The bombastic and lively Copeland had initially responded to Parker Brothers’ legal threat by charging that Darrow was not the inventor of Monopoly—the game had already been in the public domain for years, he said. His game Inflation featured New Deal Highway, Wall Street, and National Recovery Administration spaces. Players built cottages and apartments on properties, and a large sum of money could accumulate in the Jack Pot. However, whoever landed on that spot had to pay a 25 percent tax on the winnings to the game’s treasurer. In short, the game had the echo and feel of Monopoly.

  As they read through the court papers, Droeger and Ralph learned that Copeland had called on witnesses who had had connections to the game prior to 1935, the year of Darrow’s patent. A list of those names was included in the documents. The Anti-Monopoly team had their Rosetta stone.

  They knew what they had to do: track down any and all players involved in the Copeland case. Their hope was that those players would be able to testify that they had played the game before Parker Brothers had published Monopoly.

  Ralph and Droeger found other critical documents among the Inflation papers as well. One listed related patents, including two labeled “Magie 1904” and “Phillips 1924”—names Ralph recognized from the small red book that his son had so eagerly brought into his study. Knowing that patents are easily retrievable, he searched for Lizzie Magie’s name and found her 1904 and 1924 Landlord’s Game patents. Looking at the image of her board, Ralph felt as if a hand from another time was reaching out to him. It had been more than twenty-five years since Lizzie had died in obscurity, but her ink-and-paper protestation against the monopolists had survived. Staring at it and her patents, Ralph struggled to piece together exactly what she had been trying to say.

  •

  The Anti-Monopoly case was starting to receive more media attention, especially in the Bay Area, where sympathetic progressives rallied behind their board game hero. The Monopoly vs. Anti-Monopoly story line was irresistible to journalists, who immediately cast it as a battle between small and big business, West Coast and East Coast, new and old.

  Ralph’s sons, Mark and William, embraced the trial. Both took after their parents in their ravenous academic appetites, and they relished the bookish legal banter and stream of lawyers and reporters who swept in and out of their Keith Avenue living room. In the boys’ eyes, their father was becoming a real-life manifestation of the heroes they read about in books and comics such as The Adventures of Tintin (about a Belgian reporter who traverses the globe solving mysteries). Ralph also involved his sons in tactical decisions related to Anti-Monopoly’s legal and media strategy.

  Still, William was occasionally teased at school for going up against the beloved brand. Ruth and Ralph banished General Mills cereal from their kitchen cupboards, and their mounting legal bills, tallied on a board that hung in the kitchen, were a worry to the entire family.

  And as the Anti-Monopoly fight wore on and on, Ruth began to feel that something was wrong. She felt tired all the time, often falling asleep on the couch or taking naps while Mark and William played. Sometimes she lost feeling in her arms, causing her to drop whatever she was carrying, and she purchased plastic dishes to spare herself the humiliation of more shattered plates. Strangest of all was the sensation she felt when she put her foot down and couldn’t feel the ground beneath her. She was only in her thirties and had always been healthy and energetic. What could be wrong?

  Ruth had pledged her steadfast support for the cause, and was continuing to act as Anti-Monopoly Inc.’s secretary and treasurer, as well as take care of the children, but Ruth and Ralph worried about her health. The couple visited several doctors and explored a variety of possible diagnoses and cures, including hypnosis for pain, but concerns over her health soon joined the Anti-Monopoly case in the growing list of household concerns.

  Proceeding with the case, Droeger and Ralph successfully tracked down Daniel Layman. He had retired from the advertising industry and was now living on a suburban street in sunny Pasadena, California.

  Much to Ralph’s amazement, Layman still had the Finance game board that he had made decades earlier. In his personalized version of the game, neighborhoods were grouped by ethnicit
y: O’Leary Avenue, Delancey Street, and Maguire Street, each denoted with a clover, were $140 apiece; Cohen Boulevard, Epstein Road, and Goldberg Square, each denoted with a Star of David, were $80 apiece. The two cheapest properties, Wayback and Rubeville, had outhouses and cost $50 each; American Power and Light and United Gas International cost $75 each. In the middle of each row of properties was a railroad space: New York Central, Pennsylvania, Southern Pacific, and Santa Fe.

  Layman told Ralph and Droeger about Finance’s early history. Then he examined the booklet of rules that he had written decades before. He had intended to apply them to Finance, but they were actually the rules that his fraternity brothers at Williams College, the Thuns, had taught him for the monopoly game they had been playing for years. Ralph asked if he could speak with the Thuns, and Layman said he could put him in touch. They had remained friends, and Louis Thun had once sent Layman a package with an article about Darrow from an airline magazine. They “forgot to mention that when Mr. Darrow died, he was working on the invention of the wheel,” Thun wrote in his accompanying letter.

  Layman also told Ralph that economist and educator Scott Nearing had played the monopoly game early on. Ralph felt shocked—he had heard of Nearing’s famous academic freedom case and knew about his work as a radical.

  Then Ralph asked a crucial question: When he first played the game, did Layman and his fellow players call it “Monopoly”? Proving that the name “monopoly” had been in the public domain—i.e., had been a generic word—prior to Darrow’s 1935 patent was critical to his case. If it had been generic, then Ralph could argue in court that Parker Brothers should not have received a trademark in the first place and had no legal case against Ralph’s use of the word “Anti-Monopoly.”

  “Every single person who referred to this game at that time called it monopoly and nothing else,” Layman said.

  Bingo.

  In some ways, the actions of Layman and Darrow had not been all that different. Both men had seen a popular game, played it, and marketed it. But Layman had never filed for a patent, and had never claimed to have invented the game. Darrow had.

  Layman agreed to testify in the Anti-Monopoly trial. Standing on his lawn, he raised his Finance board up to his chest as Ralph clicked the shutter on his brand-new Polaroid SX-70 camera, another photo to add to his growing Anti-Monopoly evidence arsenal.

  •

  Finally, Ralph and Droeger received some replies from the Christian Science Monitor advertisement. Through those replies and the continuing research from the Rudy Copeland list of players, they learned that the monopoly game had once been played in some of the most influential intellectual pockets of the Northeast, including Columbia University in New York City.

  Ralph flew east to meet with a woman named Alice Mitchell, who told him about her husband, George; the monopoly games they’d played; and George’s colleague at Columbia, the famed economist Rexford Tugwell, who had first taught George the game. Ralph asked Alice if she still owned the original board she had made. She produced a cloth approximately the size of a card table. She had painted everything on the board, she said, except for the words in one corner that read, “Graduate Student’s Club at Johns Hopkins University.” Alice agreed to testify under oath that she had played the monopoly game before Darrow had produced it.

  Ralph then got in touch with Ruth Raiford. She had seen his advertisement in the Christian Science Monitor weeks before, but it had taken some nudging from her friend Dottie Harvey, the now-grown-up little girl who had watched her mother, Ruth, paint so many monopoly boards in Atlantic City, before she contacted him. Later, Ruth Raiford would put him in touch with both Dottie and Dottie’s father, Cyril, and with her sister-in-law Dorothea Raiford, widow of Jesse Raiford, the real estate agent who had attached prices to the game’s properties.

  Ruth also had an old oilcloth board game to show Ralph. When she pulled it out, he could hardly believe it. The board looked almost identical to the Monopoly board he and his family had played on that fateful night just a few years earlier. The color groupings were almost identical, and so were the Atlantic City property names. Ruth pointed to a space on the board and began to chuckle. Marven Gardens was spelled with an “e,” consistent with the real-life spelling of the name—Charles Darrow and Parker Brothers had gotten it wrong.

  Ralph asked Ruth if she knew of a woman named Joanna who had worked at an aircraft company.

  “Yes,” Ruth replied. “That’s my niece Joanna.” Joanna Raiford McKain.

  Ralph’s heart leapt. He had finally found her. Joanna lived only a few blocks away from her mother.

  Ruth had one more suggestion for Ralph.

  “You should speak with Charles Todd,” she told him.

  ANSPACH CONNECTS THE DOTS

  “All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon.”

  —VOLTAIRE

  As the Anti-Monopoly trial gained attention in the mid-1970s, Parker Brothers commented publicly, albeit briefly, on the case. Robert Daggett, who continued to represent the company, told reporters that he could prove that Ralph had chosen the name Anti-Monopoly to capitalize on Monopoly’s trademark, because sales of Ralph’s game when it was called Bust-the-Trust had gone nowhere. With his comment, Daggett played into the idea that Ralph was a crackpot opportunist, a loony left-wing professor looking to make money off of an American icon.

  Ralph was too busy trying to track down the early monopoly players to take much notice of his opponents’ remarks. The testimonies he had obtained were helpful, but questions remained. For the moment, all he really had was a hodgepodge of elderly people remembering long-ago days spent over handmade game boards. What he needed was a linear narrative of Monopoly’s inception. The hunt continued.

  In the meantime, depositions of the early monopoly players had to be taken—and taken carefully. Ralph told potential witnesses that he wanted to learn about Monopoly’s origins, but avoided saying that the makers of Monopoly were trying to put him out of business. Even the mention of Anti-Monopoly could put him at risk—he could be charged with witness tampering, in which case the witness’s testimony would be thrown out.

  Taking the depositions of the older Quaker players was not without awkward moments. Both sets of lawyers needed to be in attendance, meaning that the legal rivals had to travel and spend significant amounts of time together against their respective wills. Usually, that meant Ralph, John Droeger, Parker Brothers lawyer Ollie Howes, and a court reporter whom none of them had met before piling into a car together, even as they were conspiring about how to destroy each other in court. The sequence of events for setting up a deposition usually included Ralph making a preliminary phone call, then making a scouting trip to see if someone would make a good witness, then he and the lawyers traveling together to take the sworn deposition.

  Ruth Raiford had put Ralph in touch with her old Quaker friend Cyril Harvey, a retired teacher. Cyril’s wife, Ruth, had passed away some time before. Cyril agreed to be deposed, and in 1975, forty years after the boisterous monopoly nights in his home in Atlantic City, he and his daughter, Dottie, sat down with Ralph, Droeger, Howes, and a court reporter in Haddonfield, New Jersey.

  In an early question to Cyril Harvey, Droeger described the game in question as a “real estate trading game,” knowing that if he asked about Monopoly by name, it could be considered a leading question. Immediately, Howes jumped in to ask Harvey if he understood what “a real estate trading game” meant.

  “Yes, I guess that’s right,” Harvey said. “Oh, that’s right. He had to ask the question that way.”

  “Why did he have to ask the question that way?” Howes asked.

  Everyone was curious to hear the elderly man’s answer. Was Ralph or Droeger guilty of witness tampering?

  “Well,” Harvey said. “I’m just being facetious. I mean, he couldn’t just start out and use the word.”

  “Did he tell you that?” Howes pressed.

&nbs
p; “No,” Harvey said. “I have heard enough Watergate to figure some things out …” The televised Watergate hearings had, for better or for worse, given the public an education in the fine points of questioning witnesses.

  “Watergate is making a hell of a difference in our profession,” Droeger interjected. “Isn’t it?”

  On the deposition questions went.

  “I’m not surprised at the time it took with Watergate,” Harvey commented at one point during Howes’s questioning. “This is infinitesimal in comparison.”

  Droeger, oddly enough, came to his opponent’s rescue. “Oh, he’s just being very thorough. We’re going to earn our money here today.”

  One of the lawyers produced a copy of an early Finance board, published by Knapp Electric.

  “I never saw anything like that before,” Harvey said, looking at the board. “That is something.”

  Both sides tried to use the Finance board to ask Harvey about the differences between it and his Atlantic City board. But Harvey couldn’t remember the details of the game that he had played some forty years ago.

  •

  Acting on the tip from Ruth Raiford, Ralph tracked down Charles Todd. He felt nervous about calling him. Many of the potential witnesses he had tried to find had turned out to be deceased or unable to remember much about their monopoly days. He also worried about the risk of accidentally tampering with a witness—a mistake he especially didn’t want to make with Todd. Raiford had led him to believe that Todd’s testimony could be critical.

  Ralph dialed Todd’s number in Augusta, Georgia, and his wife, Olive, answered. She told him that they had been expecting his call ever since Ruth Raiford had alerted them to his interest in Monopoly’s origins. They would be happy to speak with him.

  On his way to the Todd home, Ralph wondered, as he had wondered before, why Parker Brothers had had Darrow sign for the Monopoly patent. It appeared that Darrow had never applied for a patent during the two years that he had sold the game on his own, nor had he sought to register the word “Monopoly” as a trademark. Yet Darrow had put a copyright on his game board once it had been acquired by Parker Brothers. Why? It didn’t add up. Had Parker Brothers needed Darrow to get the patent for some reason?