The Monopolists Read online

  Next, Howes confronted Ralph about the similarity between the name “Anti-Monopoly” and the name “Monopoly.” The General Mills lawyers, working on behalf of Parker Brothers and its new parent company, knew that the consumer-confusion angle was critical to winning their case.

  Ralph said that he had never heard of anyone trying to return an Anti-Monopoly game because they had purchased it instead of Monopoly by mistake. Howes moved on, digging into Ralph’s rejected Anti-Monopoly trademark application. Ralph explained what his earlier lawyer had told him about patents often being rejected by lower-level patent officers attempting to avoid granting patents that could be duplicative.

  “Nevertheless,” Howes said, “it is a determination that somebody expert in this field had made that determination?”

  Ralph’s lawyer objected.

  The deposition didn’t last eight hours this time, but it was long enough for Ralph. General Mills now knew the broader contours of what he understood to be the hidden truth about Monopoly, all of which could explode even more in public if the case went to trial.

  •

  Charles Darrow never had another board game hit. Despite a vigorous advertising campaign, the stock-exchange-themed Bulls and Bears did not sell well. But it didn’t matter to the Darrows. The family continued to enjoy their Monopoly fame and fortune, traveling the world by cruise ship and raising orchids in Bucks County.

  Darrow’s artist friend Franklin Alexander never received compensation or recognition for his contribution to the game, but he laughed it off and said he didn’t care. The Alexanders and the Darrows remained friends well into old age, with Charles and Franklin still enjoying a good fishing expedition and a good chuckle over their poke at pop culture history.

  In 1952, Darrow’s Monopoly patent expired, seventeen years after it had been approved by the U.S. Patent Office. However, the game’s trademark rights and copyright lived on—Parker Brothers remained what some later called “a monopolist over Monopoly.” Lizzie’s patent number had disappeared from sets decades earlier—an unusual occurrence, as the earliest date of a patent is seldom removed from a product. But given the circumstances, it was only logical that Parker Brothers would not want to draw attention to the game’s early years.

  Even when in his seventies, Darrow continued to tell reporters his mythical version of Monopoly’s origins. The Great Depression had ended long ago, but the Darrows had never forgotten it. Esther hoarded pencils until they were tiny nubs, and Charles still made his son William and later his grandsons work for pay, ten cents an hour to weed dandelions. In a navy blue two-ring binder, Charles marked the purchases and sales of individual stocks he was invested in, and those investments mirrored the properties on the Monopoly board—the B&O Railroad, the Pennsylvania Company, various utilities.

  Dickie lived in the Vineland facility in New Jersey, occasionally coming home for weekends or holidays. William studied agriculture in college and eventually bought property adjacent to his parents’.

  The Darrow home was filled with trophies from their travels—exotic tribal masks from Africa, orchids from obscure rainforests, and knickknacks from around the world. Charles and Esther took home movies and photographs of their voyages and showed them to friends who were interested. The Darrows were grateful for the Monopoly fortune, but throughout the years, Esther sometimes commented that no amount of money could bring Dickie’s health back.

  For the most part, Charles Darrow kept quiet about Charles Todd and the monopoly games that had been played before he stepped in. But he wasn’t totally unaware of Lizzie Magie. In an article about Darrow and the game in the American Magazine, a reporter wrote, “But [Darrow] wants it known, that part credit goes to a Virginia woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Phillips, who started him on the idea.”

  Darrow’s modest efforts to give Lizzie acknowledgment went largely unnoticed.

  •

  On a warm day in August 1967 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Charles Darrow got in his car and drove to the post office to collect the mail, just as he had done every morning for years. Returning home, Darrow took the mail into his office. Over coffee, he sorted through envelopes, daily notices, and financial statements. Then Darrow collapsed, a cerebral aneurysm killing him instantly. His obituary in the New York Times and other publications hailed him as the inventor of Monopoly. Members of the Darrow family continued to receive residuals from the game decades after his death.

  •

  Ralph had finally linked together enough of Monopoly’s history to create something of a complete story, and it bore little resemblance to the tale that had been told by Parker Brothers. As Ralph saw it, Parker Brothers had not only lied about the true inventor of the game, they had engaged in patent fraud and also tried to erase any signs of the game before 1935.

  Ralph flew east to Philadelphia to aid in deposing Darrow’s widow. Elderly and elegant, but still mourning Dickie’s death four years earlier, Esther appeared with her lawyer in his firm’s storied, antique-filled downtown Philadelphia office. Howes and Droeger were also in the room.

  Pulling out an oilcloth and photos of early game boards, the lawyers began questioning Esther about what she knew of the game. She said that her late husband had designed its toy locomotives, and when asked if he had also created the “little man with the mustache,” she said, “Well, I think so.” When asked whether her husband had received any help from friends in developing the game, Esther said that “there were neighbors next door that I can’t remember the name of ‘’ and that he had played the game with Charles Todd. She couldn’t remember why her husband had called his game Monopoly and said that the family had seldom vacationed in Atlantic City, bringing into serious question the long-held belief that the town had served as Darrow’s vacation inspiration.

  •

  With a good handle on Monopoly’s history, Ralph now shifted his focus from deciphering the true story to spreading it. As with his earlier causes—the Arab-Israeli War, the Vietnam War—telling the truth about Monopoly became a crusade that consumed every ounce of his being.

  By now, it was clear that Monopoly’s history, visually displayed, was more akin to an organic chemistry formula than the average toy’s or game’s.

  Ralph Anspach, inventor of Anti-Monopoly, became a board game detective, using early, pre-Parker Brothers boards as evidence of the game’s controversial origins in his case against Parker Brothers. (Anspach archives)

  Not everyone was eager to hear the truth. At William’s school, fellow students—and a few teachers—sometimes mocked him about his nutty Anti-Monopoly inventor father. Others told the younger Anspach son that they didn’t understand why his family was working so hard to rip apart a treasured icon of American pop culture. Some family friends began to snub Ruth and Ralph—their patience for hearing about legal battles having worn out. Dinner and party invitations trickled to a halt. And Ruth continued to undergo test after test.

  Gene Donner, Ralph’s public relations man, still cast Ralph as a character in a David vs. Goliath narrative, and reporters still responded. But the Anspachs’s growing Anti-Monopoly file of clippings was also sprinkled with negative notes, some painting Ralph as a lunatic.

  The case had turned into an exhausting rotation of courthouse visits and lawyer appointments, and Ralph was often out of town, doing research on the road. Ruth, Mark, and William talked constantly about Anti-Monopoly, the game and the legal battle.

  One time, William picked up the phone to call a friend and heard a clicking noise. He mentioned it to his parents. Sure enough, Ralph and Ruth began to hear the clicking on the phone line too.

  The family discussed whether or not they were being wiretapped. Given all the chatter about the government developing a penchant for the practice, the idea didn’t seem entirely far-fetched. Could Parker Brothers or an outside private investigator be listening in on their conversations? Was their paranoia misplaced?

  After discussing the matter among themselves, the family decided not to say a
nything about their suspicions. It would make them sound too crazy. Instead, they would just wait it out and conduct important conversations only in person. Nonetheless, Ralph felt the same way he had during the height of his involvement in the anti–Vietnam War movement. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.

  •

  Meanwhile, on a college campus on the other side of the country, a different kind of Monopoly controversy was brewing. Cornell University had become a hub for zealous Monopoly players and, as such, had brought two unlikely friends together shortly after they had arrived on campus in 1973.

  Jay Walker was the son of a successful real estate developer in Scarsdale, New York, and had a dorm room filled with then-high-end gadgetry such as an open-reel tape deck, Sennheiser headphones, and an IBM Selectric typewriter. A proud libertarian, Walker quoted Ayn Rand with gusto and boasted his own “Walker Foundation” letterhead. Jeff Lehman was a middle-class kid from Bethesda, Maryland. His father worked in civil service, and his mother had raised five kids and then returned to the work force to practice law. A math major, Lehman was an ardent believer in activist government and New Deal philosophy.

  When the two students weren’t roaming Cornell’s expansive green lawns, they could be found holed up in its large, austere brick buildings, playing games at odd hours. From his dormitory, Walker held Monopoly fests that featured four to six regular players, including Lehman. All were completely unaware that their collegiate predecessors had done the same with different versions of the game forty years earlier.

  Walker, Lehman, and their friends liked Monopoly so much and played it so often and with such vigor that they began to modify the rules, adding things to the game that Walker thought had never been done before. They experimented with more-effective deal making, offering immunity for landing on properties, and analyzed which properties were the most likely to receive renters (the strip on the board from the Jail space to the Free Parking space), selling each other options to buy a property or engage in profit-sharing arrangements. Walker proclaimed that anything not explicitly prohibited in the rules should be permitted, a wildly different style of play than most of the players had grown up with.

  The players formed the Ivy League Monopoly Association, with Lehman and Walker presiding over its Cornell chapter. They began to train for regional tournaments, traveling and crashing with friends as needed, and spending at least one night sleeping on the floor. As the two friends honed their skills, they became critical of the competition, which they found to be unimpressive, and the “terrible rules” used at the regional tournaments, as compared with the freewheeling rules they used at Cornell.

  Before long, the Cornell group had set up its own regional tournament at a fair in Syracuse, drawing over one hundred players (Walker won), and a Monopoly exhibit that drew thousands of viewers. When Parker Brothers heard that Walker and his cohorts were using the advanced Cornell rules for their games, a lawyer sent Walker a letter asking him to stop. It also demanded that the players hand over all rights of authorship over their rules to the company. When Walker and Lehman asked if Parker Brothers was willing to pay them for their hard work, they were told that Monopoly belonged to Parker Brothers and students could not modify the game without its permission.

  That spring, the Cornell group conducted a Monopoly marathon on campus featuring four players playing fifty games simultaneously for two days. The proceeds went to local charities. After that success, Walker and Lehman weren’t satisfied with running local tournaments anymore—they wanted to go to the game’s national and world championship, sponsored by Parker Brothers. They divided their efforts: Lehman continued running the tournament, and Walker entered the world championship. He won his region’s local competition and advanced to the national championship, held at F.A.O. Schwarz in New York, the same store where the Darrow version of the game had been sold forty years earlier.

  As word of the Ivy League Monopoly scene trickled out in the press, Walker and Lehman were contacted by a book publisher about writing a book on Monopoly strategy. Novices in the book industry, the pair were unsure what to do but saw that Yankee baseball pitcher Jim Bouton was scheduled to lecture on campus about his book Ball Four. The two approached Bouton afterward for advice, and he recommended his literary agent, who also represented famed children’s author Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time.

  With the help of the agent, the two college students sold their book concept to Dell Publishing for an advance of ten thousand dollars, and Walker hired “a whole set of fancy lawyers” to review their text. He had heard that Parker Brothers had made legal threats to their publisher, claiming that their guidebook infringed on the Monopoly trademark. Infuriated by the challenge to what Walker felt was the freedom of the press, he dumped more money into legal bills to counteract their prepublication challenges.

  During Christmas vacation of their sophomore year, Walker and Lehman hibernated in Walker’s suite in the Sigma Phi fraternity and put together the book, taking turns writing the chapters. Their finished product was titled 1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games and contained “for the first time, the sure-fire skills, strategies and secrets the experts use.”

  The two students had realized that the return on investment of Monopoly properties was not equal. While the blue and the green properties were the priciest and most coveted among amateurs, the orange and the red ones yielded higher rents relative to their costs and the cost of buying houses and hotels. Years later, a computer enthusiast in Downers Grove, Illinois, analyzed the odds of winning based on 187,000 Monopoly games, and his findings confirmed that the orange properties were potentially more lucrative than the blue ones. Walker and Lehman also understood that Monopoly wasn’t purely a game of luck—the art of deal making played a significant role, as it was unlikely that one could obtain a monopoly just by landing on all spaces of a like color. Most people played Monopoly incorrectly, injecting far too much cash into the game, which allowed a single game to go on for hours and hours. People also felt entitled to ask for rent owed after a turn had passed. To Walker and his friends, these were marks of an amateur.

  In 1000 Ways to Win Monopoly Games, published in 1975, Walker and Lehman offered simple tips, encouraging players to buy every property that they landed on and recommending when to build four houses per property rather than a hotel and thus create a housing shortage, as each box was limited to thirty-two houses and twelve hotels. Most people forgot that when a player landed on a property and decided not to purchase it, the banker should then auction it off, accelerating the pace of the game and giving a nod to the system that Lizzie Magie had originally conceived.

  The authors advocated not breaking the rules, but rather knowing them inside out and using them with clever aplomb. The earlier a player could trade, the better, as “trading is the key to almost every Monopoly victory.” When players paid off a mortgage on a property, they commonly forgot to pay the bank back an additional 10 percent. A player in Jail retained the right to collect rental income, making it an advantageous place to be later in the game to avoid landing on a competitor’s built-up property monopoly. Railroads and utilities were good to own, but inferior to colored property groups. Immunity deals, which offered free stays on properties, were fair. “A Monopoly game,” Walker and Lehman wrote, “can be a lot like golf. You can play well for several hours, then make one little mistake and lose it all.”

  Parker Brothers did not acknowledge any of the records set by the players at the Cornell tournaments, asked Walker and Lehman to stop printing their book, and effectively locked Walker out of the Parker Brothers world championship.

  “I’ve offered them pretty much everything,” Walker later said. “And every time they turn around and tell me, ‘no, no, no, no, no, no.”’ Through their agent, Walker and Lehman found a lawyer who was so enraged by the Parker Brothers response that he agreed to represent them at little to no cost.

  On April 28, 1975, Walker read a front-page story about Ralph Anspach and his legal
battle with Parker Brothers in the Wall Street Journal. Within days, Walker looked up Ralph’s phone number and called him in Berkeley. Ralph had received his share of prank calls since his legal battle had begun, but Walker’s story captured his attention, and the two swapped anecdotes. Both men felt that Parker Brothers’ actions were stifling the development of its own game. They began devising a plan.

  A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

  “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

  —ADAM SMITH

  In June 1975, John Droeger called Ralph with good news: Parker Brothers, via its parent company, General Mills, had made a settlement offer. This could be it—the end to nearly two years of legal hell, credit card bills, jetlag, and personal strain. General Mills’ offer was “very generous,” Droeger said.

  General Mills offered to make Ralph an executive in its games division, which now clearly included its Parker Brothers acquisition, and to give him more than $500,000—roughly $2.2 million in today’s dollars—plus damages. In exchange: He had to hand over the production of Anti-Monopoly.

  Droeger regarded the job offer as a chance for Ralph to “change things from the inside” while also earning a hearty salary. Droeger had handled some big settlements in his career, but this would be his largest yet. The settlement would also allow Ralph to finally pay his legal bills. Droeger felt that the offer, especially the cash part, was a good deal for his client and that the Anspachs would be crazy not to take it.

  At home, the family deliberated. It was possible, they thought, that General Mills was trying to buy Ralph’s silence. If he accepted the offer and became a Parker Brothers employee, he might not be able to talk freely about Monopoly’s origins anymore.