The Monopolists Read online

  The General Mills offer represented a tremendous amount of money for the Anspach family. The proposed six-figure sum was more than enough to pay off the Anti-Monopoly legal bills, put Mark and William through college, and maybe even buy a house that wasn’t slipping away.

  But for Ralph, it wasn’t all about the money. He wanted to prevail in court for the right to make his own Anti-Monopoly game and tell the world about Monopoly’s true origins. He was also concerned that if Parker Brothers had the rights to Anti-Monopoly, it would allow the game to wither away, just as it had done with Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game.

  It wasn’t all about the money for Ruth, either. She was concerned about General Mills having ownership of a game that they had invented as a form of political advocacy and education.

  It was important to Ralph to have consensus among all his family members before making any decision. Ruth was already on board, and when he spoke to Mark and William, they vowed their support for Anti-Monopoly as well.

  When Ralph told Droeger that he would not accept the settlement offer, Droeger asked him if he was insane. Droeger asked to meet with the rest of the Anti-Monopoly board of directors and found that they were in agreement with their leader.

  In a June 10 settlement meeting with the Parker Brothers lawyers before Judge Lloyd Burke in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Droeger said that he had done everything in his power to make his client understand that this was a good offer, but to no avail. The next day, the Anti-Monopoly team formally turned down the settlement. That afternoon at a meeting in his firm’s offices, Droeger told Ralph and his colleagues that it was “bizarre” to turn down an offer of a pile of money and a chance to alter the game industry from a coveted position inside the business.

  Things only got worse from there. At another conference later that summer, Droeger told Judge Burke that he thought his clients were “crazy” and that he was not going to defend them anymore. Ralph was confused as to why Judge Burke was even there, as it was his understanding that after a settlement offer, a case was assigned to another judge, so that the proceedings could start afresh and without bias. Outside of chambers, the tension between Droeger and Ralph regarding Ralph’s epic unpaid legal fees only further intensified. Droeger’s partners had been pressuring him about collecting for the tremendous number of hours he’d spent on the case.

  Judge Burke did ultimately recuse himself from the Anti-Monopoly case, but the relationship between Droeger and Ralph continued to crumble. In addition, due to a mishandled court procedure, Ralph’s hope that his case would now be assigned to a jury rather than to a judge was thwarted. Ralph began to look for another lawyer.

  Ralph asked Droeger to hand over all the documents related to the trial. For now, they would go to Benjamin “Barney” Dreyfus, a friend of Droeger’s who had done some work on the case early on.

  Dreyfus had built his career as a champion for underdogs. His client list included whistle-blowers, Black Panthers, and a woman named Helen Sobell, who had been trying to visit her husband at Alcatraz, where he’d been serving a thirty-year sentence, having been convicted of conspiring with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Dreyfus’s core causes were freedom of speech and voting rights, and he was known to often work for little or no money.

  Ralph now found himself at the mercy of whichever new judge was assigned to his case. That turned out to be Judge Spencer Williams, Richard Nixon appointee and reputed fan of big business. At the time, Williams was one of the most overturned judges in the entire state, meaning that his decisions were often reversed on appeal. Ralph also heard that Williams hailed from Massachusetts (Parker Brothers’ home base), was a fan of Parker Brothers, and had ruled in favor of large businesses in the past. Ralph was in despair.

  During a particularly low moment of the trial, Dreyfus sat in the court cafeteria with Ralph and his younger son, William, and told the Anspachs that he thought a trial loss was imminent.

  William, after years of putting up with bullying, watching the jokes come in at his father’s expense, and now sitting in a courtroom for long hours, finally couldn’t handle it anymore. He burst into tears.

  “I started crying because I was so upset,” William later said. “That was really devastating.” He added, “But I think he was trying to be honest.”

  •

  At some point before the Parker Brothers–sponsored national and world Monopoly playoffs, scheduled for winter 1975, Jay Walker flew to San Francisco to meet with Ralph. Walker was still irate over being banned from the official, elite Monopoly competitions. The tournaments were invitational, so Parker Brothers had every right to exclude him, but as one of the top players in the country, Walker felt that he should have the opportunity to compete.

  Rumors flew that Parker Brothers was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to transport players from all around the world to Atlantic City for days of glittery competition at the national championship, then Washington, D.C., for the global competition soon thereafter. Just two years earlier, a “life-size” game board had been constructed in the seaside town, its properties traversed by young women in bikinis.

  “I call it a farce,” Walker said of the upcoming tournament. No one from his region had even been considered for the qualifying rounds. Ralph and Walker decided to join forces, and they began to plot what they called the “Atlantic City caper.”

  Gene Donner started to work on publicity. Leading up to the tournament, he helped get two stories written in the Atlantic City Press about the Quakers and their role in the game’s early history. He also purchased an ad in the paper promoting a lecture open to the public to be given by a professor of economics at Atlantic City’s Holiday Inn at two P.M. on the day of the tournament. The Holiday Inn was located next door to the building where the tournament was taking place, and the time slot fell in between Parker Brothers’ scheduled events.

  Atlantic City’s decay had only worsened after World War II. With the widespread use of automobiles and the establishment of commercial airlines, the Northeast’s middle class now had many vacation destinations to choose from. Atlantic City was no longer glamorous or exotic. A third of its citizens lived on welfare, and public health officials were fighting rampant venereal disease. The only activity that seemed to be on the rise was arson.

  Parker Brothers saw the advertisement for Ralph’s lecture and changed its schedule to conflict with Ralph’s event, making it extremely difficult for journalists to attend his lecture. In addition, at company expense, it shuttled reporters away from Atlantic City and to Washington, D.C., where the world championship was taking place. Parker Brothers seemed to have outwitted the Atlantic City caper.

  As part of his “Atlantic City caper,” Ralph Anspach took out advertisements for a lecture designed to undercut the publicity around Monopoly tournaments. (Anspach archives)

  Undeterred, however, Ralph packed up his actual-size board game replicas in his black artist portfolio and he, Donner, Walker, and another Cornell friend headed to Washington for the tournament. Once there, they found the area surrounding L’Enfant hotel, where the tournament was taking place, thick with security personnel. Parker Brothers had learned its lesson from Atlantic City and was hoping to shield everyone in attendance from the band of Anti-Monopoly misfits.

  Ralph’s plan was to transplant his Atlantic City scheme: host a lecture in a conference room at a cheaper hotel nearby and invite journalists. L’Enfant was not allowed to give out the names of its guests, but somehow Walker and his friend managed to obtain a list of the reporters, contestants, and other Monopoly-related guests staying at the hotel. They put together press kits and distributed them, only to realize afterward that they had forgotten to insert the “truth about Monopoly” lecture information in the kits, thus defeating the whole point of the endeavor.

  All would have been lost had Walker not learned that a breakfast banquet was planned for the Monopoly press. The saboteurs dashed into the L’Enfant dining room b
efore the guests’ arrival and carefully tucked invitations beneath the plates. Then they raced back to the conference room that they’d rented at the nearby hotel and set up for the lecture. Ralph pulled out the pre-Darrow boards he had collected, along with property cards and some examples of the early monopoly money. Copies of the sworn depositions he had gathered from Daniel Layman and the Quaker players were laid out as well. Reporters trickled in and began to learn the details of the case that had consumed Ralph and his lawyers for many months. The unraveling of the board game tale that the public knew had begun.

  After the lecture, Ralph tried to get back into L’Enfant for the presentation of the championship’s top award, the Darrow Cup, but a representative hired by the company asked him to leave. He boarded a plane back to California to finish preparing for his trial, pleased with his work in D.C.

  •

  Infuriated with Parker Brothers for bestowing the Darrow Cup on its champions, in 1975, Ralph Anspach hatched a plan to sabotage Monopoly tournaments. (Anspach archives)

  The phone rang, interrupting another frigid February day in the Bay Area. On the other end of the line was a man claiming to be a former Parker Brothers employee. He had heard about the Anti-Monopoly trial and wanted to be a whistle-blower. Ralph quickly grabbed a writing utensil and a piece of paper.

  “Parker steals games,” the man told Ralph, going on to describe a black box at the company offices that contained the “true story” of Monopoly. The whistle-blower did not feel comfortable testifying at Ralph’s trial, as he had a game development company that still depended on its relationship with Parker Brothers to survive. The lack of on-the-record testimony was unfortunate for Ralph, but he was emboldened by the tip and began to seek out other Parker Brothers employees, past and present. None of them agreed to testify against the company.

  The case and related stresses were wearing on Ruth and Ralph’s marriage. The financial arguments continued as Ralph shifted expenses on and off credit cards. Ruth’s health was not improving, and increasingly the doctors suspected her condition to be multiple sclerosis. Ralph’s sons were inching toward adulthood, and life in the household was not getting any easier. Ralph was frequently out of town, and when he was home, the conversation often revolved around the impending trial.

  •

  Humid, corrupt, and crime-ridden. Such were typical characteristics of summers in Chicago, along with sidewalks that could double as skillets and foul moods. But what transpired at the secretive toy design firm Marvin Glass and Associates in July of 1976 surprised even the most blasé Chicagoans.

  First, lawyer Carl Person, acting on behalf of his client Christian Thee, served executives and game designers at Marvin Glass with subpoenas. Thee claimed that the company had stolen his invention, an art auction game that he called Artifax and Marvin Glass had marketed as Masterpiece.

  Five days later, in an apparently unrelated event, Albert Keller, a designer at Marvin Glass, headed into the office. He had notes in his shoes. He also had a gun. He walked into the fortresslike building and down the corridor of the second floor of the Marvin Glass offices, entering and exiting one office after another. He shot and killed his coworkers Anson Isaacson and Joseph Callan in Isaacson’s office. He shot two more employees in another office, killing Kathy Dunn, a twenty-three-year-old designer. Then he shot two more employees, reloaded his pistol, and shot himself in the temple.

  By ten A.M., sirens were wailing into the thick Chicago air. When the police arrived at the Marvin Glass offices, they found bodies slumped over desks, surrounded by pools of blood and brightly colored toys. Keller’s body was sprawled in the second-floor corridor, one hand still clutching the pistol. Reportedly, a model of a toy police car was nearby.

  Employees and executives at toy and game firms across the country were shocked to hear about the carnage. They were baffled as to why the shooting had taken place and how a killer could have been lurking inside the walls of one of the industry’s most famed and acclaimed firms tasked with creating childhood joy. Keller had been a deeply troubled man, but his rampage highlighted the fact that the game industry was not just about fun. It was cutthroat big business.

  Ralph heard about the Marvin Glass shooting when a reporter phoned him for a comment on the breaking news. What breaking news? he asked.

  He listened to what had transpired with a mix of horror and anxiety, knowing firsthand just how dark and sinister the game industry could be. Game ideas weren’t just pieces of paper, patents and prototypes. Inventions were often central to the identity of their inventor and, in extreme cases, could become matters of life and death.

  The murders at Marvin Glass had been the work of a mentally ill, disgruntled employee, but something at the company had enraged the distraught man. As the legal claims brought against Marvin Glass just a few days before the killings showed, idea stealing—and who knew what else?—seemed to have become common in the industry. A large company could purchase or contract new game ideas through a smaller company like Marvin Glass, where they could be further developed, and then get a patent for the finished product.

  •

  By November 1976, the battle was about to begin in the Anti-Monopoly vs. Monopoly courtroom. Robert Daggett and Ollie Howes were confident of a Parker Brothers victory. Former executive Robert Barton was due to appear, and the Parker Brothers legal team had assembled several toy and game store employees who would testify that customers were confused about who made Anti-Monopoly and who made Monopoly. Parker Brothers had brought in additional counsel as well—a fleet of sharply dressed men in suits who contrasted with the motley band of Anti-Monopoly supporters, mostly Bay Area locals.

  Ralph’s attorneys Barney Dreyfus and Bob Chickering were representing Anti-Monopoly in court. Reporters wielded their notepads and took their seats. Judge Williams sat on the bench.

  Daggett called up a woman from Bellevue, Washington. From 1968 to 1976, she said she had worked at a toy and hobby store that sold both Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly. She told the court that when she had first seen Anti-Monopoly, she had thought Parker Brothers had made it because of its name, and that store customers had been confused too.

  A toy and game store owner testified that in November 1975 his store had taken out an ad in the Cincinnati Enquirer that had read, “Monopoly or Anti-Monopoly, your choice, $4.48,” followed by the phrase “by famous Parker Brothers.” A similar ad had run in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch. The store owner told the court that he had thought that because the games were synonymous, Anti-Monopoly would sell.

  “Does the prefix anti, a-n-t-i, mean anything significant to you, sir?” Daggett asked.

  “It means against.”

  “Does anti-abortion mean the same thing to you as abortion?”

  “Well,” the store owner said. “The prefix ‘anti’ means anything that you are saying against any other wording or name that you use it.”

  “It means the opposite, does it not?”

  “Yeah, I would—yeah, possibly.”

  By the time the court broke for lunch, the outlook for Ralph was dreary. Clerk after clerk had filed onto the stand to paint a picture of a game profiting on the tailwinds of Monopoly’s success.

  In the afternoon, another woman who worked at the New York City Parker Brothers office took the stand. One of her duties at the office was to answer the phones. She recalled that on one occasion when she picked up the phone, Ralph was on the line. His first words to her were “This is your enemy.”

  She said she didn’t understand his humor. Then Ralph explained that he was from Anti-Monopoly and had heard that she would be called as a witness. He said he wanted to know what she planned to say in her deposition. He also said that Parker Brothers was going to lose the case. “He told me over and over that—that Parker Brothers is going to lose,” she recalled.

  “Did these conversations please you or disturb you or leave you neutral emotionally?” Daggett asked.

  “I’m not sure that’s relevant, Your
Honor,” Dreyfus said.

  “I think it is, Your Honor,” Daggett said.

  “Objection overruled,” Judge Williams said.

  “They disturbed me,” she said.

  “Will you tell the court why?” Daggett said.

  “Well, I had the impression I was being interrogated on the phone,” she said. “He didn’t scream at me or anything. He spoke moderately, but I had the feeling that I was being manipulated and that—he didn’t come out and say that he did not want me to give the deposition, but I just got the feeling that he wanted—he wanted to know everything that I was going to say and my words were going to get twisted around somehow.”

  Then Jim Esposito, a young, shaggy-haired freelance journalist living in Venice Beach, took the stand. Dreyfus had called him. Esposito, who was writing an exposé about the game industry for Oui magazine, recounted his conversation with the national sales manager for Parker Brothers. Esposito said that the manager had told him that anytime Parker Brothers or Milton Bradley released a new game, orders came in all the time from distributors and game store owners who were confused about which company had produced the new game.

  This testimony helped dampen the Parker Brothers argument, as it portrayed a confusing business landscape. People were often unclear about which company made what.

  Daggett began to cross-examine Esposito, whose story was still in its early stages. “There are several references in your notes to me,” Daggett said. “One of which says I have been a member of the Bohemian Club for some years. What has that got to do with this article?” (?Judge Williams was reportedly a member of the club as well.)