The Monopolists Page 5

  In developing Banking, George tapped into a collective ambition, which in its best light resembled driven entrepreneurship; in its worst, downright greed. The game was about the desire to get rich quick, but also about people being able to live out a fantasy. If people liked to play rich, they might also like to play detective, world traveler, or star author, he reasoned.

  George submitted Banking to two Boston book publishers. Both turned him down. Undeterred, he used fifty dollars he had earned selling fruit grown on his family’s land to publish the game himself. Five hundred copies of Banking hit the market just before Christmas of 1883.

  Needing time to develop his small business, George asked for and was granted a three-week leave of absence from high school. He then traveled throughout New England selling his game, to clear a profit of one hundred dollars. Before graduating from high school, George published two more games, Baker’s Dozen and Famous Men, the latter designed by one of his teachers.

  In spite of his success with games, George was drawn to journalism. After high school, he worked as a junior reporter at a Boston newspaper and tried to juggle his reporting duties with his games business. His interest in games was little more than a hobby, he thought. He lacked an office, a printing press, and employees, and the future of the game industry was unclear. The newspaper industry, on the other hand, was flourishing.

  But juggling the two businesses proved to be too much. George became ill with a severe case of bronchitis, and his doctor advised him to choose between the two careers, because his serious illness proved that he could not do both. George chose games.

  •

  Milton Bradley, the man who would later become George Parker’s chief competitor, had gotten his start decades earlier. Born in Vienna, Maine, in 1836, into a family that had endured epic suffering since arriving in New England two centuries earlier, Bradley was already past his failing career as a printer and into game invention when George was born.

  Bradley’s early years had been marked by poverty. By the time he was ten years old, his family was broke, thanks to his father’s botched investment in a process to turn potato crops into starch. Bradley started college, but due to lack of funds was forced to drop out and live in his parents’ home, working as a draftsman and a lithographer.

  A tall man with sharp shoulders, Bradley parted his hair to the right and kept it as smooth as his beard was scraggly. His sage face was cast in pale skin with deeply set eyes and a long nose.

  In 1860, Bradley created his first game, the Checkered Game of Life, claiming it to be the first “game with a purpose”—one that “taught a lesson of success through integrity and right living.” The game was derived in part from a body of ancient Asian games, and its goal was a “Happy Old Age” … of fifty. Perhaps reflecting the dark times from which it had been created, the board had an Intemperance space that led to Poverty, a Government Contract space that led to Wealth, and a Gambling space that led to Ruin. A square labeled Suicide had an image of a man hanging from a tree, and other squares were labeled Perseverance, School, Ambition, Idleness, and Fat Office. Since purists still associated dice with gambling, the Checkered Game of Life used a spinner to determine how many spaces a player moved on his or her turn.

  In 1860, Parker Brothers rival Milton Bradley created his first game, the Checkered Game of Life, claiming it to be the first “game with a purpose”–one that “taught a lesson of success through integrity and right living.” (The Strong)

  Bradley’s game was a success, selling more than forty thousand copies in its first year, an astronomical feat at the time that proved there could be a mass market for board games. He was among the first to realize that it wasn’t enough to make an entertaining product—one also had to market it, as disposable middle-class income was slim to nonexistent.

  But Bradley was much more focused on education than the teenage George Parker would be. One day in the late 1860s, his fortune in board games already made, he attended a lecture on the “kindergarten movement,” which had begun in Germany based on the teachings of Friedrich Fröbel. After the lecture, Bradley became one of its key advocates in the United States, and he is credited with publishing one of the country’s first books on kindergarten. And while that contribution may have been a more profound one in the long-term for the United States, his name would become far more intertwined with his games legacy.

  •

  George Parker understood that it wasn’t enough to peddle Banking and a handful of other games if he wanted to build a lasting business. Buyers and players demanded variety—and rivals such as Milton Bradley were consistently producing new titles. He needed to expand his inventory with new and exciting games not just to grow his company but to survive.

  In 1885, the first George S. Parker Company catalog was published, featuring several other games along with George’s originals. In 1886, George published the Dickens Game, “a new social entertainment” with characters from the famous author’s novels. Around that same time, in an attempt to appear more mature, George began wearing an elegant tailored suit every day—a habit that he was to continue for the rest of his life.

  Next, George bought up the rights to other games from local game publishers and rebranded them as Parker titles. This allowed him to promote himself as a prolific game inventor without having to go through the time-consuming process of researching what the public wanted, inventing and testing new games, and finding out how much people would be willing to pay for them. Unlike the authors of books or composers of music, the creators of the board games were generally not mentioned in the games’ promotion or even acknowledged at all. In a testament to the rapid growth of George’s company, he was even able to buy out the company that owned the rights to the popular Mansion of Happiness as a Parker game, the upstart buying out its predecessor. He was still in his twenties.

  By the late 1800s, George had amassed a catalog of more than 125 items, the bulk of which came from outside firms. His shift away from education-focused, morally charged board games was all but complete. One Parker title, the Strange Game of Forbidden Fruit, promised players “no instruction but quantities of fun.” A rapturous public bought and played the Parker games. Ever more affordable and widely available, games had tapped a collective desire.

  George opened up a small storefront in Salem from which to sell his wares. Original Parker games filled only some of the shelves, and games acquired from other companies filled up the rest. Also in the store were children’s toys, which at that time were reflections of daily adult life—miniature farm plows, rakes and mowers, toy coal carts equipped with mules and drivers, and small steamships and locomotives.

  The demands of the company grew until George could no longer handle its operations by himself. He enlisted the help of his older brother Charles, who joined the company in 1888. Previously, Charles had worked as a partner in a coal and oil firm, where he had demonstrated his prowess in finance and management. With his long, somber face, Charles had a reputation for being more organized than his younger brother, as well as savvier about managing money and people. With the addition of Charles, the George S. Parker Company became Parker Brothers Inc.

  Partially as a result of the efforts of the two brothers, shoppers found an abundance of games to choose from. In the five years since introducing Banking, the company sold Game of War, Innocence Abroad, Crossing the Ocean, and the Railroad Game, among others. Through the Parker games, players could act as characters in the political, cultural, and social arenas that they read about in the newspapers or heard about through word of mouth. A player could be a soldier, sailor, railroad magnate, financier—or whoever else he or she pleased.

  •

  A common problem in this era was the stealing of ideas. “Very often I hit on a good thing,” an unnamed toy and game manufacturer told the New York Times in 1895. “And a good thing is worth a good deal of money. The other manufacturers are on the lookout for something that will pay well, and we keep our designs under cover as lo
ng as possible. Anything new, if good, will be copied quickly.”

  Concerns also existed over whether the games craze was only a fad—or a new fixture in the American landscape. All signs seemed to be pointing toward the latter scenario. “We may divide the whole struggle of the human race into two chapters,” James Garfield said, before being elected president. “First, the fight to get leisure; and then the second fight of civilization—what shall we do with our leisure when we get it.” Activists argued that playtime improved a child’s development and began constructing playgrounds in urban slums that allowed children to climb and swing under police supervision. Once considered slovenly and slothful in the face of hard work, play was now considered a sign of economic success and a personal right.

  Game makers wanted to be perceived not just as businessmen but as innovators. In 1893, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers won acclaim at the Chicago World’s Fair for their “huge, well-arranged” exhibit of toy soldiers and games, displayed not far from what was then branded as the Edison lamp. Through George Parker and Milton Bradley, games had become an important part of the entertainment business.

  In the late 1880s and early 1890s, a tiddlywinks craze swept across Europe. Played by popping circular disks into a pot, the game was a simple one that undoubtedly had ancient predecessors. It was resonating wildly among European children and adults alike, and George sought out the rights to its trademark in the United States. He wanted to ensure total control of the game in his market, and in the 1890s he got his way. More than a dozen different sets of tiddlywinks joined the Parker Brothers catalog, with the company reaping handsome profits.

  The joy didn’t last long. Parker Brothers’ trademark on tiddlywinks was challenged when competing firms like Milton Bradley made their own flavors of the game. Tiddlywinks was eventually deemed to be in the public domain, meaning that other companies could market their own versions of it. Parker Brothers soon had competition, and its tiddlywinks profits dropped precipitously, as did interest in the game. It was a lesson to George, and one that highlighted a commonplace problem for game makers: their inability to grab hold of trends already popular in the public domain. It was extremely profitable to have exclusivity over the newest, hottest game, but it was difficult to obtain, maintain, and justify the sole control of a bestselling phenomenon.

  Although he was consumed by business, George did find time to fall in love. He courted twenty-one-year-old Grace Mann, and in 1896 they married, to settle not far from where George had grown up. A year after their wedding, their first son, Bradstreet, was born. Three years later, their second son, Richard, was born, and in 1907, Grace gave birth to a daughter, Sally.

  George’s siblings also married and started families. Charles and his wife had two children who died as infants and a daughter, Mary, who survived. The family’s oldest brother, Edward, and his wife had a son, Foster. Edward left his work as a newspaper editor to join the company in 1898, and now all three Parker brothers were engaged in the family game business full-time.

  Parker Brothers had become one of America’s premier toy and game companies, but many felt that George, when left to his own devices, was not the best of managers. George paid his critics little mind, though. With hundreds of game titles now published, he was just starting to build his empire of wood and cardboard.

  •

  As the nineteenth century tipped into the twentieth, the assembly line of ladies painting Parker Brothers game sets and puzzles by hand had faded into the past. Lithography and other innovations in mass printing meant that the production of games became cheaper and simpler.

  More games produced with lower labor costs meant higher profits for George and his extended family, who began to enjoy the high social status that came with their new wealth. Their company was now one of Salem’s most significant and celebrated employers. Living in elegant homes tucked away on shaded streets, the Parker women wore only the most fashionable silk dresses of the time. They were elected to community boards, and their names appeared frequently in the Boston-area society columns.

  The Parkers and their social set were precisely the sort of people who were interested in a new highbrow fad called Ping-Pong, a kind of miniature tennis, played on a table with small paddles and a petite celluloid ball. Ping-Pong had taken hold in Victorian England, and even though it was being played in the United States, Parker lore claimed that George Parker encountered it during a visit to London in 1902 and immediately saw its potential in the United States. While some in the United States were already playing the game, it was clear to George that whoever controlled ping-pong’s exclusive trademark there as it grew in popularity stood to profit enormously. Later that same year, a Parker Brothers version of the game hit the U.S. market, along with advertisements featuring long-skirted, bun-wearing women pinging and ponging, the name supposedly coming from the noise made when playing. Parker Brothers also began to sponsor Ping-Pong tournaments, with players fighting to win the Parker Cup, in an effort to cement ties between the company and the Ping-Pong brand.

  What started as buzz soon turned into an all-out phenomenon, complete with the publication of Ping-Pong poetry and Ping-Pong tournaments held among brokers on Wall Street. That women could play “almost if not quite as well as men” was “among the principal reasons of its popularity,” the Philadelphia Inquirer proclaimed. Manufacturers of Ping-Pong sets couldn’t always meet the demand and sometimes fell behind on their orders. A champion player asked Parker Brothers for permission to print the official Ping-Pong guidebook. It appeared that George Parker’s strategy was working, at least initially.

  Perhaps out of fear of having a repeat of the tiddlywinks situation, George pushed stories in the press to remind people that the term “Ping-Pong” was owned by Parker Brothers. But as some people began using the terms “Ping-Pong” and “table tennis” interchangeably, the distinction between the two terms became murky. The company’s ability to sell the game exclusively was being threatened.

  Much to George’s dismay, the Table Tennis Association was formed, to compete directly with Parker Brothers’ Ping-Pong Association. Because of Parker Brothers’ claim to Ping-Pong’s rights, no player could belong to both organizations, thus creating two national titles: one in table tennis and one in Ping-Pong. Eventually, in 1933, the United States Table Tennis Association was formed.

  George lost exclusive rights to the game and was reminded yet again of how difficult it was to maintain the ownership of a concept. Technically speaking, Ping-Pong was a trademarked brand of table tennis equipment. However, table tennis was the name for the actual sport. It’s hard to say just how much money Parker Brothers lost after control of the game slipped out of its grasp, meaning it now produced the game alongside a fleet of competitors. But over the course of the last century, whatever one chooses to call the pastime, it has become a classic in the West, a craze in Asia, and an Olympic sport. The loss of profits was surely maddening to George Parker and his brothers, and to their descendants.

  •

  Personal losses hit the Parker family hard as well. In the fall of 1915, the eldest brother, Edward, the company’s treasurer and executive for seventeen years, died at his home in Salem at age sixty. Charles and George were both aging too, and George began to think about the implications of passing the reins of the family business to a younger generation.

  Edward, George, and Charles Parker, circa 1914. (Philip Orbanes)

  George’s oldest son, Bradstreet, was not interested in discovering the next Ping-Pong or tiddlywinks, or in being part of New England high society. Instead, he fled Harvard to try to become a pilot. When George heard about what his son had done, he traveled to bring Bradstreet home, calling him a “lost cause.” Bradstreet fled again, this time taking a leave from Harvard to enlist in the navy. But he didn’t make it to the battlefront of World War I. Bradstreet fell ill in the great 1918 flu pandemic as it swept through New England and died in the hospital with his parents at his side. He was twenty-one years ol
d.

  Devastated by the loss, George put the succession question aside for a while as the family grieved and the board game business continued to soar. Electric lighting was becoming common in American homes, meaning that games could now be played more safely and enjoyably, and for longer hours, than had been possible during the gas lamp era, a reinvention of the daily routines.

  With Bradstreet’s untimely death, Richard, George’s middle child, became Parker Brothers’ heir apparent. Unlike Bradstreet, Richard was an obedient son and a sterling student. He was exactly the kind of successor whom George could rely on to take the firm into a brave new decade with an economy that was promising to roar. Cars were on roads, the Standard Oil Trust had been broken up, World War I was over, and women were voting.

  Richard had inherited his father’s pale complexion and delicate features. His was a Northeast pedigree: He’d graduated president of his class at a top prep school and had been accepted into Harvard’s class of 1922. At the university, he joined several organizations, including the Lampoon.

  In the summer of 1921, Richard journeyed to Europe with his parents and sister, Sally—one of the family’s many Atlantic voyages. When the rest of the Parker family sailed back to the United States, Richard stayed behind with some of his Harvard classmates to see more of Europe. He traveled with his friends to Strasbourg, France, and his friends proceeded on to Germany. But Richard had forgotten his passport. He decided to take a quick flight back to Paris to retrieve it and join his friends in Germany the next day.

  With jovial spirits, on September 8, Richard and four others boarded an express airliner. But the plane crashed upon landing, killing Richard and everyone else on board. He was twenty-one years old, the same age as his brother Bradstreet when he died.