BOMBS, BOOBS & BURGERS

Remember the Slinky? The toy that walks down stairs alone or in pairs and makes a slinkity sound? Yes indeed, if you're over the age of 25 or so, you most definitely remember the Slinky, which had one of the most memorable ad jingles of all time. In this classic commercial from the sixties the words are somewhat different from what I remember in the eighties, which obviously means that over the years the jingle had something like a hundred different verses:



The Slinky was invented in 1943 by Richard James, a Navy engineer who was looking for a way to stabilize sensitive instruments on board ships by using springs. When one of his steel torsion springs - a coil that has no compression or tension - accidentally fell off his shelf, he watched it "walk" down to his desk, then a stack of books and then finally the floor. It was a "Eureka!" moment. His wife Betty thought the spring's movements looked "slinky," and the name stuck. The couple managed to convince a Gimbel Brothers department store in Philadelphia to let them display their toy just before Christmas in 1945, and it ended up being a huge hit. Believe it or not, in this day and age of high-tech toys and video games, the Slinky still sells well - more than 300 million were sold by its sixtieth birthday in 2005.

Richard James, however, went kookoo. In 1960, despite being very wealthy thanks to the Slinky, James left his wife and their six kids to join a religious cult in Bolivia. The Slinky was honored in 2001 as the official state toy of Pennsylvania, but James never got to soak it in since he died in Bolivia way back in 1974. Crazy, huh? The Slinky did end up finding a military use - American soldiers in the Vietnam war found it worked well as an antenna for their mobile radios.