Unwinding the long history of the Slinky

It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that Slinky would make its home in Hollidaysburg. Much of that is owed to one tough woman, Tom’s mother Betty James, who worked hard to make it her home.

In 1943 Betty married naval engineer Richard James who was working on a device to stabilize shipboard instruments.

Tom James described the moment his father had the revelation that changed his family’s life. “A spring took a step in the lab he was working in. He looked at it, he picked it up, he tried it again and it did it again. He took it home to my mother and he said, ‘you know, there’s something here.’”

Richard James worked for two years to perfect the toy and then, one winter night, he and Betty set up a table at the Gimbels department store in Philadelphia to try to entice buyers. Betty asked a friend to come along.

“I gave her a dollar and I said, ‘Let’s go down and we’ll each buy one to make him feel better," Betty James says. "Well, we got off the elevator and over in one corner there were just hundreds of people waving dollar bills. And my husband was in the middle of it.”

That night they sold 400 Slinkys in just 90 minutes and from there they took off. As the Slinkys got more attention… and brought in bigger sales… Betty and Richard rapidly grew out of their first factory. The Jameses grew rich and their family grew too.

By 1960, Jameses had six children. It was then that Richard, who had grown increasingly religious and was giving away company assets to charity, presented the family with a bombshell.

“He called all of us downstairs to the kitchen — and we were living in a 31 room home, it was a magnificent home — and Pop said, ‘I’m going to Bolivia. Who’s going with me?’” James says.

“And he said to me, ‘What are you going to do? Run the factory or sell it?’" Betty James recalls, laughing. "I didn’t know what I was saying but I said, ‘I’ll run it.’”

Betty started to commute each week to the factory outside Philadelphia. Her kids were over two hundred miles away near her family.

“She’d leave Sunday nights crying and she’d come back Thursday evenings," Tom explains. "We had a nursemaid, but it was so hard seeing Mom leave every week in tears.”

A couple of years after finally finding a spot for the factory near the kids, Betty had a meeting with one of the town fathers of Hollidaysburg, which was a town right nearby.

“He said to me, ‘how many acres do you need?’ I had absolutely no conception of how big an acre was,” she says, still amazed. “And I thought, ‘Well, I have six children… I need six acres.’ And he said 'Well, do you think a dollar would be too much?'”

And with the generosity of the community — for a dollar — what was then “James Industries” came to Hollidaysburg. Betty — five-foot-one and feisty — had slowly pulled the company together again.

And then John Lasseter, director of Disney’s “Toy Story," came to Betty with the idea of having a Slinky Dog in the film.

“He said, would I be interested? Ha! You bet we were interested," she exclaims. "So they chose to use the Slinky Dog. And we had dogs all over the factory for a while. The orders were coming in so fast and it did affect Slinky sales too.”

When "Toy Story" came out in 1995 it was the 50th anniversary of the Slinky. That year, James Industries sold 3 million Slinky Dogs. Then, four years later, the Postal Service honored the Slinky with a stamp.

Betty James has a theory about why such an ultra-low-tech toy — really just a distant cousin to the bedspring — continues to entice small hands.

“It’s one of those things that once you get it in your hand, it’s hard to put down,” she says. “I’ve often said that it reminded me of eating peanuts. Once you get it started, you don’t want to put it down.”

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