Fred Morrison

Fred Morrison

1920–2010

One day in 1938, Fred Morrison and his girlfriend were on a Santa Monica beach, tossing a 5-cent cake pan taken from her mother’s kitchen. A stranger, fascinated by how the disc whirled through the air, offered to buy it for a quarter. “That got the wheels turning,” Morrison remembered. He would eventually turn the flying pan into what we now know as the Frisbee, one of the most successful toys of all time. To date, more than 200 million have been sold.

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After serving as a pilot in World War II and becoming a carpenter, Morrison focused on developing his brainchild, seizing on the postwar obsession with flying saucers. The result, in 1955, was a plastic disc he called the Pluto Platter. Dressed in a space suit, he hawked it at local fairs. “A young California company called Wham-O, which had made a name for itself with the Hula Hoop, took notice,” said The Washington Post. In 1957, Morrison sold it the rights in exchange for lifetime royalties. Wham-O executives then discovered that students at Eastern colleges “had their own name for the Platters: ‘Frisbies,’ after the Frisbie Pie Co. in Bridgeport, Conn., whose pie tins had long been popular for tossing.” With a slight spelling change, the Frisbee was born. “I thought the name was a horror,” Morrison said. “Terrible.”

The Frisbee went on to spawn its own subculture, including Ultimate Frisbee teams at high schools and colleges throughout the U.S. and beyond. Morrison once offered the secret to a perfect toss: “You need a good, firm grip and a quick release.” But, he added, “the darn things can be unpredictable.”