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Back during Dubya Dubya Deuce, Uncle Sam was looking for some kind of rubber substitute for the war effort.  Because profits drive democracy and sometimes both profits and democracy are threatened at the same time, big corporations strive to be the first to give the government what it needs.  Everybody wins.  Well, not everybody.  Generally just the first to give them what they want.

The Facility,  buried so deep north of Fort Stockton in land behind fences that a lot of folks didn’t even know it was there, was working as feverishly as any other location committed to capitalism and giving Uncle Sam what he was looking for.  James Wright, the chemical engineer assigned the task, started off by mixing silicone oil and boric acid in a test tube.  The result was a gooey mixture that turned pink.  Wright removed the mess from the test tube and tossed it down on the counter in front of him.  He was shocked when it bounced right back at him, like a fly ball right off the glove of a Mud Hen’s outfielder.

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Thinking he might have just landed on the combination of chemicals that would yield exactly what the government was looking for, The Facility sent samples of the substance out to scientists around the globe to see if it would fit the bill for any of the projects they were working on.  Try as they might to find a purpose for the putty, it didn’t seem to match any of the requirements for temperature in arctic areas or suitability for other proposed applications.

The whole concept of finding the right application for the stuff was put on the back burner, but not forgotten.  Engineers would still mix up small batches of the stuff to give away at picnics and parties as gag gifts or party favors.  Wright knew full well that engineers had a sense of humor that separated them from the stoic accountants or the dodgy characters in marketing.  It was one night, when a group of those same engineers were tossing back a few at the Lucky Lady Lounge and passing around a wad of the pink substance they’d made in the lab, that fate intervened.  And fate was dressed up in a suit he couldn’t afford and named Peter Hodgson, Sr.  

Passing through Fort Stockton on his way to Anywhere, America seeking his fortune, he’d pulled into town in a swank new Gala Green 1949 Buick Special Sedanet.  After checking in at the Cattle Baron Hotel, the dapper out-of-towner made his way to the Lucky Lady and discovered that not all life changing deals are made in New York or Hollywood.  The engineers, watching Hodgson pull up and park outside the front door to the Lucky Lady, noted the 1949 models were not re-styled until mid-year, so all early ’49s still looked like the 1948 examples.  But the streamlined sloping sedanet still managed to look different than anything from Ford or Chrysler.

Hodgson had gussied the thing up with massive rear fender skirts on the back, each festooned with chrome strips lining up with those on the front fenders and doors.  Wide white wall Goodyears offset the body colored wheels and small chrome hubcaps.  The car looked as rakish as Hodgson, himself.  Always looking for the Next Deal, Hodgson considered the Buick an investment in his “brand” rather than an expense.  And, already $12,000 in debt from past bets that didn’t pay off, the $1,787 he’d borrowed to buy the new car seemed like a drop in the bucket.  Folks didn’t need to know that the car was the lowest price Buick; the only one that was available under $2,000.  The fact that it was phased out after only 4,687 were built “just added to its exclusivity,” Hodgson noted.

An amicable sort, Hodgson fit in with the engineers at the bar and in no time they were showing him the humorous, but useless creation they’d made at The Facility.  None of them would have ever guessed that the smooth talking and dapper gentleman massaging the chunk of pink matter in his fingers was actually a high school dropout, looking for lightning in a bottle.  What he got instead was putty in an egg.

Hodgson found someone to lend him $147, probably someone who didn’t know about the $12,000 he was already in debt, or the $1,800 he financed on the Buick.  For $147, he bought twenty pounds of the putty that he said, “Feels silly in my hand.”  That transaction came out to seven dollars per pound.  He then packaged it in small plastic eggs and sold it as an adult themed toy for $2 per half ounce.

Hodgson had hit on something.  He was selling up to 300 eggs per day by marketing the eggs at a handful of retail stores.  Covering distribution using nothing but his good looks, finesse, and his Gala Green 1949 Buick Special Sedanete, he felt like his gamble had paid off.  He was working down his debt more rapidly than those whom he owed the money to ever thought he would.  And then something happened he never expected.  A story ran in the New Yorker about “the toy with only one moving part”.

Within days of the story being published, Hodgson was beset by orders for 230,000 eggs.  Silly Putty was on its way to becoming a cultural phenomenon.  Hodgson was on his way to trading the Buick in for a Cadillac.  And not the bottom of the line model.

Whereas the original idea had been for Silly Putty to be marketed to adults because, “It appeals to people of superior intellect,” that would change after the New Yorker article.  Kids were so attracted to Silly Putty that the market shifted from 80% adults, 20% children to just the opposite.  As a result, The Facility had to change the composition of the stuff.  Parents were complaining about the material permanently sticking to hair, carpet, upholstery, and anything else their kids could think of to stick it to.

First advertised on The Howdy Doody Show in 1957, Silly Putty became an international product in 1961, taking Russia and Europe by storm.  It went to the moon in 1968, used by the Apollo 8 astronauts to “grab and hold” items in zero gravity.  It is currently used by occupational therapists for rehabilitative therapy of hand injuries.

Peter Hodgson went on to the Great Beyond in 1976 a wealthy man.  A year later, the rights to the product, which he’d purchased from The Facility, were sold to Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola Crayons.  Silly Putty was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2001, and is also featured in the Smithsonian Museum.  Over 6,000,000 of the eggs are still sold every year.

Hank still keeps a big wad of the stuff stuck to the underside of the bar over at the Lucky Lady, although Lucinda has made it clear she would never touch the thing.  “That stuff has got to be nastier than Mayor Goodman’s balls at this point,” she’ll say when asked about it.  “And it would be a cold day in hell before I ever touched those damn things, either.”

I generally choose to leave that aspect of the story alone.  Instead, it’s better to focus on the fact that success doesn’t lie in how educated you are, or how much knowledge you’ve been able to accumulate.  Sometimes it’s as simple as driving your ’49 Buick into the right place at the right time and thinking outside the box.  Seeing something that nobody else sees, even though you’re all looking at the exact same thing.

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