Frisbee inventor

I thought I would give you all something light to chew on for the holiday weekend, although I’ll have plenty to throw at you next week. (The Utah Legislature is fast-tracking a constitutional amendment to outlaw affirmative action, for instance.)

By the way, an anonymous poster on my last blog tried to bring Utah’s personal bankruptcy rate into the discussion. The blog was about public, not private, debt, so the comment was irrelevant. But just for everyone’s information, Utah ranks 13th in the nation in per capita bankruptcy filings. That’s not terribly good, but a lot of people seem to think the state is No. 1, which is not true. (See the figures here.)

Now, to the light stuff. The news was buzzing yesterday with word that Walter Morrison, a Utahn who invented the Frisbee had died.

I may not have the best memory, but I distinctly recall having written about that very same story in 2002, only it wasn’t about Walter Morrison. It was about Ed Headrick. (Read about it here.)

I remembered it because Headrick was an eccentric sort of guy who wanted his remains cremated and shaped into little Frisbees. He said, “When we die, we don’t go on to purgatory. We just land up on the roof and lay there.”

If you Google hard enough, you’ll come across the name Richard Knerr, and this story about his death and how he was the “Hula Hoop & Frisbee inventor.”

Granted, the idea of picking up a flat disc and hurling it probably occurred to many people throughout history, but this is all rather confusing. The name Warren Franscioni also comes up from time to time in connection with the birth of the Frisbee.

Well, the truth is they all played a role. Walter Morrison and his future wife, Lu, started chucking cake pans at each other in 1937 – for fun mind you. In 1948, Warren Franscioni put up the money to have discs molded out of plastic. In 1957, they sold the rights to Wham-O. Ed Headrick at Wham-O patented it and added concentric grooved lines to make it fly better. Richard Knerr was co-founder of Wham-O.

Hey, when something works, everyone wants credit. But Morrison was the main guy. Of course, in Sevier County, where he was from, you can throw cake pans for miles without hitting anything.