ONLY HUMAN 'SILLY' SUCCESS STORY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00001R000300290003-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 1998
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: January 29, 1964
• Content Type: NSPR

Nl'W YOR WitUed - Approved ANi UAW
NEWS
m. 2,055,266
S. 3,157,103 '
Front Edit Other
Page Pace Page
Date: ' J;~ !`! 2
NCI
When Peter Ilodgson put a putty-like
substance nobody wanted into a plastic egg
and launched it as a toy for adults his
friends and well-wishers shook their heads
in elegy, doubt.
"Man, get yourself committed," they adv;; 1
him, "before you damage yourself."
Peter now has a five lig?ure yearly income and
a .5-:uillion-a-year enterprise that he built from
the g:)oey stuff nobody wanted. His wife, Margaret
still finds this incomprehensible. At. which Peter
aital;es his head, goes "tsk-k tsk-k" and says:
"She should really know better. She once
Peter and Margaret Hodgson
sari ed for the Central Intelligence Agency. But
SPY--
"The reason all this success from a lot of Bunn
Vithout any arm twisting."
eating with the children-by phone. Peter Jr.,-26,
eaclles at Yale and is taking his Ph. D. there;
ersity gradual.'.;, are. both married and each has
C1014.
o"z S211-educated
Peter himself, now 47
T! A
in New Haven that folded in six months. Peter'
took over its one remaining account.
"A toy shop run by a lady named Ruth Fall-i
,;titter," says Peter. "She was- looking for adult.,
toys and one day she showed me this gooey gupp `,
that a friend of hers, an engineer at General%
Electric, had given her. It was a waste product
from silicon compounds GE was using in an effort
to find a source of rubber."
Is It Gum, Rubber, V'/hat?
a ete fingered the stuff. He stretched it. It was
like gun). He dropped it and it bounced like a ball.
He hit it with a mallet and it broke into a lot oil
pieces. He molded it back like clay, pressed___it.i
against a comic and it picked up the picture.
He suggested that Ruth Failgatter make it a,
toy for adults. She didn't think much of the idea..
So he made it himself, put it in a plastic egg,
called it silly putty and in his persuasive way got'
it into the Doubleday bookshops.
"One manager reported that it was the biggest
thing to hit the shops since `Forever Amber' and
'Peyton Place,"' Peter says.
To add to his joy the kids started grabbing it
from the adults.
"Then I got a barrage of letters from the par-j
ents because the stuff stuck in Johnny's dungarees
and Mary's curls," he says. "We changed the gupp
so it won't stain or stick."
Two years ago he thought he had some kind;
of a nut on the phone when the voice said it was !
the State Department and would Peter want to
send his silly putty to Russia and maybe it would
be best if his son toolc it mere.
"It was no gag," Peter says. "The State De-
partment was sponsoring a. plastics show in Russia
and they thought silly putty would lighten it up
and show we do things for fun here too. They]
found out my son was taking his Ph. D. in Russian;
so they thought he should take it over. He did,
The .Japanese Are Convinced 11
Peter recently returned from a trip to Tokyol
where he convinced the Japanese they ought to
have his gupp too.
"Japan introduces all their things here," he says,
"So I thought, why not introduce something of;
ours to Japan? I'm going to make it there."
His plant in North Branford, Conn., which em-1
ploys- 125 people, makes and sells over five million
silly puttys a year. He's sold a total of 32 million
here, in every major European 'country, in India
and South Africa. -
"The gupp," says Peter, "is now an interna-
l tional.celebrity."
.. - r...~.~..
and sporting an ex-11
beyond the third yearI
He's Ergo) Norfolk, Va. When he left school
tsti?stician of Wendell Willkie's bid for the presi-
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00001 R000;
CPYRGHT
00290003-1