Betty James, who named the toy her husband invented -- the Slinky -- and rebuilt the toy company he abandoned, making the springy plaything a pervasive part of American culture, has died. She was 90.
James, who served as chief executive of the family-run business for almost 40 years, died Thursday at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, a hospital spokeswoman said. No cause of death was given.
In 1943, Richard James was a Navy engineer trying to figure out a way to stabilize instruments on ships at sea when a spring fell off a shelf. He watched it bounce end over end and went home to tell his wife, Betty, he thought he could make it into a toy that "walks."
When he asked her to name it, she turned to the dictionary and found "slinky," which means stealthy, sleek and sinuous.
Richard James tinkered with different types of steel and tension before debuting the coiled Slinky at a Gimbels department store on a snowy day in 1945 in Philadelphia.
"A Slinky just sitting there isn't very exciting. It has to move," Betty James told CNN.com in 2001. "It if hadn't been for Gimbels giving us the end of a counter to demonstrate, I don't know what would have happened."
The couple sold 400 of the toys in 90 minutes for $1 apiece.
The same year they introduced the Slinky, they borrowed $500 to form a company that was eventually known as James Industries to mass-produce the toy in the Philadelphia area.
By the late 1950s, the couple had a 12-acre estate near Bryn Mawr, Pa., but Richard James seemed uncomfortable with material success, according to biographical references.
He left his family in 1960 to join a religious cult in Bolivia and died there in 1974. He left behind six children between the ages of 2 and 18 and a business in shambles.
"These religious people always had their hands out. He had given so much away that I was almost bankrupt," Betty James said in 1996 in the Austin, Texas, American-Statesman.
She later recalled 1961 as her toughest year: She moved her children near her hometown of Altoona, Pa., and made a 450-mile weekly round-trip commute to the factory while a caregiver stayed with her children Monday through Thursday.
By 1965, she had moved the Slinky plant to Hollidaysburg, near her home, where it remains today.
Using a mortgage taken out on her house, James "gambled everything she had" and went to a New York toy show in 1963 -- and orders once again came pouring in, said her son, Tom James, in 2005 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
