This Day in Cultural History

March 7, 1933—Unemployed radiator repairman Charles Darrow invented Monopoly, a board game that, at the height of the Great Depression, started a board-game craze that shows little if any sign of abating 75 years later. Or so the legend goes.

Well, I guess there’s a bit more validity to this claim than to the one that Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball, but it’s not by a whole lot.

The origins of Monopoly actually date back to “The Landlord’s Game,” created by Elizabeth Magie, who used it to teach the virtues of economist Henry George’s single-tax movement. Magie’s Quaker friends may have liked the game, but not Parker Brothers (which, to their credit, told her to secure rights to the idea—which she did in 1904, with Patent #748,626).

Parker Brothers may have inexplicably rejected Magie’s idea, but it was embraced wildly by others who loved it so much that when they made copies they even named particular landmarks after local streets. Along the way, these enthusiasts—notably including economics departments at academic institutions such as Haverford and Princeton—introduced wrinkles into Magie’s concept, such as charging higher rents when one person owned all the spaces in a particular group—taking it a step closer to what we know as Monopoly.

Another user was Darrow, who encountered the game while in Atlantic City—which is why there are place names in the final game such as Boardwalk and Marvin Gardens. Darrow sold enough copies of the game at the Philadelphia department store Wanamaker’s to spark the interest of a new Parker Brothers executive, Robert Barton. This time, Parker Brothers figured—not illogically—that if the game could sell so many copies during the Great Depression, its future was very, very bright.

There remained the little matter of Magie, who still held the patent for the Landlord’s Game and all variations of it, including Darrow’s. So, Parker Brothers bought the rights to issue Darrow’s version in exchange for publishing three other games by Magie.

By 1935, half a million copies of Monopoly had been sold, and the next year the total leaped to three million—all remarkable in an age when resentment at Wall Street over starting the Depression was so high that Franklin D. Roosevelt won a landslide Presidential victory by campaigning against “economic royalists.” None of it mattered—Darrow was on his way to becoming the world’s first millionaire board-game designer.

In a case of life imitating a game (which itself imitated life), Parker Brothers was acquired first by General Mills, then by Hasbro, which continues to defend the Monopoly trademark and brand, its past history notwithstanding.

When I was a lad, I seldom, if ever, played Monopoly. This, of course, left me fatally unprepared for the world of business, with the inevitable, lamentable results you might expect in adulthood. I didn’t play the The Game of Life that much, either—and, some might argue, my subsequent success at that barely exceeded my business prowess.

Instead, my game of choice as a youngster was something called Go to the Head of the Class, which fed my ravenous lifelong interest in trivia and, I would argue, even what you are reading now. I pored over the quiz booklet so often that I practically inhaled the answers to questions on matters of serious (“Prior to 1960, who was the youngest man ever to be elected President of the United States”) and not-so-serious (“What were the names of Donald Duck’s three nephews?”) import.

I didn’t realize until now that this game was originally invented in 1936, by the Milton Bradley Co., or that it went through yet another edition nearly 20 years after I played it.

And then, of course, there’s Trivial Pursuit, a game that other people, I learned to my extreme discomfort nearly 20 years ago, take with sometimes nearly deadly seriousness.

A friend had invented me to come along to a party in Rockland County, N.Y., held by a couple she knew from work. On the few occasions I had met them before, the husband and wife had struck me as reasonably genial people. Little did I know how a simple game can bring out the latent maniacal element in acquaintances.

As a guest who knew few people at the party, I was reluctant to push myself socially. I certainly was not one to chortle at getting an answer right, let alone winning an entire game.

I tell you this as background for the following. I managed to blurt out, from the darkest recesses of my memory, the answer to “Which former Brooklyn Dodger first baseman later became a television star?” (Answer: Chuck Connors, of The Rifleman fame.) “How did you know that?” someone asked, with what sounded like jealousy. “I dunno,” I answered. “He’s the only actor I could think of who ever played baseball, and he was tall, so I figured he might have been a first baseman.”

That answer mustn’t have satisfied my male host. The next thing I knew, a beer bottle went whistling past my head.

I'm as surprised that I escaped injury as that my jaw didn't drop from shock. I doubt very, very much that I won a game after that. I’d be surprised if I got a single answer right. The incident gave literal meaning to an old Bob Dylan lyric: "It's only people's games that you got to dodge."