ABSTRACT
While small boys have played with hoops for centuries, the entire world became obsessed with them for a six-month period in 1958. The boom began in the spring in Los Angeles when Spud Melin of the Wham-0 Manufacturing Company took note of the phenomenal sales of hoops in Australia and made a few prototypes out of a light, stiff polyethylene plastic formed into a circle held together by a wooden plug and staples. After he demonstrated them personally at local parks and schools, kids began buying them by the thousands. The craze quickly spread east. Grown-ups even got into the act. By September 1958, Wham-O's San Gabriel plant was turning out 20,000 hoops daily and was still falling behind on orders. In the meantime, over forty more novelty makers hopped on the hoop wagon, and sales, retailing from one to two dollars, ultimately reached an estimated 120 million units.
