by Mary Pilon
Then, through the freezing air, Ralph and Russ saw uniformed figures heading their way, their lights blinding in the bright haze and cold air. They were environmental protection officers, and they asked Ralph and Russ to leave. The two men retreated to Russ’s house to thaw out and have a drink. The phone rang. It was a man who claimed to have been involved with the burial. He had seen their excavation efforts on TV and said that Russ and Ralph had been about thirty yards away from where the games were buried.
It was too late for Ralph. He had to return to California.
A few months passed; ice melted, flowers bloomed. Russ and Ralph spoke over the phone. Russ had bad news: The land where the Anti-Monopoly games were buried had been sold to a residential development company. Houses were being constructed on top of the forty thousand board games.
They would remain underground.
•
In the summer of 1980, just six months after Carl Person joined forces with Ralph, the Anti-Monopoly case had to go up against Judge Spencer Williams again, on appeal. Dubbed “trial two” by the Anti-Monopoly team, this round of debate centered on whether the public had a product or its producer in mind when it purchased a game. Did people buy Monopoly because it was Monopoly, or because it was a game from Parker Brothers?
How Judge Williams had handled the question had ping-ponged through the court system already, a legal labyrinth that seemed equally riddled with confusion. After Williams had originally ruled in Parker Brothers’ favor, the appellate court in 1979 had sent the decision back to Williams for a reexamination of the validity of the Monopoly trademark.
To help prove their case this time, Person and Ralph commissioned a market research survey. Among lawyers, the use of surveys in trademark cases had mixed reviews. Surveys, as any student of politics or polling knew, could be easily manipulated to meet a specific agenda. They were also costly to conduct and at risk of being thrown out by the presiding judge. Surveys were prone to errors, too, as it was often difficult to interpret what a consumer was really thinking.
Edward Canapary, the researcher who had conducted the Anti-Monopoly survey, took the stand. He reported that when people were asked the open-ended question “Why did you buy Monopoly?” or “Why would you buy Monopoly?,” 82 percent gave responses that were related to the product itself; 2 percent gave answers that were either related to Parker Brothers or neutral; and 16 percent answered in a manner that was indecisive. Robert Daggett, again representing Parker Brothers, said that he thought the survey had been designed by Ralph so that each question was phrased to “predict, if not require, the conclusion it reaches.”
Weeks later, a court reporter called Ralph with the news. Anti-Monopoly had lost again. All they had left was a second appeal.
The Monopoly battle had lasted over six years. Ralph had taken out a third mortgage on his home, and his credit cards were maxed out. His sons now had deeper voices, William in high school and Mark off to college, with little to no financial help from Ralph. His relationship with Ruth was rocky, as was her health, and he hadn’t spoken with his friend John Droeger since the settlement conference blowup.
If they lost this time, it would likely be all over for Anti-Monopoly and up to Ralph to figure out how to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and how to explain to his sons why he felt the fight had still been worth it.
•
The months dragged on, with Ralph meandering back to his routine as a professor and his mountains of trial documents collecting dust in his study. Then, in the summer of 1982, nearly a year after the most recent trial, the phone rang at the Anspach house. It was a court reporter with news.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had again ruled against Parker Brothers and General Mills, this time not only declaring that the trademark “Monopoly” was invalid and that the word had become generic, but also reversing the majority of Judge Williams’s remaining findings of fact. The opinion also read that a lower court now had to determine whether Anti-Monopoly had taken reasonable care to inform consumers that Parker Brothers did not manufacture the game.
The court added, “It remains unclear how widely played the precursors to modern MONOPOLY were in the 1920s and early ’30s.” Also, the Anti-Monopoly team “has simply made no showing as to what the public conception of the term was at that juncture.”
Nonetheless, the overall decision was resoundingly positive and enormously significant to Ralph. Perhaps most vindicating was this line: “The court’s reference to Darrow as the inventor or creator of the game is clearly erroneous.” Since normally it is the district judge who makes rulings on facts (because it is that judge, not the appellate judge, who has the witnesses and documents before him or her), the appellate court had in effect given poor marks to Judge Williams on that score in accepting Ralph’s exhaustive research.
At first, the victory didn’t sink in. Only slowly would the weight of the last eight-plus years begin to lift off of Ralph’s shoulders. That night, the family went out for dinner in an expensive restaurant. After nearly ten years of drastic budget cuts, the Anspachs were finally free of both the Anti-Monopoly case and its debts. Ralph’s legal bills would be paid by Parker Brothers.
News of the verdict traveled quickly to the palatial Parker Brothers offices in Beverly, Massachusetts. Inside the company’s pristine glass facility, financed by parent company General Mills, employees were shocked to hear that Parker Brothers had lost. Some executives shook their heads and wondered what was wrong with the courts in California. Randolph Barton, Robert Barton’s son, said that he was “dismayed and disappointed” by the decision. Spokespersons for Parker Brothers refused to comment on the court’s account of the game’s origins.
Much had changed at the firm since the case had begun. Randolph Barton, grandson of founder George Parker, had risen to the presidency of the company in 1974, shortly after Ralph had received his first threatening letter from Parker Brothers.
At the 1982 Consumer Electronics Show, Parker Brothers had finally introduced an electronic version of Monopoly. The electronic version was essentially the same as the traditional version, but featured a Playmaster that controlled the rolling of the dice, property ownership, and how players moved around the board.
Parker Brothers was also facing threats from some new players in the game industry. Foremost among them was Nolan Bushnell, the cofounder of Atari, which produced Pong, an addictive digital version of the Ping-Pong game that George Parker had reeled over nearly a century earlier. Bushnell, perhaps even more than Parker, understood that successful games had to be easy to learn but difficult to master.
None of this seemed to matter to the Parker Brothers attorneys and executives as they deliberated over their next move. Ralph had been a thorn for nearly ten years. They weren’t about to let the ruling of the appellate court stand. They would appeal the Anti-Monopoly case to the Supreme Court.
•
While Parker Brothers lawyers frantically worked long hours to prepare for a fight in the nation’s highest court, other employees engaged in a massive publicity drive to drum up support for their cause. Soon other companies with significant trademarks told reporters that they were “up in arms” over the court decision to strike down Parker Brothers’ victory, and scholars argued over whether the courts could start to punish those who had created unique, popular products by deeming their trademarks generic. The Parker Brothers spin on the case was that the appellate court hadn’t known what it was doing.
Others who joined Parker Brothers in its fight included the American Bar Association, Procter & Gamble, and the U.S. Trademark Association. The notion that a trademark becomes invalid when it denotes mostly the product, not the producer, was blasphemous to them and many other companies. “You don’t have to know Crest is from Procter and Gamble to have the trademark identify the source,” the executive director of the U.S. Trademark Association told the New York Times.
The sparring between Anti-Monopoly and P
arker Brothers evoked references to Pac-Man, E.T., and Wheaties as lawyers for Parker Brothers argued that the Anti-Monopoly ruling, if untouched, “immediately jeopardizes many of the most successful marks on consumer products.” “This is sheer nonsense,” Carl Person said in reaction to the dire predictions.
Parker Brothers hired Nathan Lewin, an acclaimed lawyer who had argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court, to take the case on its behalf. On January 27, 1983, Lewin filed several amicus, or “friend of the court,” briefs from titans of corporate America on behalf of Parker Brothers. The briefs took issue with the Ninth Circuit appellate court’s decision, “because it causes confusion and uncertainty in the administration of trademark law.”
Four days later, Person, who had relatively little experience before the Supreme Court, fired back. He wrote to the court saying that Lewin’s amicus briefs did not reflect the uniform view of trademark lawyers. “It is Mr. Lewin, not the Ninth Circuit, which has created the alleged uncertainty and confusion,” Person wrote. In addition, Lewin had mentioned an earlier Anti-Monopoly survey, regarding possible confusion over the games’ names, but not the one that had proved Person and Ralph’s point, that people buy Monopoly because of the product, not the producer.
In New York City, Ralph huddled with Person in his tiny office, the two working late into the night on documents tied to the Supreme Court filing. Once again, they pulled out research relating to Lizzie Magie, the Atlantic City Quakers, the Darrow invention story, and the confusion over the Monopoly and Anti-Monopoly names. Finally, documents in hand, Ralph boarded a train from New York to Washington, D.C., to personally deliver the papers.
Peculiarly enough, Jeff Lehman, the Cornell student who had coauthored the controversial book about how to win at Monopoly, had gone on to law school and was working as a clerk for Justice John Paul Stevens. Upon hearing about the Monopoly appeal, Lehman recused himself from the case.
Ralph stared up at the white pillars of the storied Supreme Court building with awe, and then ascended the steps to drop off his filing. He was only a few blocks away from where Lizzie had filed for her first patent on the Landlord’s Game eighty years earlier.
REDEMPTION
“They monopolized Monopoly. Actually the game was in the public domain. But now the truth is coming out.”
—RALPH ANSPACH
Almost a decade to the day after Ollie Howes’s threatening letter had shown up in Ralph’s mailbox, a very different piece of Anti-Monopoly news arrived at the Anspach home in Berkeley. Calling from New York City, Carl Person said that the Supreme Court had refused to hear Parker Brothers’ case. The Ninth Circuit appeal victory stood firm, and Parker Brothers reportedly entered into a series of six-figure settlements with Ralph that exceeded his legal fees and the costs associated with the loss of his forty thousand Anti-Monopoly games. These settlements more than doubled the settlement offer that Ralph had turned down years earlier and had far more beneficial terms, including ensuring that Anti-Monopoly stayed on the market.
Ralph didn’t know whether to believe Carl or not. He had become so accustomed to false hope. But finally, he realized that at last the Monopoly war was won. At last he would be able to sell Anti-Monopoly without interference from the company he had grown to despise.
•
During the Reagan era, Anti-Monopoly’s countercultural bent didn’t resonate with the public the same way that it had a decade earlier. Bigger—houses, cars, shoulder pads, hair—was better. The cynicism of the Watergate era had faded into the roaring economy of the 1980s, and Anti-Monopoly sales in the United States stalled. Ralph later lamented the lost window of opportunity for selling the game. “Justice delayed is justice denied,” he said.
After decades of marriage, the raising of two boys, and a legal battle that had lasted almost a decade, Ruth and Ralph divorced. Years later, both wondered whether their obsession with Anti-Monopoly had blinded them to fractures in their marriage. They also wondered if there had been anything they could have done differently, or if the loss of a common enemy—be it Nixon, the war in Vietnam, or Parker Brothers—had been the reason the marriage had ended. But staying together, both agreed, would have been even more difficult than embarking on new lives apart.
In the original Anti-Monopoly game, players separate things that are bound together into independent pieces, lending the dissolution of Ruth and Ralph’s marriage a bitter symmetry. Mark and William were now out of the house, but their parents’ divorce, compounded with Ruth’s illness, which they now knew for certain was multiple sclerosis, had taken a toll. That fateful Monopoly night they had shared together in the early 1970s felt as though it had happened a century ago.
•
It still didn’t seem right to Ralph. Through all of this, he felt, the Atlantic City Quakers hadn’t received ample credit for their contributions to the creation of Monopoly. The streets of Atlantic City were lined with tributes to Darrow—a plaque near Park Place, mentions in the local museums, false retellings of the legend by city officials and tour guides. Yet the Quakers and their hours of playing and perfecting the game went largely unnoticed, even after Ralph’s trial. Through the course of his Monopoly research, they had become real people to him and revived the connection to those who had welcomed him when he immigrated with his family as a child.
In the late 1980s, he decided to try to get a plaque acknowledging the Quakers placed in the seaside town. The Quality Inn on Pacific Avenue agreed to host the commemorative marker, as the hotel stood on the former site of the Atlantic City Friends School, torn down in the mid-’80s.
On September 11, 1989, the plaque was hung in the hotel’s Quaker Room. It read,
HONORING THE TRUTH ABOUT MONOPOLY
In 1931, the game now sold as MONOPOLY, was invented in and around the Atlantic City Friends School which once stood on this spot. The invention was a cooperative effort centered on Ruth Hoskins, Jesse Raiford, and Cyril Harvey. Ruth Hoskins was the principal and Cyril Harvey was a teacher of this school. Jesse Raiford was their friend.
While the plaque told an incomplete story of Monopoly’s history by omitting Lizzie Magie and the Arden players and using the word “invented” perhaps too strongly, Ralph considered it progress in the war against the Darrow folktale. Ralph dedicated the plaque, and Talicor, the new publisher of Anti-Monopoly, sponsored the event. In a hotel conference room, Ralph took to a podium wearing a blazer and a striped tie. He stood before a banner that read, “Talicor: Honors the True Creators of Monopoly and Introduces Anti-Monopoly.” The group of early monopoly game players craned their necks to watch Ralph as he spoke—older, grayer versions of the souls who had tread the same soil decades before. The event served as a reminder of who wasn’t there: Jesse Raiford, who had died in 1960; Ruth Harvey, who had passed two years later; and dozens of other Quakers who had played the game in its early years.
“Parker Brothers supported the Darrow myth for years,” Ralph said, “and bought up a lot of patents and versions of the game that were popular at the time. They monopolized Monopoly. Actually the game was in the public domain. But now the truth is coming out and the people who deserve the credit for Atlantic City Monopoly are getting the credit.”
Ralph walked outside the hotel and snapped a Polaroid photo of the three-story brick building with a green and yellow Quality Inn banner above its door. The Atlantic City Friends School was long gone from the corner of Pacific and South Carolina Avenues, but much of its original building had been incorporated into the hotel. Behind the site rose a bland brick building over fifteen stories high, and across the street stretched a stark, empty parking lot.
After years of decay, Atlantic City had become another experiment in urban renewal. Representatives from large casinos and area politicians had argued that in order to rebuild the city, it was first necessary to destroy it. Hotels like the Traymore and other decadent pieces of the city and its Quaker-constructed past were demolished, Ardenite William Price’s beloved Marlborough-Blenheim
imploded spectacularly to make room for a modern Bally’s. Thousands of residents were displaced as casino moguls designed businesses that isolated their guests as much as possible from the city’s harsh streets. By the end of the 1980s, Atlantic City had become one of the top tourist destinations in the United States, yet only five of the twelve major casinos in town were posting a profit, and what little bounty was earned was seldom passed on to locals.
Local papers reported that elderly residents were being robbed on Oriental Avenue and that the city’s youth pelted the tourist buses with rocks. Land speculation pushed people out of their houses, and local churches and synagogues left the city, never to come back. Void of customers, hundreds of businesses shut their doors.
Yet despite the bleak cityscape, Dorothea Raiford, now eighty-eight years old, said that for the first time since she had lived on Atlantic City’s streets, she would be able to look at a Monopoly board and smile. A fifty-five-year-long wait had come to an end.
“I feel wonderful,” Raiford told a news reporter who asked her about the new plaque. “I’m just glad I lived long enough to see it. It finally happened.”
•
In the year following the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the Monopoly case, the decision “put the fear of God in people,” according to one trademark lawyer. The Anti-Monopoly case was cited in a New York federal court ruling upholding a decision stating that Nestlé’s Toll House cookie, like Monopoly, was generic. A similar invocation was used to find Eastern Air Lines’ Shuttle generic as well.
