The Billion Dollar Monopoly (R) Swindle

Monopoly games are notoriously long but the one which triggered the events in this book really got out of hand--it's now twenty-five years old. The problem was that one thing led to another and first I played Monopoly with the family and then I invented a game called Anti-Monopoly. Being a Professor of Economics, I decided to market my idea on my own which turned out to be a lot of laughs (on me) at first . . . but I learned. . .and eventually I developed it into a national best-seller with the help of a few loyal associates. At which point, Parker Brothers showed its gratitude for my buying its sacred game by hitting us with a major trademark infringement suit. While this caused us a lot of trouble, the law suit boomeranged into a giant mistake for Rich Uncle Pennybags, like trading Baltic for the Boardwalk even-steven.

True, we had to take the smug symbol of riches all the way to the United States Supreme Court before we prevailed, enduring six years of being banned from the market and having 40,000 of our games buried in a garbage dump as an arrogant but ill-fated object lesson to other challengers of the Monopoly monopoly. All that's described in the book but another big part of it tells how the law suit stimulated me to check out the background of Monopoly and how I was almost squashed by the skeletons which started to rattle out of the closet. My detective work wasn't as easy as winning Monopoly when you own the good properties because I was up against a mom and apple pie legend about the origins of Monopoly. Central casting in this epic tale was the rags to riches story of a man named Charles Darrow, a supposedly gutsy victim of the Great Depression who invented Monopoly to feed his pregnant wife and kids but was then catapulted into countless riches as the creator of the most popular, privately-owned board game in history.

One mystery phone call on a TV show triggered the hunt which eventually unmasked our hero as an impostor and proved that the whole legend was a corporate- sponsored fraud fabricated to save the business from bankruptcy. I also discovered that Parker Brother's Monopoly was based on a folkgame named monopoly which had been originated by a woman, Elizabeth Magie. Not only that but it had been played on personalized, homemade boards all over the eastern United States for twenty-three years before our folk hero arranged to become a proud papa.

The Monopoly in your closet is the Atlantic City version of this folkgame. It was created by some ingenious Quakers who taught school in Atlantic City. Apart from some designs made by a graphic artist, Darrow's sole contribution to the invention was to copy the Quakers' creation with the faithfulness of a medieval monk transcribing a sacred text. The original work was then suppressed as part of a business scheme to dump Monopoly's real world competition and the nation's media, from Sports Illustrated to The New York Times was conned into trumpeting the fake story.

Yes, ironically enough, the game in which players rip off tenants and utility users and dump competing players right off the board with their monopoly muscle was itself illegally monopolized by means of a fraudulent patent monopoly. And the engineers of the fraud laughed all the way to the bank as they raked in monopoly profits and gouged you and me for a cool billion dollars. And nobody knew about it until Monopoly decided to push Anti-Monopoly off the market--and this book came to be written.

ONE A Strange Phone Conversation

It's August 20, 1974. I'm sitting in a television studio on a sweltering day in Portland, Oregon flogging the Anti-Monopoly game I had invented about three years earlier. . . The game company I had created for my Anti-Monopoly game was pushing me into these publicity tours to regenerate our sales because Parker Brothers' legal assault had melted down our purchase orders from about a million to 30,000. It was a public television interview program with listener call-ins. . .

A Mrs. Stevenson joined us. "First of all Dr. Anspach, I hate to date myself with a story going back all the way to the mid-thirties, but I think Parker Brothers has a lot of nerve suing you for getting a free ride on their game when they stole monopoly in the first place."

"They what it?" I said and paused, afraid even to breathe her word since I didn't want a libel suit slapped on us. We were having enough trouble with the other one. After all, I, like everybody else in the world, knew exactly how Monopoly had been invented and theft had nothing to do with it. On the contrary, what had happened was one of the best-known chronicles of Yankee ingenuity and well-rewarded initiative.

This inspirational real-life story was found on every instruction sheet inserted into every Monopoly box so that people could dream of the real wealth to be earned in this land of opportunity as they played with make-believe Monopoly money. And if the players missed the story on the rules, they got a chance to read all about it in its perennial retelling in newspapers, magazine articles, and books, or to hear about it on radio and TV shows.

The hero was Charles B. Darrow, a Philadelphian who had lost his job in the Great Depression which caused terrible hardship to his pregnant wife and little son. But Darrow did not despair or look for welfare handouts. One evening, Darrow sat down at his kitchen table and "devised out of thin air" a game in which people could fantasize about riches no longer attainable during this collapse of our capitalist system. . . Parker Brothers. . . licensed the game from him--and the best selling board game in history was launched. A grateful corporation rewarded this real life Horatio Alger so generously that "he would soon be able to retire for life at the age of 46 and become a millionaire gentleman farmer, world traveler--especially to ancient cities--motion picture photographer, and collector of exotic orchid species."

Having refreshed my memory, I went on a little testily. "Whatever gives you that idea? Somebody Darrow invented Monopoly and he worked with Parker Brothers".

"Of course," added the host approvingly. "During the Great Depression."

"He stole it," Mrs. Stevenson persisted. "I had a good friend in college who was one of the few women of her day to become an aeronautical engineer. She swore to me that her father and friends had created the exact same Monopoly game now sold by Parker Brothers, Atlantic City street names and all ."

The host of the show passed me a piece of paper on which he had written in big block letters "Careful!!!! Libel. Kook." I nodded to him and moved on cautiously. "Fascinating. Can you remember any more details about your friend's story?"

"Well, I can tell you one thing. My friend was a real sober person. Remember, she majored in engineering, but whenever Parker Brothers had something in the papers about that Darrow person, she would practically throw a fit about Parker Brothers working in cahoots with that con-man."

The host, an inveterate note writer, wrote in bigger block letters: "MORE CONSPIRACY THEORIES. SAY ALLEGED FOR GOD'S SAKES."

"Can you remember anything else about your friend's alleged invention story, Mrs. Stevenson?" I prompted.

"Anything else? Let's see now. She said it happened in the early thirties, when she was just a little girl, but she could recall very clearly watching her father and his friends working out the details of the game. And even then they called it monopoly, though that was quite a bit before Darrow and Parker Brothers arrived on the scene."

"Do you recollect your friend's name, by any chance?" I asked, thinking of how I should get her social security number, current address and the number of her drivers license--just in case Stevenson wasn't a kook after all.

"Of course I remember her name. Lord, I don't think I'll ever forget Joanna. She was a real whiz kid, that gal."

"Go on," I pressed her. "Joanna who. . .?"

"Oh, well, that's another matter. She's been married and remarried several times and I've lost track of her so I couldn't possibly know her last name. But I can tell you she'd be about fifty right now, and she graduated from NYU where they had a special wartime program to train women as aeronautical engineers, what with all the men being away in the army. But I'm afraid that's all I can tell you about her."

The host had had enough. "This makes no sense to me, Mrs. Stevenson. Just for starters, if the game was stolen from Joanna's friends and family, why didn't they complain to Parker Brothers, a very reputable company, or haul Darrow to court so they could get back the millions you claim did not belong to Mr. Darrow."

This stopped her for only a moment. "Right you are. I remember asking Joanna the exact same question. She said part of the reason was a religion thing. They were Quakers and you know the way Quakers are; they're very peaceful and they don't like to quarrel in court."

"Not very likely," I thought while the host shook his head in disbelief. She pretty well lost me at this point.

Still, I jotted down the information about Joanna No-name. You never know. Then I schlepped on to Seattle, the next stop on my publicity tour.