Chinese Checkers GameIn the 1930s a craze for the board game commonly known as Chinese checkers swept across America.
A Topeka manufacturer, L. G. Ballard, took advantage of the nationwide fad by developing his own version of the game that he called "Star Checkers." The Star Checkers game wasn't Ballard's first foray into the novelty business. Several years earlier he had found success marketing products such as towel racks, potlifters, and cat-shaped wooden match holders. By the spring of 1938 the Ballard Manufacturing Company of Topeka was shipping out around 15,000 Star Checkers games a month (including 500,000 to 700,000 marbles) to Woolworth stores nationwide, with preparations underway to produce 4,000 sets daily to meet order demands. Ballard employed several workers just to count out the marbles for each game -- ten each of six different colors. The need for a faster and more accurate method of parceling out the marbles led Ballard to invent a device that counted and dispensed them automatically. 
Chinese checkers was not a new game; it was a simplified variation of a European board game called Halma, which was developed around 1880 and had its own run of popularity in America during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Like Halma, from two to six players could play Star Checkers. The first player to move all of his ten marbles from one point of the star to the point directly opposite by means of checkers-like jumps was the winner. The images at right were appeared in an article entitled "Topeka Product Enjoying Nation-Wide Sales," which appeared in the Kansas Business Magazine for April, 1938. The top photo shows L.G. Ballard (at back, left) in his office at Ballard Manufacturing. The middle photo is a corner of the manufacturing department. At bottom are some of the company's products, including Star Checkers. Ballard's Star Checkers game can be seen in the "Entertainment" case of the 1920s and '30s section of the main gallery at the Kansas Museum of History.
|
|
 |
Return
to the latest 
