Monopoly Way Back When

QUESTION: I recently purchased a box lot at a country auction. In it I discovered a piece of oil cloth on which seems to be drawn a game board much like the one used for Monopoly. However, the names of the streets aren’t the same. Can you tell me anything about this?

ANSWER: What you’ve uncovered is an old game board from the early days of Monopoly.  Before Charles Darrow of Philadelphia commercialized the game and sold the rights to Parker Brothers, people made up their own game boards and used odds and ends for playing pieces.

It all began when Elizabeth (Lizzie) Magie Phillips created a game called “The Landlord’s Game” in 1904. As a proponent of the economic ideas of Henry George, she designed her game to teach the single-tax theory as an antidote to the evils inherent in monopolistic land ownership. It caught on with college students who played it in their dormitory rooms. But since they were often low on cash, they made their own boards.

The Landlord’s Game came in two parts: The first was like Monopoly, a game in which there’s only one winner. But in the second part the game employs the same capitalistic principles but mixes them with a healthy dose of tax reform, to prevent the evils of monopolistic ownership, and then transforms all the players into enlightened winners.

While the game board resembles the one for Monopoly, the names, drawings, colors and the like used on it are different. It’s painted with blocks for rental properties such as "Poverty Place" (rent $50), "Easy Street" (rent $100) and "Lord Blueblood's Estate " (no trespassing - go to jail). There are banks, a poorhouse, and railroads and utilities such as the "Soakum Lighting System" ($50 for landing it) and the "PDQ Railroad" (fare $100). And, of course, there’s the famous "Jail" block. Players could only rent properties on Phillips's board, not acquire them. Otherwise, there’s little difference between The Landlord’s Game and the Monopoly of today.

After Phillips published her game in 1923, it became popular as a grass roots movement. One of the people who became addicted to the game was Ruth Hoskins, a young Quaker woman from Indiana who went to teach at the Atlantic City Friends School in the Fall of 1929. Earlier that year, she learned to play a version of the Landlord's Game, called Auction Monopoly, from her brother, who learned it at college. Early in 1930, Hoskins taught it to her fellow teacher Cyril Harvey and his wife, Ruth, and the Harveys played it with their friends Jesse and Dorothea Raiford. It was Ruth Harvey who drew the first Atlantic City Monopoly board with Atlantic City street names.

The Harveys lent their games to Quakers staying at Atlantic City hotels and also taught their relatives, Ruth and Eugene Raiford, who, in turn taught their friend, Charles Todd, a manager of one of the hotels. Todd then taught the game to his hotel guests Esther and Charles Darrow.

Darrow liked the game so much, he enhanced the design and made 5,000 sets by hand in his basement. He sold these to Wanamaker’s, a highly regarded Philadelphia department store, as well as F.A.O. Schwartz, New York’s famous toy store. A friend of Sally Barton, the wife of the president of Parker Brothers, told her about this new game and the rest, as they say, is history.

The royalties from sales of Monopoly soon made Darrow a millionaire and newspapers touted Darrow as the inventor of Monopoly. And while he made lots of money from it, all he did was organize the game and sell it. Since Phillips had actually created a different game, albeit similar, she had no rights to the game of Monopoly, which had been developed by many people over time, much like the Linux operating system for computers.

For more information, read Pass Go and Collect on Early Monopoly Games.

I Scream, You Scream...We All Scream for Ice Cream

QUESTION: I have an old pewter or white metal cylinder form which stands about 8 inches tall and has three parts: a decorative molded top in the shape of a bunch of fruit, a long tube center that’s ribbed on the inside, and a screw-on base that supposedly belonged to my great-grandmother. Can you tell me what it is?

ANSWER: What you have is what’s known as a banquet ice cream mold, topped by a sculpted bunch of fruit with leaves. This type of mold, made of pewter, dates from the early 1900's and would have been used for parties or holiday gatherings.

Ice cream is a frozen dessert usually made from dairy products, such as milk and cream, often combined with fruits or other flavors. It’s origins can be traced back to at least the 4th century B.C.E. when people living in the Persia (in today’s Iraq and Iran) would place snow in a bowl and pour grape juice concentrate over it, inventing what has come to be known as the snow cone.

During the first century A.D. , Roman Emperor Nero had ice brought from the mountains and topped it with fruit. But it wasn’t until the reign of China's King Tang in the 7th century that the idea of icy milk concoctions became popular, a idea that would ultimately become fashionable in European royal courts.

Arabs were perhaps the first to use milk as a major ingredient in the production of ice cream. They sweetened it with sugar rather than fruit juices, and came up with ways to produce it commercially. By the 10th century, ice cream had spread to Baghdad, Cairo, and Damascus. Makers used milk or cream, plus some yogurt, and flavored it with dried fruits and nuts.

Charles I of England so loved his "frozen snow" that he offered his ice cream maker a lifetime pension in return for keeping the formula secret. But it was the Quaker colonists who first introduced ice cream to America in 1772. During colonial times, confectioners sold ice cream at their shops in New York and other cities and some of the founding fathers, including George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson regularly ate and served ice cream. First Lady Dolley Madison served it at her husband's Inaugural Ball in 1813.

In 1843, the U.S. Government granted Nancy Johnson of Philadelphia a patent for a small-scale hand-cranked ice cream freezer. Eventually, the creation of the ice cream soda by Robert Green in 1874 added ice cream's popularity.

Decorative molds, enhancing ice cream's presentation at the table, appeared at fancy parties in the late 19th century, a tradition borrowed from British molded puddings. The most notable of the American mold firms were Eppelsheimer & Co., Krauss Co. and Schall & Co. However, the first ones came from European makers. Makers used pewter, white metal or tin to create a variety of forms ranging from animal, human and bird figures to floral, architectural, and holiday-oriented themes that came in various sizes.
                               
Joseph Micelli, Sr., one of the country’s premier mold makers, sculpted them with remarkable details of animals, people, flowers, fruit and even vegetables for the Eppelsheimer & Co. of New York. Their molds have E & Co NY and the mold’s catalog number stamped on the bottom.
 
The molds produced by Krauss Company, also of New York, are distinguishable by their integrated mold hinges rather than soldered hinges. 

Ice cream molds are now highly collectible. The barrel banquet mold in question above sells for around $250, but smaller ones in the shape of individual bananas, pears, peaches, and other fruit and flowers sell for $30 to $70. From the outside, these molds often look plain, but inside they include minute details. While the barrel mold was meant to be unscrewed and lifted off, most ice cream molds, as with their chocolate counterparts, have hinges that allow them to be broken open to release the creamy confection.