Don Poynter, who made toilets talk and golf balls walk is dead

Some of Don Poynter’s creations, it must be admitted, had a certain whoopee-cushion quality.

There was, for instance, the Talking Toilet, a chatty gizmo that could be concealed on a toilet; when someone sat down, a recorded voice would exclaim “Move over, you’re blocking the light!” or something similar.

And there was the GoGo Girl Drink Mixer, a skimpily dressed glass-holding doll that rotated her pelvis to stir a cocktail.

But if some of the countless novelty items Poynter invented and produced were on the lowbrow side, there is no denying the subtle brilliance of one of his earliest and most successful ones: the Little Black Box. Created in 1959, it was an unadorned box with a switch on top. Activate the switch and the box vibrated a bit; then a hand emerged from it and turned the switch off.

That was it: a device whose only purpose was to turn itself off. Other people in the same period had explored iterations of the so-called useless machine, but few saw the marketing possibilities as clearly as Poynter.

“Reps at a New York trade show kept asking what it did,” he told the alumni magazine of the University of Cincinnati, his alma mater, more than 40 years later. “I said, ‘It does absolutely nothing, except switch itself off.’ Everyone thought I was crazy, but I sold it to Spencer Gifts. In one month, it became the hottest item they ever had.”

Later, when the television show “The Addams Family” appeared in 1964 with a character known as Thing, who was just a hand, Poynter struck a deal to market a variation of the box under that name. Poynter said he sold 14 million of those. Over the years, he accumulated so many patents, he lost count.

Poynter, who in a colorful life was also a drum major, an entertainer at Harlem Globetrotters games, a puppeteer and a golf course developer, died Aug. 13 in Cincinnati. He was 96. His daughter Molly Poynter Maundrell said the cause was cancer.

Her father, she said in a phone interview, was lucid even in his final days, recounting stories to the hospice center staff so extraordinary that they prompted a phone call.

“I knew exactly what the social worker was going to ask me,” Maundrell said. “She said, ‘I was worried he was hallucinating.’ And I said: ‘They’re true. They’re all true.’ ”

Donald Byron Poynter was born May 14, 1925, in Cincinnati. His mother, Gertrude (Johnson) Poynter, was an artist and homemaker, and his father, William, was an inventor and photographer.

Young Don showed an inventive streak early; Maundrell said he told stories of sneaking flash powder from his father’s photography supplies, making little bombs out of it and dropping them from remote-controlled airplanes.

“I started out trying to entertain myself,” he told Scripps Howard News Service in 1988. “Then I discovered it was fun entertaining other people, too.”

Poynter Products was founded in 1954. Poynter’s first big hit was whiskey-flavored toothpaste, which brought him enough notoriety that he was a contestant on the game show “What’s My Line?”