Inventor Foley brought people close via Twister
LOS ANGELES — Chuck Foley, whose Twister party game brought shoeless strangers achingly close to one another and made even the most spirited rounds of Scrabble seem comparatively tame, has died. He was 82.
The inventor, who held 97 patents, died July 1 in a care facility in St. Louis Park, Minn., family members said Wednesday. He had Alzheimer’s disease.
Foley came up with a wide variety of gizmos and games, including a handlaunched toy helicopter, soft-tipped darts, plastic toy handcuffs and “un-du,” a liquid adhesive remover used by librarians, people who keep scrapbooks, and anyone who wants to lift an uncanceled stamp off a used envelope.
“I was born with a gift,” Foley told The New York Times in 1998. “Ideas pop into my head.”
Twister, marketed as “The Game That Ties You Up in Knots,” was born as a collaboration between Foley and cartoonist Neil W. Rabens when they worked at a St. Paul, Minn., design firm in the mid-1960s.
“I remember the patent office saying we needed mechanical parts to patent it,” Rabens told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday. “It was Foley who said, ‘How about using people as the parts?’ ”
Foley even went to Washington and demonstrated to astonished patent officials just how Twister is played — a process whose hilarity is not conveyed in a patent filing that says: “With a particular limb of each player on a particular locus of a certain column, and with the referee chancing to call for the movement of the said limb to a locus of the same column, the players shall each be required to move that same limb to another locus of that same column.”
In other words: With a turn of the spinner, people in various contortions on a plastic mat marked with colored dots get up close and personal in a hurry.
Twister rocketed to popularity after Johnny Carson and actress Eva Gabor played it on “The Tonight Show” in 1966. However, Foley said in interviews that he made only $27,000 on it after a dispute over royalties.