AP News, January 17th, 2008
Richard Knerr
ARCADIA, Calif. (AP) — Richard Knerr, co-founder of the toy company that popularized the Hula Hoop, Frisbee and other fads that became classics, has died. He was 82.
Knerr, who started Wham-O in 1948 with his childhood friend Arthur "Spud" Melin, died Monday at a hospital after suffering a stroke earlier in the day at his Arcadia home, his wife Dorothy told the Los Angeles Times.
Knerr and Melin got their start in business peddling slingshots. They named their enterprise Wham-O after the sound a slingshot made when it hit its target.
They branched into other sporting goods, including boomerangs and crossbows, then added toys that often bore such playful names as the Superball, Slip 'N Slide and Silly String.
When a friend told them in 1958 about a large ring used for exercise in Australia, they devised their own version and called it the Hula Hoop.
Around the same time, they bought the rights to a plastic flying disc invented by Walter "Fred" Morrison, who called it the Pluto Platter. Wham-O bought the rights and renamed it the Frisbee.
The rest is amusement history.
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Hone Tuwhare
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Hone Tuwhare, the first Maori poet to be published in English and one of New Zealand's most celebrated verse writers, has died. He was 86.
Tuwhare, who had been in poor health for several years, died Wednesday in a home for the elderly in the southern city of Dunedin. The cause of death was not immediately released. Prime Minister Helen Clark confirmed his death.
Tuwhare's work, spanning more than 40 years, was popular among poetry connoisseurs and general readers alike.
He was named New Zealand's Te Mata Poet Laureate in 1999, won two Montana New Zealand Book Awards for poetry and was awarded honorary doctorates of literature by Auckland and Otago Universities.
Born in 1922 to the Ngapuhi tribe in the northern New Zealand town of Kaikohe, Tuwhare first began to write in 1939.
His initial collection, "No Ordinary Sun" in 1964, was a passionate cry against nuclear weapons, penned in response to the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945 — the first book of poetry by a Maori writer in English.
Now in its 10th reprint, it remains one of the most widely read individual collections of poetry in New Zealand. He also published at least 10 other volumes of poems as well as several plays.
