Back in our day at the college newspaper, we had our share of controversy. Our paper was considered positively communistic within the context of the commuter-school/business college haze that was Florida Atlantic University in the early Eighties. We used to get the nastiest letters railing against our perceived stands on abortion, apartheid, Central America. You name it, we stood left of it. Granted, we were a cadre of mouthy misfits, of social distorters who were more comfortable screaming at each other about Walter Mondale’s running mate or UB40’s crossover over a pitcher of Mic at the Rathskeller than we were at the wet-T-shirt contests at “I Tappa Keg.” (Boy, how times have changed!) Back then, we had a real “Who cares? Everybody hates us anyway,” attitude. Our views went over as well then as Salamander Stew might at an SOS meeting now. So, nothing in the way of confrontation or controversy surprised us. Well, almost nothing. The Cease & Desist Order was quite a shock. What was shocking was that it wasn’t for our liberal misquoting of some college dean nor for the picture of the student body president’s face pasted on a naked woman’s body. No, the order came from the mega-toy manufacturer Wham-O®. Our resident slacker (before there was a name for it), reporter Rebel One (he attested that he had legally changed his name to that), regularly mentioned in his writings the sport now known as disc golf. Back then, it was called Frisbee golf or Frisbee putt or somesuch thing. Heck, we figured that mentioning the product would have been appreciated by the suits. Instead they took us to task for not including the ® symbol. If memory serves, they were ticked that we weren’t using the entire product name, Frisbee® Flying Disc, with each reference. For a product which pilfered its name from somewhere else (the flying pie tins of Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Frisbie Pie Company were the inspiration), they sure seemed uptight.
Oh well.
Actually, the Frisbee® was originally called the Pluto Platter, developed by Wham-O® after they had come to an agreement with the disc’s inventor, Walter Morrison. Morrison followed in his father’s tinkering footsteps (dad invented the sealed-beam car headlight) and developed his Morrison’s Flyin’ Saucer in the years after his return from WWII as a prisoner in Stalag 13. The dudes from Wham-O® saw folks lofting Morrison’s disc above California’s beaches and approached him with a deal. Even today, his is the basic design behind all subsequent Frisbee®s. In the late-Fifties, the Wham-O®ers decided to pump up their market by hitting college campuses. But Yale-ies had been tossing similar contraptions for years — the Frisbie pie tins. It was on this tour where the Wham-O® boys first heard the terms “Frisbie” and “Frisbie-ing.” A legend was born. (Hmmmmm, does the pie co. get a slice of that?) Anyway, you can read all about it and more in the book Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual & Definitive Treatise by Stancil E.D. Johnson, MD. The section about the origin is available online, as is more info about the famous flying disc (including some great physics lessons) and the sport which has developed around it. http://www.frisbee.com
All of this reminiscing and origin digging has a purpose, really. This Labor Day Weekend is the 22nd Annual Waterloo Fall Classic disc golf tourney, Fri-Sun, Sep 3-5 at Waterloo Park, 15th & Red River, sponsored by the Waterloo Disc Golf Club. The three-day throw fest will benefit the Ronald McDonald House. The times vary each day, with check-in and late registration kicking it all off on Friday at 2pm. A doubles tournament will continue until dark. On Saturday, the fun begins at 7am, and on Sunday (times pending) the plan is to start at 8:30am. There are tons of tee-off times in between, so it’s probably a good idea to call ahead. While you are at it, you might have the sponsors translate this curiously boggling sentence from the flyer: “Ace Pot will be per flight and split evenly among all Aces within each flight.” 292-1290 or 280-0025.— Or you could stay at home on the couch, eat a whole tin of Pringles, and watch the Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon beginning Sun, Sep 5, 8pm and running for 211é2 hours straight through on KXAN-36. This year, the ‘thon makes history as the world’s first live multilingual Webcast. Some of the starpower shining down on this year’s Labor Day of Love include Bill Maher, Casey Kasem, Martin Short, Ed McMahon, Marcel Marceau, Brendan Fraser, Mariah Carey, Tom Petty, Laura Dern, Charo, Cher, Brandy, Carrot Top, Judge Judy, and (omigod!) Lucy Lawless. http://www.mdausa.org or 520/529-2000. 
This article appears in September 3 • 1999.