About 300 people slunk into this town to bid on the earthly goods of the late Betty James, a woman whose life required as much flexibility and rebound as the spring-steel coil she sprung on a toy-hungry world: the Slinky.
On the lawn of her sprawling Tudor home were nine televisions, three refrigerators, nine mink coats and enough Sinatra-era furniture for a rat pack reunion.
Still, beneath an auctioneer's tent where avarice mingled with nostalgia, every other eye seemed focused on a table whereon rested James' personal collection of Slinkys.
"She probably just held a few things back that meant something to her," said auctioneer Ron Roan, who organized the estate auction last month, eight months after James died.
The variety was stunning: original Slinkys in their orange-brown boxes, gold-colored 40th- and 50th-anniversary limited editions, a plastic one "celebrating the Syracuse student -- past, present and future." There was a Slinky board game, Slink the dog from the "Toy Story" movie, and a Slinky Santa who, instead of Ho-Ho, goes boing-boing.
Then there was the lone Nittany Slinky, coiled in honor of Richard T. James, Penn State College of Engineering Class of 1939.
James came home from his job at a shipyard in 1944 to show his wife the odd, fully compressed spring he'd been working with, convinced it had peacetime potential.
If Richard James was the father of the Slinky, Betty was its midwife.
"She named it. She went to a dictionary," said Tom James, Mrs. James's son, who was 3 at the time and played his own role.
"I was the one that discovered it went down stairs," he said. "I fell and it came after me."
When James set up a table at a department store in Philadelphia, desperate to make a sale, Mrs. James, in what her son described as an "I Love Lucy moment," corralled her friends and hurried down to assure him at least a few sales.
She couldn't get near the table. Store patrons, fixated by the back-and-forth flutter of the steel coil, captivated by its simple capacity to addict, bought them all.
Slinky made the James family rich. It didn't make the family permanent.
After building a fortune on a toy so simple it remains the quintessential merging of simplicity to marketing, the elder Mr. James bought a mansion outside Philadelphia and, by his son's account, went a bit odd.
"He got in with some cult people -- religious cult people," his son said. In the early 1960s he called a family meeting, announced he was going to Bolivia and wanted to know who cared to accompany him.
The elder Mr. James died in Bolivia more than 30 years ago after a run-in with a South American warlord, his son said. Details are sketchy. What is clearer is that Mrs. James kept the rights to the Slinky, moved the children to this town outside Altoona, where she was born and raised, and flirted with bankruptcy.
She opened a manufacturing plant in Hollidaysburg, gambled her house and savings and sprung her product on a new generation.
"Her representatives told her 'You have to go on television,' " Tom James said. She did. The Slinky, with its brain-freezing jingle walked, stretched and boinged its way across televisions nationwide throughout the '60s, making its "slinkity" sound.
Back at the auction, a box of Slinkys comes up for sale.
"I know something about every one of them," Mr. James said. "I bought the wire."
A box of loose Slinkys went for $45. A small hubbub began in the James family row.
"Somebody's getting a deal," he whispered. "There's a gold-plated Slinky in there. We sold them for $100."
(E-mail Dennis B. Roddy at droddy(at)post-gazette.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com.)
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