Co-Founder Of Slinky Company Dies At 90 »

Posted By TimALoftis 1 year ago in Business & Finance

Prop it 36 Drop it

Betty James, who co-founded the company that made the Slinky and beat the odds as a single mother in the late 1950s to become a successful executive, has died. She was 90.

She died Thursday, said a spokeswoman for the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

In 1945, James and her husband at the time, Richard, founded the company that would later make Slinky, the toy for which she was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 2001. The coil-shaped toy which could go down stairs by walking end-over-end became a hit with children.

She took over management of James Industries Inc. 14 years after the company was founded, after her husband left her to follow a religious cult in Bolivia. Richard James died in 1974.