LAB `FAILURE' CHARMS KIDS AS SILLY PUTTY FOR 50 YEARS.

Byline: Randall Chase Associated Press 

You can stretch it, bounce it, pull it apart and put it back together again. After going nowhere as a World War II rubber substitute, Silly Putty celebrates its 50th anniversary next year as one of America's classic toys.

``It was a thinking-kid's toy - the fact that it was a solid liquid and the way it behaved in your hand,'' said Peter Hodgson Jr., who teaches Russian literature at UCLA.

``Part of its weirdness is that it had no use at all. It's hard to imagine any other culture, any other country, in which this could have made sense . . . and nobody less eccentric than my old man could have carried it off.''

The ``old man'' was Peter Hodgson, an advertising copywriter then working on a catalog for Ruth Fallgatter, owner of a New Haven, Conn., toy store called The Block Shop.

As with practically everything having to do with Silly Putty, there are conflicting stories about how the senior Hodgson learned about the strange, new substance that had disappointed its inventors.

Hodgson's son said his father was introduced to it at the home of a Harvard physicist. According to Silly Putty maker Binney & Smith, Hodgson and Fallgatter were attending a party hosted by a General Electric executive when the mysterious material was passed around the room.

In 1949, Hodgson and Fallgatter decided to include some of the bouncing putty in her toy store's catalog. It was packaged in a clear, compact case and sold for $2. It outsold everything in the catalog except a 50-cent box of Crayola Crayons.

Fallgatter lost interest in the new product, but Hodgson didn't. In 1950, he borrowed money to buy a batch of the gooey substance and to package 1-ounce wads of it in plastic eggs selling for $1 each. He dubbed it Silly Putty.

Shrugging off advice from marketers at the International Toy Fair in New York to give up on his idea, Hodgson displayed it at bookshops. Sales skyrocketed after a New Yorker magazine writer did a story about Silly Putty.

Hodgson eventually created one of the first television advertising campaigns targeting children, with commercials airing on the Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo programs.

When Hodgson died in 1976, he left an estate valued at $140 million. Binney & Smith, which also makes Crayola Crayons and Magic Markers, acquired the rights to Silly Putty in 1977.

For more than 20 years, Silly Putty has been made at Dow Corning's plant in Greensboro, where about 300 different products are produced. But Binney & Smith, owned by Hallmark Cards Inc., has decided to drop the Greensboro plant from its vendor list.

Silly Putty is made in a machine resembling one that industrial bakers use to make bread dough. It comes out in basic white and coral. It is cooled with dry ice, formed into 50-pound blocks, packed into boxes and sent to Binney & Smith, which jazzes some of it up with special colors and packages it for distribution to toy stores across the country.

Silly Putty still comes in the familiar plastic eggs, and it still sells for about $1. It still works its silly magic, although it doesn't transfer comic strips the way it used to because of improvements in newspaper inks.

Depending on whom you believe, Silly Putty was created during World War II either by Corning Glass Works scientists Rob Roy McGregor and Earl Warrick or by James Wright, a GE researcher.

All three men were trying to develop silicone-based products that could be used as substitutes for rubber, a precious wartime commodity.

Warrick, 86, said the basic recipe for Silly Putty is to mix a silicone derivative with boric oxide.

``The really smart fellow is the man in New York who saw the possibility of a kid's toy out of it,'' Warrick said. ``I think he's a multimillionaire. I got a dollar for my patent.''

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PHOTO (Color) Silly Putty celebrates its 50th anniversary next year as one of America's classic toys.

Tom Mendoza/Daily News