My Gobble Popper Dream

I've had a lot of moneymaking ideas in my life. Most of them All of them were Walter-Mitty-like dreams. All, that is, until I finally succeeded to some degree with a chicken plucker plan book in 2002. 

For example, in the early 1980s I dreamed of being a toy and game maker. It was a few years after I invented Granola Bars.

One of my toy/game ideas was the Gobble Popper you see above. That Gobble Popper is now a relic. But it might make a good display in the future Planet Whizbang museum.  The museum will show many of the crazy ideas I had before I came up with the chicken plucker. And some after. 

For now, I keep that Gobble Popper in a box with a bunch of other old junk.

The back story is that I bought a lathe and some tools from an old guy here in Moravia. Paid $100 (and sold it for $100 a few years later). What could I make and sell with a lathe? That's how my mind works. I came up with the concept of a well-crafted ball and cup toy. Heirloom quality, don't ya know?

So I made a lot of dust, and a few gobble poppers. It was fun. 

The trick to getting the ball into the cup is not to swing it, but to pop it up. Thus the Popper part of the name. As for the Gobble (or Goble, which is just an ignorant spelling of Gobble), I have no idea how I came up with that. But I liked it then, and I like it now. It's kind of catchy.

The big challenge with the Gobble Popper is not to get it into the cup once, but to pocket the ball as many consecutive times as possible. I've consecutively pocketed the ball 47 times. But that was years ago, when I was in the prime of my Gobble Popping career.

I envisioned, as I was making all that dust, that there would one day be worldwide Gobble Popper competitions. Hey, why not!

I even printed up Gobble Popper instructions. I recently came across the instructions, and reading them after all these years was a real hoot. I've posted pictures below. Click on the pictures and you should be able to see a larger version that you can read.

I never sold a single Gobble Popper. I didn't even try. Selling is always the hardest part. 

It is, of course, much easier to sell things like Gobble Poppers these days because we all have access to the internet. If the internet was around when I invented Gobble Poppers..... well, I can only imagine how amazing that would have been.

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