History
Originally created by Steve Chmelar in 1971, who constructed a giant hand out of hardware cloth and paper mache for the 1971 Iowa High School Athletic Association Boy's State Basketball Finals. Ottumwa Bulldogs vs Davenport West Falcons. A senior in high school, Steve's photo was taken by the Associated Press and published in the Des Moines Tribune and the 1971 Ottumwa High School Class Yearbook, the "Argus" in Ottumwa, Iowa.
In 1978, Geral Fauss created foam fingers to show support for the team at the high school where he taught, to raise funds for the industrial arts club, and as a project that his industrial arts class could produce themselves. The first prototype foam finger was actually made out of plywood and had a painting of a "number one" done in the school's colors.
The success of the hand at his high school led Geral Fauss to venture into the sports merchandise business, by making hands to sell at the 1978 Cotton Bowl game (University of Texas Vs Notre Dame), and later by founding Spirit Industries for the large scale manufacturing of foam fingers. In 1979, the first polyurethane foam version of the product was produced by Spirit Industries.
Read more about this topic: Foam Hand
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)