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
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“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)