They were paper cutouts of six animals attached to empty thread spools. All I could see of them in the glass case at the auction house were their faces and two front feet.
Their tails were glued to the other end of the spools, creating a small body for each of them. The six animals, all in color on cardboard, came with a rhyme introducing each by name and instructions on how to attach them to spools.
The animals were distributed by the Spool Cotton Company, which owned the labels J&P Coats & Clark’s O.N.T. Coats & Clark’s was a name that was as common as the threads and other sewing materials the company produced.
They were all part of a set of “Spool Pets”: Kitty Cat, Puppy Dog, Bob Bunny, Hal Horse, Clara Cow and Pete Pig. Children could get the complete set by mailing four cents in stamps to cover postage and handling.
I read the card for Kitty Cat, who wore a big red bow:
“Here’s Kitty CAT,
whose cozy purr
Makes everybody
fond of her.
When she grows big
it will be nice
To have her catch
some naughty mice.
Of course she cannot
really talk,
But you can make her
stand and walk.
So, read the plain
directions that
Tell how a SPOOL
Makes Kitty CAT.”
Opposite the poem were instructions on how to cut out Kitty Cat, apply glue, let it sit a little to harden and then attach the cat’s head and tail. The result? “There you have me standing up for you as a good CAT should do.” Here’s what the cards looked like before they were cut out.
The idea for Spool Pets came in the 1930s when Coats & Clark’s was a little worried that women were only buying their No. 50 thread and ignoring the other sizes. Company officials and their ad agency wanted to solve that problem, but were baffled about how to do it.
The solution came when adman G. Lynn Sumner passed a toy store and spotted a toy animal in three parts: a body made of a square block, with front and rear parts attached. He figured that they could do the same thing with spools using animals requiring various spool sizes, and market them to children. An art director at his agency drew the heads and tails, and a rough model of the Spool Pet was born.
A series of six cards were made with animals’ fronts and backs on separate cards. But the cards needed more; so John Martin, a children’s book author, was enlisted to illustrate the cards and write the rhymes.
A child “would be after its mother for spools to make the toy,” Sumner wrote in his 1952 book “How I Learned the Secrets of Success in Advertising.” The flip side of the cards, which laid out the importance of the right size of thread and its purpose, was for the mothers, he noted.
The cards for this amazingly simple toy were first offered in school publications aimed at the elementary grades. The advertising was so successful, Sumner wrote, that it was expanded to Sunday newspapers and to magazines. Spool Pets were immensely popular. Children raided their mother’s sewing boxes for empty spools, and mothers wrote that the pets were good school projects.
Martin also created a second series titled “Spool Zoo” consisting of a bear, hippo, zebra, fox, elephant and lion. Spool animals could also be found inside packages of the Coats & Clark’s bias trim.
The Spool Pet showed the soundness of using children to sell products, according to Sumner. “It was not the first time that children had been enlisted to help sell the parents, but it proved an effective use of that powerful influence in the home. … It did not attempt to sell the child but the mother, through the child’s interest and influence.”
And that influence has not changed.
