The Superball Incident

I openly owned a Superball for five minutes. I bought one in Joe's Candy Store between 83rd & 84th Street on York Avenue in 1965 when the amazing nuclear ball was introduced.

I left the store cautiously bouncing the other worldly sphere off the sidewalk not wanting it to fly into the avenue. It's awesome powers unknown to me. After giving it a couple of test bounces, I whacked it off the ground as hard as I could trying to send it up to the sixty-foot high tenement roof. Instead, it went off on an angle towards Spotless Cleaners, hit the store's door at 80 miles an hour cracking the glass and bounced back to me cleanly just in time for the guy in Spotless Cleaners to come out the door and see me standing there with the ball in my hand. "Lose the ball," he told me.

I placed it in the street and walked away. Spotless was a chain dry cleaners so insurance paid for the door's glass. I snuck back later sliding behind the cars in the street and picked up my ball leaning against the curb. Going forward, the Superball stayed in my pocket when I strolled past Spotless Cleaners.

Fun Superball Fact: In the late 1960s Wham-O made a "giant" superball, roughly the size of a bowling ball, as a promotional stunt. It fell from the 23rd story window of an Australian hotel (or some reports say, from the roof) and destroyed a parked convertible car on the 2nd bounce.