where the rainbow path leads you
Eleanor Abbott, Candy Land and more
Next week’s edition will be the last newsletter of 2024.
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While visiting a San Diego polio ward in 1948, schoolteacher Eleanor Abbott dreamed up a candy kingdom of gumdrop mountains and lollipop woods.
Her vision for “a sweet little game for sweet little folks” — something to help younger polio patients pass the time — became a colorful, now-ubiquitous board game: Candy Land.
Eleanor herself had been stricken with polio some years before. She wanted Candy Land to teach and enchant as well as distract its players; children as young as three could recognize the color-coded directions and players of all ages understand the simple story as they move their pieces around the board. Older kids could play alongside younger ones to beat back boredom, homesickness and fear of the iron lung.
In 1948, the polio epidemic raged across the United States, with multiple outbreaks quarantining thousands of patients in isolation wards. As a polio survivor herself, Eleanor knew all too well what a grim place the polio ward could be. She wanted Candy Land to offer a fantastical escape from the world of doctors and syringes, and before too long, young patients in San Diego asked for more copies of King Kandy’s colorful adventure game.
In 1949, Eleanor’s friends encouraged her to pitch the game to Milton Bradley, the upstart toy company. By the time Jonas Salk licensed his life-saving polio vaccine n 1955, Candy Land had become Milton Bradley’s best-selling board game.
But Eleanor never forgot Candy Land’s true origins. In the earliest mass market editions of the game, she insisted on including an image of a child walking with a polio leg brace, still smiling at the “Candy Hearts” starting point. And before she died in 1988, she donated the entirety of her Candy Land royalties to charities serving children.
More on 🍬:
Candy Land was Invented for Polio Wards, The Atlantic
Another epidemic in another era gave birth to Candy Land, The San Diego Union-Tribune
More from me:
Listen to me chat about books and history and girlhood on The Ribbon Book Club podcast! I so loved talking with these hosts and laughing with them — also a good reminder to finally post some more of my Dear America recaps.
I’ll be featured in Passerby Magazine this coming January. They interview so many incredible women: death doulas, musicians, archivists and more. You should subscribe to their phenomenal newsletter (and keep an eye out for my feature).
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