The Flying Pie Tin

On Kossuth Street in Bridgeport's East Side, there was a bakery. It made pies, good ones, sold to restaurants and college dining halls and corner groceries across Connecticut and into Vermont. The company was founded in eighteen seventy-one by a man named William Russell Frisbie, who bought out a branch of the Olds Baking Company and put his own name on it. The Frisbie Pie Company eventually grew to supply colleges throughout New England, including Middlebury College up in Vermont.

Here is what happened at Middlebury, and also apparently at Yale, and reportedly at other schools where Frisbie pies turned up: the students discovered that the empty tin, turned upside down, had an airfoil shape. If you gave it the right spin off your fingertips, it would travel across a lawn in a long, stable arc. Word spread, as word does among bored undergraduates with access to pie. Somebody called out "Frisbie!" when they threw, the same way a golfer calls "fore," to warn people in the path.

This was the nineteen thirties and forties. Nobody had coined the word Frisbee yet. That came later, in nineteen fifty-seven and fifty-eight, when a California toy company called Wham-O had acquired rights to a plastic flying disc and realized that "Pluto Platter" was not going to sell. They already knew about the pie tin craze. They changed the spelling slightly, to avoid trademark trouble, and called their toy a Frisbee.

The original Frisbie Pie Company closed its Bridgeport factory in nineteen fifty-eight, bought out by another bakery. The Kossuth Street building is long gone. But the object, the shape, the flight path, the wrist snap, the shout that warns the dog to move: all of it traces back to a pie company in Bridgeport that mostly just wanted to sell dessert.