In 1956, Joan Anderson, a Los Angeles housewife and onetime model, flew to Australia, her home country, to visit her parents. When she arrived, she realized that a curious fitness craze had taken hold.
“Everywhere I would go, everybody was giggling,” Ms. Anderson said in “Hula Girl,” a 2018 documentary. “I asked what was going on and they said, ‘Oh, everyone’s doing the hoop.’”
The “hoop,” she discovered, was an exercise ring, made of wood, that was swiveled around the waist and hips.
“Everyone was having such fun,” she added, “I thought, ‘I’d like to do that, too.’”
Back in Los Angeles, Ms. Anderson asked her mother to mail her one of the rings from Australia, and it soon brought joy to the Anderson household.
Her children played with it. Ms. Anderson swerved it around her hips for friends at dinner parties. When someone told her that it looked as if she was “doing the hula,” the traditional Hawaiian dance, Ms. Anderson was struck with inspiration.
She named the object the hula hoop.
What transpired next would place Ms. Anderson at the center of what she described as an American tale of shattered dreams and promises, a business deal made on a handshake, and, eventually, a lawsuit.
Ms. Anderson died on July 14 at a nursing facility in Carlsbad, Calif., north of San Diego. She was 101. Her daughter, Loralyn Willis, announced the death.
The hubbub over the hoop started when her husband, Wayne, saw opportunity in the object and decided to pitch it to Wham-O, a toy company that soon became known for the Frisbee. As it happened, he was acquainted with one of Wham-O’s founders, Arthur Melin, known as Spud, so he arranged a meeting.
The encounter, she recalled, occurred in a parking lot outside Wham-O’s offices in San Gabriel, Calif. The Andersons opened up the trunk of their car and took out the hoop.
“There were no witnesses,” Ms. Anderson said in the documentary. “Just Spud and my husband and myself.”
“We told him, ‘We’ve called it the hula hoop,’” she continued. “He said: ‘Looks like it has some merit. If it makes money for us, it’s going to make money for you.’”
The deal was sealed with what Ms. Anderson characterized as a “gentleman’s handshake” and nothing more.
Wham-O began experimenting with the hoop, developing a plastic version of it and trying it out on children at a Pasadena elementary school. The company also started giving them away to generate buzz. By the time Wham-O was selling the hoop, lines were forming outside department stores.
As the popularity of what Wham-O trademarked as the Hula Hoop grew, Ms. Anderson said, she and her husband heard less and less from Mr. Melin.
“We called Spud and asked him what was going on, and he kept putting us off,” she said. “Then they just ignored us.”
The hoop quickly became a national sensation. From Ms. Anderson’s home in the suburbs of Monterey Park, she watched as newspapers landed on her porch with headlines like “Hula-Hoop Sales Soar to $30 Million in 2 Months.” Over the years, stories about Wham-O’s success sometimes spoke of a “friend” visiting from Australia who first told the company about the hoop.
“I think that bugged me more than anything,” Ms. Anderson said. “It was never reported correctly at all. I was not a ‘friend.’”
In 1961, the Andersons filed a lawsuit against Wham-O. But the company presented records demonstrating its own woes. Just as quickly as the Hula Hoop sensation took off, it swiftly ended, entering the annals of American fads. Wham-O was left with heaps of unsold hoops and argued that it had not made a profit after production costs.
The case concluded in a settlement, and the Andersons walked away with just a few thousand dollars.
The couple moved on with their lives. Wham-O went on to release the SuperBall, the Slip ’N Slide and Silly String. Mr. Melin died in 2002. (Wham-O was sold in 1982 to the Kransco Group Companies for $12 million. It was later sold to Mattel, which then sold it to a group of investors, and it has continued changing hands ever since.)
“We often talked about the money we could have made from it and maybe changed our life a little bit,” Ms. Anderson said in the documentary, “but it didn’t work out that way.”
“The world isn’t fair. But life goes on.”
Joan Constance Manning was born on Dec. 28, 1923, in Sydney, Australia, to Claude and Ethel (Hallandal) Manning. Her father was a real estate broker.
As a young woman, Joan was a swimsuit model known as the “Pocket Venus” because she was 5 feet 2 inches tall. In 1945, Wayne Anderson, a U.S. Army pilot on leave from duty, approached Joan on Bondi Beach. They married a few months later and moved to California. Mr. Anderson, who went on to run a prosperous woodwork machine manufacturing business, died in 2007.
In addition to her daughter, Loralyn, Ms. Anderson is survived by two sons, Warren and Gary, and six grandchildren. Another son, Carl, died in 2023.
Over the years, Ms. Anderson’s brush with hula hoop history faded into family lore. When her children grew up, they sent letters about her story to Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres, but nothing came of it.
Fate intervened in 2016, when Ms. Anderson’s daughter was recounting the story to co-workers while dining at a restaurant in La Mesa. At a table nearby, eavesdropping, was the mother of Amy Hill, a filmmaker. She asked for her telephone number and passed it along it to Ms. Hill.
Intrigued by the tip, Ms. Hill began vetting the story with her husband and collaborator, Chris Riess. They decided to pursue the project and interviewed Ms. Anderson at La Costa Glen, the retirement community where she lived.
The resulting short documentary, “Hula Girl,” premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2018. At 94, Ms. Anderson flew to New York to promote the film, and a writer for Vogue interviewed her for an article. The documentary was also shown at the Sydney Film Festival and received coverage in The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazine.
It was screened as well for Ms. Anderson’s fellow residents at La Costa Glen. Her friends watched in fascination as they learned about her connection to the hula hoop.
At La Costa Glen, Ms. Anderson stayed fit by swimming every week and taking ballroom dancing lessons. She also became a formidable bridge player. And in her apartment, she kept the original wood hoop that her mother had mailed to her from Australia, although it mostly sat collecting dust.
“I do it once in a while for exercise,” she said, “but not as much as I should.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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