John: Hello, everyone.

Regina: Hi.

Adrianne: Hey John.

Billy: Hey.

John: I’ve gathered you here to ask a question to which I can’t find the answer on the internet.

Adrianne: You’ve come to the right place.

Billy: That’s the concept of our show. Congratulations.

John: So you know how sometimes there are these things from your childhood that seem to completely vanish from consciousness? Well, for me, one of those things is this thing called a guac ball.

Wild And Crazy Kids: We did things differently on this show, we play guac ball! C’mon Annette, send me that guac ball.

John: Um, can somebody describe the toy that you’re looking at?

Adrianne: Uh, it looks like a beach ball, but it has like a sort of goofy face on one side and it looks like it’s maybe weighted? So it kind of wobbles through the air.

John: Exactly.

Wild And Crazy Kids: There’s the pitch, and it makes it to the right side of the infield. Mandy’s out.

John: I had I think it was a green guac ball. And I think my sister had a red one.

Regina: So, what would you use it for?

John: Like balls, like around the house, like in the, in the toy chest, you would have like inflatable balls that you’d throw around?

Regina: What did you need a ball for? 

Billy: This is a whole category of products. Like what, like, what is the point of like a wall climber that you throw at the wall? Like, it doesn’t really have a real utility. It’s just fun to do.

Adrianne: They’re called toys, Regina.

Regina: I think me not remembering my childhood is really counting against me here. Like, I don’t know… this is a problem for me.

Wild And Crazy Kids: Using an oversized ball that’s weighted on one side so you can’t possibly throw it or hit it straight, we’re going to let these kids play something we call guac ball.

John: So the clip we’re watching here is from a show called wild and crazy kids on Nickelodeon. Uh, I remember it from my childhood in the nineties. And somehow when I was looking for the guac ball online, this single video on daily motion was the only evidence I could find of this thing ever existing.

Billy: Okay, wait, so you remember this, but is there… do you know anyone else that it remembers it, like anyone in your family?

John: I was wondering the same thing. Like, did I invent this or something because it’s, it seemed really weird that this was the only place on the internet I could find it. So I called up my parents, uh, to see if they remembered me having this thing.

John’s Mom: Oh, I have no recollection.

John: If I said guac ball, would that ring a bell?

John’s Mom: No. Where would you have gotten that? Cause we have no recollection. Dad… but dad usually remembers this stuff where I don’t.

John’s Dad: It was probably bought here..

John’s Mom: Oh my God.

John’s Dad: Maybe bought in Toys R Us.

John: Or I was thinking Gymboree.

John’s Mom: I don’t remember anything like that at Gymboree. I have no recollection. Like this is just going completely over my head. Like it’s not even an inkling in my mind.

John: Ok so that wasn’t going anywhere. So I tried up my sister, Jess, and she had a completely different reaction.

All right, I’m recording.

Jess: Oh boy.

John: Okay, do you remember a little inflatable ball, but it was weighted on one end? So when you threw it, it kind of wobbled through the air.

Jess: Yeah.

John: You do you remember this?

Jess: I mean, yeah, isn’t it a common toy? Yeah? I mean, I don’t know what color it was.

John: I remember it was called the gwok ball.

Jess: Gwok ball! Like guacamole?

John: Yeah, but not, I don’t think it was spelled that way. I think it was spelled G-W-O-K….

Jess: G W O K. What, what kind of spelling… gwok ball?

JT… you goof! It’s a hundred percent this. You spelled it wrong! Guac ball. Yeah, like guacamole. Right? This is totally it. I’m texting you the screenshot. Spelled like guacamole.

John: Oh, look at that!

Jess: Uh yuh yay. Is that it?

John: That is it.

Jess: Well there you go.

Billy: Why wouldn’t you just try to search it with the obvious spelling first?

John: Yeah, I don’t know. I remembered it having this weird spelling. I think part of my logic was that this thing was from the nineties and I don’t remember G U A C, the shortened version of guacamole, being used that commonly until like relatively recently.

Regina: Really?

John: Yeah and Google has this thing called the Ngram viewer, which lets you see how common a word or phrase has been historically based on the Google books archive.

So if you type G U A C into that, it seems like guac was barely used at all until the 2000s and usage has had like a huge spike since then. On the graph I’m looking at, it’s basically a steep line  starting around 20 years ago.

Billy: Okay.

Adrianne: This is because we discovered the avocado in the year 2000.

John: True. The earliest mention of the abbreviated guac that I could find in the New York Times was from May 29th, 1994 in a New York Times Magazine piece by Maureen Dowd. I’ll drop the link in here.

Regina: Maureen’s always a trendsetter.

Adrianne: This is confusing.

Regina: “Chuck Kemp opened his mouth full of tacos and guac and stuck his tongue out.”

John: There’s a lot of references in there that I don’t understand but the point is, this was the earliest mention of guac to mean guacamole in the New York Times. And then it was another three years before the New York Times used guac again and that was a little more in line with food, it was an article featuring Superbowl recipes. This was January.

One of the recipes was called Guac on the Wild Side.

Billy: I’m on a site called QuoDB, which is a website that searches.

John: Quose, the database, the database for quos.

Billy: Yes, no, no. It searches quotes from movies and TV based on subtitled data that people have uploaded to the internet. If the word guac was said in a major movie or TV show, it would be on here presumably. And it seems like almost everything is from the last 20 years or so. Uh, the exception would be, there is a episode of Northern Exposure, which was in 1993.

Northern Exposure: I bet you’d be good Dr. Ed, you don’t scarf down the guac or hit the Philly cheese steak too hard. Yeah. You first Dr. Fleischman.

Billy: But then there’s not any other mentions as far as I can tell until the year 2000 in an episode of Will and Grace. So.

It seems like mostly a new millennium thing.

Will & Grace: And you must be Grace Adler. Uh, tell me, did you have any trouble finding the place?

Grace Adler: Big honking greasy ones with extra cheese and guac, and they drip on her fancy clothes and she thinks no one knows, but they know all right.

Adrianne: Wow Will & Grace. Normalizing concepts left and right.

Billy: Sexuality, dips, all kinds of things.

Adrianne: And you said this toy is from the nineties. So, how is it that this toy ended up being called the guac ball when nobody was talking about guac?

John: Yeah, I don’t know. I want to know who named it that and why they called it the guac ball that early.

Go ahead now and Google guac ball.

Billy: Okay.

John: The top result is something called toy directory. Guac ball from Creative Imaginations, Inc.

Adrianne: All right. So maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but on toy directory, it says this toy is made by Creative Imaginations and it says CreativeImaginations.us is their website…

John: Yeah, go to that.

Billy: CreativeImaginations.us.

Adrianne: Mm. Doesn’t exist.

John: A dead end.

Billy: I’m actually able to see an archived version of the site on archive.org.

John: Yep.

Adrianne: So on the about page, this screenshot is from 2008. It says, “Since its inception in 1986, Creative Imaginations’ first priority has been to attract creative artists and product designers. Creative Imaginations started as a gift product manufacturer and their very first product was a huge success.

This novelty inflatable desktop punching bag called the Wham-it made the front page of the Wall Street Journal in December, 1989. Oh my God. Wall Street Journal, December, 1989.

Billy: Why was it on the front page? How slow of a news day was it? When you had to put the wham it on the cover. Can you imagine that? In the era we’re living in now that just like a one day they put the Wham-It on the cover.

Adrianne: I think I found the Wham-It article.

John: Oh, wow.

Billy: Oh, so this was like Christmas buying season.

Regina: Oh, I see. I see.

John: ‘Tis the season for kitsch and the novelties range from tacky to tasteless.

Billy: They left that part out on their corporate bio.

Adrianne: This has a quote, stress is the major mental health issue of the 1980s.

Billy: Cute that they thought that that was exclusive to the 1980s.

Adrianne: Right? Yeah, it says, “stress is the major mental health issue of the 1980s contends Jack Behlmer, Wham-It’s creator and President of Creative Imaginations, Inc of Costa Mesa, California. Jack Behlmer, B E H L M E R.

John: He was the president of Creative Imaginations in the eighties and the episode of Wild and Crazy Kids is from 1990. So wonder what uh, wonder what Jack Behlmer is doing these days. Probably inside.

Adrianne: Yeah, he’s probably sheltering in place.

Billy: All right. So it sounds like you need a direct line to Jack Behlmer, right?

John: Yeah, I want to find this guy. Overall, though what I really want to know is the answer to two questions. Um, one, where did the guac belt come from originally? And two, why was this thing called the guac ball 10 years before anyone else was using that word?

Adrianne: Coming up, John gets guaced on in r/surfing.

John: I have learned so much about the Guac Ball, more about the Guac Ball than I wanted to know, probably.

Billy: More than anyone probably wanted to know.

John: Yeah. So come along with me on this journey, and I’ll subject you to what I know now that I didn’t know before.

Billy: I’m excited.

John: Yeah. Uh, all right. So first up, uh, you remember Adrianne, you found this article in the Wall Street Journal that, uh, quoted someone named Jack Behlmer. I think he, the, he was the, uh, president of Creative Imaginations in the 1980s. I found him. And I talked to him on the phone.

Jack: Hello.

John: So I asked him about, you know, how he became a toy person.

Jack: Well I worked in, I was in the hair and skincare business, I worked for a professional hair and skincare product manufacturer. And I learned what not to do as far as I was concerned in, in business.

John: So Jack told me that the products that they made at this hearing skincare company, they were hard for them to sell and they were hard for customers to buy. So in 1986, he came up with the Wham-It.

Jack: I don’t know if you ever saw it or the packaging, but it came in a can called “therapy in a can,” and the beauty of it, I think, the genius of that was that there was a storyboard, like a little six cell storyboard of what the Wham-It is, which you could understand without having to read.

John: So I’m dropping in Slack right now a photo of the Wham-It can You all seeing this?

Adrianne: I like it.

John: Yeah, it is a little tiny punching bag in a can. And it was, it was a hit among office workers in the 1980s.

Jack: I mean, it was the most popular product in New York, Manhattan for like a year and a half. I mean, we had a, it was on television. It had window fronts on Rockefeller Center. It was kind of incredible.

John: I, I don’t have any way to verify what he’s saying there about it being on television and in windows in Rockefeller Center. Uh, but it definitely seemed popular. And if you Google Wham-It, you do see a ton of them still floating around eBay. And there were lots and lots of images of them. Like they were big enough that even now in 2020, you can find Wham-It stuff online very easily.

So it had it, it echoes for 35 years. Right.

Billy: I’m going to add an asterisk and say maybe the most popular legal product.

Regina: For anti-stressing?

Billy: For stressed office workers in New York city in the eighties.

Adrianne: In the eighties.

John: The Wham-It was big enough that there was a whole line of residual Wham-It products.

Jack: It was four different sizes. There was the 18-inch desktop Wham-It, and it also had a family size, which was like three and a half feet tall. And the industrial strength mega Wham-It, which was six feet tall. And we had little key chain size Wham-It. We had an  electoral Wham-It during the 88 election. Wham-It.

Adrianne: Him describing all these different sizes and the fact that it’s kind of shaped like a Matryoshka doll makes me imagine the key chain one inside the 18 inch desktop one, inside the three and a half foot family size one, inside the mega Wham-It.

John: Anyway in 1989, the Wham-It’s highest profile media coverage happened, that was the Wall Street Journal article you found Adrianne. Uh, Jack actually had brought it up in the first email exchange we had, even before we talked on the phone.

Jack: I thought I told you it made the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

John: What did the Wall Street Journal article do to sales of these?

Jack: Nothing much, because Wham-It was introduced in New York in January of 86. And by the time that article ran in ’89 it had already kind of like plateaued out.

John: Creative Imaginations was already pivoting on to other products.

Jack: We had that manufactured for us originally in Asia and our supplier also did a lot of other inflatable products.

John: At this point, like Earth Day was big and he said the fall of the Soviet Union was happening. So kids in school were like learning about other countries, and globes were big. So Creative Imaginations sold a line of inflatable globes.

Jack: And that took us also into inflatable palm trees.

John: He makes these inflatable globes, they’re a big hit with kids wanting to learn about geography, that brought them into inflatable palm trees. He said they made an inflatable flamingos. They were, they were riding this inflatable toy thing.

Jack: So we kind of rode, we just rode trends.

John: So it’s inflatables and inflatables.

Adrianne: Like Lars and the Real Girl.

John: Well, it’s probably not like that. He didn’t say anything that made me believe it was like that at all.

Adrianne: Okay.

John: So he’s riding the inflatable wave and that’s eventually how he winds up at the Guac Ball.

Jack: We switched our manufacturing for the Wham-It from China to Mexico. And so my partner who was visiting our factory in Mexico for making the Wham-It happened to come across this ball. Oh, it was just a ball with a weighted base and a face on it. So he brought it back to us and then we said it that’s a good idea. So we started marketing it.

John: And that ball from Mexico is what turned out to be the Guac Ball. So he didn’t invent it himself. It was sitting there in a Mexican inflatable manufacturer. I got you each a gift. Do you all have the packages I sent you?

Billy: Yes. I wonder what it could be.

John: It’s time to open a package.

Adrianne: I hope it’s a Wham-It. I dropped it.

Billy: You paid for one day mail on this?

John: It was a flat rate box.

Billy: Really? It says $8 and 30 cents on it.

John: It’s flat rate.

Billy: That’s expensive, dude.

John: I agree with you. It was about the best I could do.

Regina: Oh, wow.

Billy: I don’t think that’s true.

Adrianne: Guac Ball! The ball that doesn’t play straight.

Billy: Uh, I got a pink one. This is awesome. Nine inch inflatable wobble ball.

Regina: I mean, I gotta say mine is, um, pretty similar to the color of guacamole.

Billy: Creative Imaginations, LLC. Huntington Beach, California.

Regina: Instructions for use. One, remove Guac Ball from its bag and inflate with your face until tight and round. I like that they tell you to inflate it with your face.

Billy: On it. Hold on.

Regina: Grasp Guac Ball with one or two hands opposite the Guac Ball’s, gravitational unequalizer, i.e. grab top. Throw.

Billy: [so hard to inflate it with your face.

Regina: Oh man.

John: Is it full of dust? Why are you coughing?

Regina: I don’t know. I’m worried about Billy.

Billy: Oh, yeah, mine’s nice and plump now.

Adrianne: I think I farted a little bit while I was trying to blow it up.

Regina: Just blame it on the guac.

Billy: So you want me to throw mine? Okay. I’m going to aim for my daughter’s high chair. Here we go.

John: Oh, is she in it?

Billy: Ooh, I hit it, but the way it bounced off was really funny. Oh, wow. Okay. It’s funny. This thing’s funny.

Adrianne: If you put a little spin on it, it goes wild.

Regina: Okay. I got it. Yep.

Billy: [laughing a lot] This guy’s funny.

Regina: The Guac Ball has a mind of its own.

Billy: Yeah, it’s sort of, it’s wobbly, for lack of a better word. It just wobbles around.

John: So the ball that Jack’s partner found in Mexico City was essentially identical to the Guac Balls that you’re holding.

So the face was already on it also, when you found it in Mexico?

Jack: Right, right. We’d thought it kind of looked like, um, Fred Flintstones.

John: It hadn’t dawned on me that this thing is like a dead ringer for Fred Flintstone without hair.

Adrianne: Oh totally.

John: Uh, Jack told me that, that the, the guac ball was not a Wham-It- type hit, but it was like a successful product.

Jack: It was a very popular product. In fact it was one of the best selling toy products for that price point in that time frame. We had it in almost every single independent toy shop. We also had it in KB Toys, which was a chain, which is now closed. So, yeah, we started out in green originally, and then we did line extensions where we made it into different colors and also had a little mini Guac Ball, which was a five inch diameter, same face, which made it into Gymboree, which was a store chain. And then we tried to-

John: You’re validating something about this because I asked my parents and they didn’t remember these things, but I had in my head that these came from Gymboree. It must’ve been where we got them.

Jack: The little one. Yeah.

John: And we had a little red one. Did th did it come in like a, like a candy apple red?

Jack: Yeah. It came in like a red, a yellow, and blue and a green, and then we really tried to milk it. We had a Halloween Guac Ball, it glowed in the dark, and then we did a animal print Guac Ball with leopard prints and zebra prints. Oh yeah. We did a freedom Guac Ball, which was star and stripes.

Billy: It’s funny that you had that conversation with him about what was the store, Gymboree?

John: Well there were KB toys and Gymboree. When I was talking to my parents, I was like, this either came from KB toys or Gymboree, which were right next to each other in our mall. And I was like, I think this was a Gymboree product.

Billy: Yeah. I had a KB toys in my local mall growing up. And as I was trying to imagine if I remembered this thing or not, that was the only place I could place it. I was like, maybe in the KB Toys. Oh no, I threw my Guac Ball across the room and it looks like it’s deflating now. Can I go get it?

John: Sure. But all that is to say, we’ve answered one of the two questions now, where did the Guac Ball come from? It came from this manufacturer in Mexico, and Jack did not invent it himself. Uh, and the Guac Ball was not the original name of this thing, which brings us to the second question. Why was it called the Guac Ball, and folks, this is where the story gets very confusing. And was it you who came up with the name of the Guac Ball?

Jack: The spelling is G U A C. Like as in guacamole.

John: Is that on purpose?

Jack: Yeah. Yeah, because we, I live in Huntington Beach, which is, which is Surf City. And back in the late eighties, early nineties, one of the terms that a surfer would use if he got wiped out would be like, I got guac or smashed. Okay. And obviously guacamole’s green. So that’s how it got named.

Adrianne: Oh, you got smashed like an avocado.

John: So it was a green ball and it reminded him of guacamole and also guac was a name that meant to wipe out or get smashed by a wave. He says.

Billy: He says, what do you mean.

John: Have any, have any of you heard guac to me in a surfing context before?

Billy: No, I can sort of imagine it, but I haven’t heard it.

John: Yeah. Like it makes sense. And I didn’t question it, but like I’ve never heard that term before.

Regina: Before. I mean, I’m also not a surfer.

John: None of us are surfers. Right. Have, have any of you surfed?

Regina: I mean, I surfed once. I’ve been surfing.

Adrianne: I think I, I think I surfed twice.

Billy: No, I’ve been on a boogie board.

John: So I am also not a surfer, so I was intrigued by that and I asked him to clarify, like when this would have been. So when, when was that?

Jack: That was late ’89, ’90, ’91.

John: So the word guac was being used for guacamole that early. So I don’t know any surf terms myself. I was a little bit skeptical. So I started asking around. To find out if I knew any surfers, who would be familiar with this term. So I DM someone I used to work with who I knew was a surfer. She had never heard of it. She put me in touch with another public radio producer who is a really avid surfer in California.

And he laughed and told me that he had also never heard of it. He asked some friends who had never heard of this. I thought maybe this was a Southern California thing. So I started asking around for friends of mine who had connections to Southern California. Um, all of, you know, our friend Wes, his father-in-law was a lifeguard in Oceanside in the 1980s and he had never heard of it. The wife of a coworker of mine, uh, used to live near Huntington Beach. And she worked specifically with surfers and she had never heard it either. Um, Google Books, I searched for things with guac and surf together. That turned up nothing. So I turned to where I feel like all of you would have wound up right away. I turned to Reddit, I joined Uh, lurked for a few weeks, right. Just to kind of like get the lay of the land, see if I’m going to fit in.

Regina: Wait, you weren’t already a member of r/surfing?

John: Believe it or not, I wasn’t. I joined just for this and after a couple of weeks of looking, it looked like a pretty nice crowd. I started a thread that was, uh, I think it was called, was guac a surfing term in the eighties. And let me tell you, they laughed at me.

Billy: Uh, dude.

John: Here are some of the things they told me. I mean, it could have been a thing between him and his friends, but I don’t think that was ever a term commonly used. I grew up surfing in SoCal in the eighties and nineties. Never heard that term. Shruggy emoji. Never heard that term on the East coast either, lol, though it could predate me. Does sound a little like that. Dave Chappelle bit about making shit up to mess with people on business calls, zip it up and zip it out.

Dave Chappelle: Sometimes I’ll make up just to see how they handle it. All right. We’re going to close the deal. Is that fine with you, Dave? Yeah, sounds good to me. Great. You have a good week and day. All right, buddy. Zip it up and zip it out. All right. Zippity doo dah, bye bye.

John: Uh, this person says, sounds made up and, uh, the most upvoted response, guac is guacamole, dude. So Reddit, where arcane information goes to surface, had nothing for me. And then there’s that question of whether guac was being used as an abbreviation for guacamole by any English-speaking Americans like Jack in that time period. Thinking about California specifically, I took one more search through newspapers.com and found this article from 1989 in the L.A. Times, which did use the word guac. And this was right around the same time the Guac Ball was coming out.

Regina: Chunky style guac.

Billy: They say guacamole in full first.

John: But even more ordinary sounding things like albondigas or guacamole are special. The meatballs coming in a mild Chipotle sauce and the chunky style guac with four little quesadillas made with fresh tortillas.

Regina: And this is in the Valley, so it’s not even like near.

Billy: I mean either way, this was, it wasn’t in common use yet at that point.

John: This is also supported by the fact that, uh, Merriam Webster. Dictionary.com, and the Oxford Dictionary all point to the 1980s as the first known use of guac. But more importantly for the Guac Ball, almost no one was using it to refer to anything having to do with surfing. So is Jack messing with me? I don’t know.

I emailed him again and I just gently asked him. I was like, I can’t find this anywhere. Can you verify where you came up with the name and this is the email that he sent me.

“Hi, John. I live in Huntington Beach, which claims the name Surf City. The term guac was commonly used here, at least in the eighties when wiping out. It may have been a local surf term because we also have a penchant for Mexican food here in SoCal. Hope that helps, Jack.”

So I’ll take his word for it, I guess. The question we were trying to answer here was why was the Guac Ball called that? And I think we know that answer now. It was a surf term where Jack was in Southern California at that point in time. What we can’t say for sure is how it got there or how many people were saying it or what cultures and hyperlocal terminology made it happen.

But it means that Jack was using this word before it became mainstream in the U.S., before Will and Grace, Northern Exposure, or before the New York Times used it.

Adrianne: Okay, I’m just going to say, I highly doubt this guy really was that early. It seems very natural to say guac instead of guacamole, if guacamole is around, people are going to start saying guac.

John: Right, yeah, the most we can say is that we couldn’t find a whole lot of evidence that the word guac was used before Jack named the Guac Ball. That doesn’t mean that nobody was saying it. That doesn’t mean there isn’t an answer out there. Um, and on that note, I think if any of our listeners know more about the usage of this term in the eighties and nineties, I would love to hear about it, email us@helloatunderunderstood.com. We actually would love to know if somebody out there knows an earlier instance of this. In any case, I don’t think Jack cares much about the name actually, or even the legacy of the Guac Ball itself. He just seems really satisfied that he’s sold a product that people actually wanted to play with.

Jack: I don’t know how familiar you are with California, but there was a small chain of stores called Toys International. They had a location in that mall and they would, they’d have a guy that was outstanding outside the store, just throwing the Guac Ball to people. And they was the fastest selling toy they had in over two years just because of that.

John: That must be gratifying.

Jack: Yeah, it was fun. It was just fun. Yeah. It’s fun you know, both to conceive the product and see it well-received and see it take off.

Regina: Thanks for listening. Underunderstood is Billy Disney, Adrianne Jeffries, John Lagomarsino and me, Regina Dellea.

John: Thank you to all our patrons for upporting the show. It’s been really, really amazing meeting you all in Discord. If you’re not already a member, go to patreon.com/under understood to check out how to become one.

Adrianne: You’ll get access to our second bonus podcast, Overunderstood, and our Discord where we hang out sometimes.

John: And play games, apparently.

Adrianne: And play games.

Billy: Another small thing you can do if you’d like to show is you can leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. There are a few negative ones there. There’s one titled “Meh” and another one titled “Eh” that are really dragging me down. So if you’d like to help lift us back up, please submit a review.

Regina: Give us a “Yeh.”

Billy: Yeah. Or a “Woo.”

Regina: “Yay!”

Billy: Also, if you have a question that the internet can’t answer, we want to hear about it. Email us@helloatunderunderstood.com.

Regina: Thanks again for listening. We’ll be back next week.