Mardi

Ray and his wife, Helen, aka “Bunny, lived in a house that had been built by Norman Walker, inventor of the Norwalk juicer. I think they may have bought it from Walker in the 1960s.

I have little doubt that Suggett was the inventor of “Whoops.” It was his livelihood from the 1950s till the end of his life. Unfortunately I wasn’t involved in shipping the gags, but he told me he sent them to the same distributor he had always associated with, someone I assumed to be older than Ray himself. Ray said he made a good living at it during the late ’50s-early ’60s, but that business had gradually dwindled over the years.

I’ll see whether I can find the newspaper article that has the picture of him. If so I’ll let you know and send you a copy.

RSVP to confirm we’re talking.

Mardi

I saw an item on the internet about fake vomit.

In the mid-1970s I knew a man named Ray “Harry” Suggett who lived in West Fork, Arkansas. He claimed to be the inventor of “Whoops” fake vomit. He sometimes referred to himself as “The man who made America puke.” In fact I worked for him briefly, making barf and swollen thumbs, rubber hamburgers and half-melted ice cream bars in a trailer behind his house. It was all made of latex.

He told me he had invented those things while living in a YMCA in Chicago following WWII, and that the swollen thumb was his first novelty gag. Ray died in Springdale, Arkansas in 1998, in his mid-80s. He was a wonderful man, handsome as a movie star, and deserves to be remebered.