Walter Fredrick Morrison and his girlfriend, Lucile Nay, discovered that flying discs were marketable when a stranger asked to buy the metal cake pan they were flipping through the air on a Santa Monica beach. By 1938, the couple were selling the 5-cent pans for a quarter a piece. Morrison used the proceeds to buy Nay a $35 diamond engagement ring. After a stint as an Army Air Corps pilot during World War II, Morrison tried his hand at developing “a flying disk far superior to that of a flying cake pan.” Together with a butane supplier named Warren Franscioni, they created the Flyin-Saucer, but it didn’t go very far until Morrison created a new version in 1955, dubbed the Pluto Platter. The disc had a bump that evoked an alien cockpit on top and the names of the planets around its rim. Wham-O, the visionary toy company known for its slingshots and, soon, its Hula-Hoops, bought the rights in 1957. Wham-O renamed the flying disc Frisbee, which Morrison didn’t like one bit. “Had I been consulted, I’d have vehemently objected,” he wrote in his account of the Frisbee business (written with Phil Kennedy),“Flat Flip Flies Straight!” Wham-O went on to nix the alien cockpit and planetary names, opting instead for a new, sportier disc with a stripe in the center and the words “Official Pro Model” on top. By the mid-1960s, “there was one of everybody’s roof,” says Robert Rauch, president of the World Flying Disc Federation. The Frisbee was, quite simply, “cool,” says Tim Walsh, author of a book on Wham-O. “This thing rose on the wind.”

DISC DRIVE

In the 1970s, the counterculture picked up Ultimate Frisbee, which is technically called just Ultimate because Wham-O remains fiercely protective of the Frisbee name. Today 750 colleges and universities field Ultimate teams. Andy Lee, the spokesman for USA Ultimate, the sport’s U.S. governing body, says the disc of choice is the Discraft 175-gram Ultra-Star, because it flies better. In June, CBS Sports will broadcast the national collegiate championships. “I’ve always enjoyed throwing things, and I’ve enjoyed catching things,” says Colin Richardson, a Washington-based Ultimate player. “With Frisbee that’s pretty much all there is.”

FRISBEE GRAM

An Oregon-based company, Flying Greetings, has turned Frisbees into next-generation greeting cards. Here is the company’s president, Dean Paddison, on the business:

When did you start your company?

About a year ago, with my friends Rod Hanlin and Chris Sixkiller. Our slogan is, ‘‘A card you throw away and ours you throw around.’’

Did you always work in greeting cards? No, I’m a graphic artist.

Chris has a motorcycle-accessory business and a cleaning business, and Rod is a construction guy.