Bettye-B

Bettye-B Company
1954 – 1957
932 Broadway, New York 10, New York

Though in business for only four years, the Bettye-B Company made at least two significant contributions to the game industry. Its founder, Robert J. Whiteman, created two of the first games to be based on a TV game show, Break the Bank, and Masquerade Party,
both marketed in 1955, a year after he started the company.

He also created the first three-dimensional vacuum-form board games,

Robin Hood vacuum-form 3D board

Robin Hood, B.T.O.(Big Time Operator), and Ellery Queen’s Trapped.

The title for his Bettye-B Company came from his wife’s name “Bettye” and his own initial for “Bob.”

After seeing the game-show-based Beat the Clock, a Lowell game that came out in 1954, Whiteman approached the producers of “Break the Bank” and “Masquerade Party” and told them he had developed games based on their programs. The producers were interested, but he had not yet designed either game. He outsourced the game to an associate and had finished products ready in time for a meeting with the TV executives a week later. Both games were successful and led to the development of other licensed games.

Though he was successful in the game business, he realized after a couple of years that the money he made after designing, manufacturing, advertising and selling his products, was nearly the same amount of money made by the agent responsible for licensing his properties. He gave up the game business in 1957 to devote his time to his other licensing concerns.

One of the licensing industry’s pioneers, Whiteman controlled merchandise licensing for the movie studios and independent TV producers on a worldwide basis in 1955. He is also the creator of the hit toy based on “The Addams Family,” “The Thing.”

Whiteman has managed the licensing rights to “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” for almost 60 years, after having met and worked for Robert Ripley in 1946. Whiteman was responsible for creating products and negotiating agreements in all fields from motion pictures, radio, television, and video cassettes, to newspaper syndication, books, magazines, toys, games, corporate tie-ins, premiums, and so forth. He was the licensor for the Ripley’s ‘Believe It or Not’! game invented by Bruce Whitehill and produced by Milton Bradley in 1984.

Robert Whiteman, successful entrepreneur, product developer and licensor, began his career as a concert violinist. He played at the White House at age 10, and went on to form the New York String Quartet. A graduate of the Julliard School of Music, which he attended from 1943 through 1947, he studied marketing at Columbia University in 1948.

A year later he founded a TV production firm and worked as a producer for NBC in New York. Whiteman, who owned the shows “The Great Merlini,” “Fun with Felix” and “You Can Do It Too,” produced and directed 26 films for TV.

In 1969, Whiteman bought the Liberty Library Corporation, which published Liberty magazine from 1924 to 1950, and was at one time America’s 2nd largest magazine in terms of circulation (3 million copies per week). As the sole owner of Liberty, he controls over 17,000 literary properties and 50,000 pieces of art. Many major movies have come from the pages of Liberty, such as “Double Indemnity,” “My Man Godfrey,” “Sergeant York,” and even “Mr. Ed the Talking Horse.”

Whiteman also owns the Yale University Press series The Pageant of America, encompassing videocassettes and books.

Robert Whiteman was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925. He has three grown children and five grandchildren and resides in Rye, New York, where he spends the bulk of his time in the licensing field with Ripley, Liberty, and the Pageant of America. He is still working!

Robert Whiteman was the 1994 recipient of the Abbot Award, a “lifetime achievement” entrepreneurial award presented by the American Game Collectors Association (now the international Association of Game & Puzzle Collectors).

Games by the Bettye-B Company – The games, listed in chronological order, represent the entire line of the company.

• High Dice, 1954. Special dice included one with a horse’s head and one with a horse’s tail, used to make different combinations for adding or subtracting points. (Rare)
• Happy Birthday, 1955; children’s game. (Extremely rare).
• Break the Bank, 1955. One of the first games based on a television quiz show (the show began on ABC TV in 1948). The cover shows host Bert Parks and advertises Dodge automobiles and Alka Seltzer, the show’s sponsors. It retailed for $2.98.
• Masquerade Party, 1955. Sixteen cardboard figures of famous personalities (disguised, at first, of course) included such names as Pee Wee Reese, Jack Dempsey and Leo Durocher.
• Adventures of Robin Hood, 1956. One of the first games to use a three-dimension vacuum form board, the oversized game prominently featured CBS-TV star Richard Greene. The game came with 4 plastic figures, 10 chests of gold, 10 horses, and 10 shields and armor and bows and arrows, plus two steel balls and magic windows; the board had a built-in gravity spinner. Retail price in 1956: $2.98.
• B.T.O., 1956. Similar to Monopoly, the game, using New York City locales, requires players to “shrewdly manipulate to monopolize…famous New York landmarks.” The large-sized box with many components, including 6 automobiles and 280 property value cards, sold for $2.98.
• Trapped, 1956. This large game with a three-dimension vacuum form board was an Ellery Queen license consisting of 6 playing pieces, and 6 each of bodies, fingerprint cards, motive chips and clocks. The mystery game sold at $2.908 retail.
• Bottoms Up, 1956. Hidden magnets beneath the small gameboard allowed for the playing of different games. A piece played on the board would either stick or flip over to show the opponent’s color.  

–Bruce Whitehill