Inventor or conman?: Shoddy Goods 072
The case of Ducky McCaleb and the self-rocking crib
You never know where a story will find you - or where it will take you. Hey, Jason Toon here, with Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture. This week, a curious old radio commercial leads through the West Texas plains to a tall tale of lost treasure, with one mysterious figure in the middle of it all.
A young man with big dreams and a lot of court dates ahead of him, 1949
I was listening to a recording on YouTube of a 1957 radio broadcast from Lubbock, Texas, because that’s the kind of weird thing I do. Right after the Four Esquires’ “Love Me Forever”, a lullaby of a commercial promised “Your baby will sleep as peacefully as a Christmas angel when he sleeps in a Ducky Bed.”
This wasn’t just a pitch for a comfy mattress. With a sound sensor “as sensitive as a mother’s ear”, the Ducky Bed “hears the [baby’s] cry and begins to gently rock the baby to sleep.” This parenting Godsend was “manufactured in Lubbock for babies all over the world.”
OK, a cry-detecting self-rocking bed, that’s the kind of oddity I can build a Shoddy Goods around. I figured there had to be more to the company and the invention. For all I knew, Ducky Bed had grown into a household name, and spawned a whole category of sob-triggered swaying cribs. This was just one random radio recording from 1957, out of billions of hours of radio that have ever been broadcast, that I happened to stumble across on YouTube. Statistically, what were the chances this product was a weird local one-off?
Turns out that’s exactly what it was. I could only rustle up scant traces of historical evidence of the Ducky Bed. But its namesake inventor, Cloyce Leon “Ducky” McCaleb, left his own record behind - largely of the criminal variety.
“Cadillac of the Baby Industry”
To hear the Diamond Department Store tell it in a 1957 ad in the Arizona Republic, the Ducky Bed was the product of “the inquisitive mind of a Texas farm boy.” They spun a tale straight out of Horatio Alger, about a plucky 38-year-old back-country genius by the colorful name of Ducky McCaleb experimenting for years to bring sweet relief to bedraggled parents everywhere.
It’s all in there: his childhood improvising solutions on the farm with whatever junk was at hand… his tortured nights driving his wailing baby son around to get him to sleep… his first clunky contraptions of springs, belts, and scavenged engine parts.
After getting the original 500-pound prototype down to 80 pounds, and replacing the loud motor with a quieter, smaller one, Ducky had his Ducky Bed. A “two tube electronic unit which filters out ordinary conversations” then “accepts the cry of the baby” and “converts this to start the small fractional horse motor” that gently rocks the crib.
So soundtronic, you guys
It sounds like a good idea. For about two seconds. Until you consider that new parents, the most paranoid creatures on Earth, may not be wild about putting their precious, vulnerable baby inside a runaway shaking machine, even a “soundtronically controlled” one that calls itself the “Cadillac of the Baby Industry”.
But maybe parents weren’t the ultimate audience. In other ads seeking potential investors, McCaleb’s co-founder Charlie Moore offered franchises starting at $5,000, “depending on the territory granted”. The ad claimed Ducky Bed already had “successful dealerships now in operation”.
Not that successful, apparently. Or, more likely, nonexistent. Just months later, in May of 1958, Ducky Bed filed for bankruptcy. An auction that July offered the 134 working Ducky Beds still in stock, the company’s production and office equipment - and the patent to the Ducky Bed.
“An acorn company with oak tree ideas”
But you can’t keep a good-sounding idea down. Splashed across the front page of the Paris, Texas News on December 11, 1960 was a banner headline proclaiming that Paris had landed a new plant for a company called Roka-Bed, led by none other than C.L. McCaleb and Charlie Moore. I guess nobody bought that patent.
Moore told the paper that Roka-Bed - “an acorn company with oak tree ideas” - would “consolidate” its “subsidiary operations in several Texas cities” into a 35,000-square-foot former potato chip factory, housing “50 or more employees initially”. The piece listed the many products of McCaleb’s “keen inventive mind” that Roka-Bed manufactured and distributed, from baby beds and baby bottles to “portable shower cabinets for hospitals” and “electronically automatic irrigation systems”. Hmmm. Really?
I can’t say Roka-Bed didn’t have operations all over Texas, and couldn’t possibly have hired 50 people. I’m not saying, definitively, that they never manufactured a single shower cabinet or irrigation system. You can’t prove a negative. I am saying that I couldn’t find a shred of evidence that they ever did any of that. For all the big talk in this piece, it was all the Paris News would ever say about Roka-Bed.
We’ll never have Paris. Moore and McCaleb are third and fourth from left in the photo
A functioning, 50-strong small-town manufacturing firm would pop up in the local paper now and then, in news stories, want ads, legal notices, something. A company pumping out a wide range of innovative devices would attract attention from the likes of Popular Mechanics. A Roka-Bed that did half of what Moore described would leave traces. It didn’t.
There’s one thing Moore and McCaleb were known for doing with the company: illegally selling stock in it. In 1963, they were charged with violations of the Securities Act for peddling unregistered shares of Roka-Bed to at least 19 fellow Lubbockites. The following year McCaleb was at it again, allegedly hawking unofficial stock in a whole new venture called Auto-Relaxor that made even less impression on the historical record.
It starts to look like the Ducky Bed was less a way to rock babies to sleep, and more a vehicle for McCaleb and Moore to siphon cash from credulous, perhaps sleep-deprived backers. Did they stage the whole Paris hullabaloo as a show for impatient investors wondering what their money was going?
At this point, I was still giving McCaleb the benefit of the doubt. He seemed to me an understandable figure, maybe even a sympathetic one: the striving tinkerer whose ideas are bigger than his business acumen, walking the line of what’s advisable or legal to keep his dream alive.
But his next and final public episode settles it once and for all. Whatever else he did, Ducky also employed his “keen inventive mind” for pure fraud.
The Canyon of Nonexistent Silver
According to court records, in November 1972, McCaleb began telling one Dr. Wayne Hill of Brownfield, Texas that he’d found a cache of silver hidden in a Nevada canyon. McCaleb offered Hill a share of the proceeds if the doctor could furnish funds for the equipment needed to retrieve the silver.
Hill’s initial $1000 investment soon turned into $5000, then another $5000, then more and more. Darn the luck, that hoard of silver just kept getting tougher and tougher to get out of that canyon. Eventually McCaleb wheedled more than $24,000 out of Hill.
Of course, it was all a lie. There was no silver. “All of these checks were cashed by [McCaleb] and the funds applied to his own use,” the court said. “The cache of silver never existed and no equipment or supplies as represented were ever purchased… The evidence is clear that McCaleb’s purpose was to ‘con’ Dr. Hill out of as much money as possible.”
They don’t have Ducky Beds where you’re going
Oh, Ducky, what are you doing? There’s no way to spin this one. On January 16, 1975, McCaleb was found guilty of “theft by false pretext” in a Brownfield courtroom and later sentenced to five years in prison. His appeal was denied the following year.
Then he slipped out of the public eye. I presume he served at least some of that sentence but I couldn’t find any details confirming it. He’s mentioned as still being alive in family obituaries in the 1980s, but beyond that, I couldn’t find an obituary or gravestone for McCaleb himself. Wherever he ended up, it was a long way from the nursery of the future.
But what about his idea that started it all? What about the Ducky Bed’s soundtronic dream of a bed that rocks the baby to sleep while Mom and Dad repose in blissful slumber? Every so often somebody tries out a new angle on the concept: current contenders include Snoo and Sleepytroll. Maybe they can be the ones to overcome parents’ reluctance to let an unattended machine shake their babies. After all, the only people the Ducky Bed ever hurt were the ones who invested in it.
I obviously don’t remember if my parents used any special tech to get me to sleep as a baby - I suspect it was just the audio monitors that later became video monitors everyone has now. My earliest “tech” memories are the family getting an Apple ][ when I was a few years old, though I think it was more consequential when I got my very own Speak N Spell at age 5 or so. I specifically remember getting the add-on ET module I could plug into the back to add more words like, I suppose, TERRESTRIAL. What’re your earliest tech memories? Let’s hear about ‘em in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat.
—Dave (and the rest of Meh)
There’s gold in these here past Shoddy Goods stories, and you don’t need any drills or trucks to get it:
This might be ew to bring up, but there is a tragic malady called "shaken baby syndrome." Perhaps the only upside of the fact they didn't sell any of these is that they didn't contribute to SBS?