C. Carey Cloud » Cracker Jack » Plastic Dangles


In 1953, C. Carey Cloud created the Plastic Dangles for Cracker Jack. He made 12 different dangles in this series, including a butterfly, a deer, an elephant, fish/dolphins, a horse, a horse and rider, owls, a pan, a parrot, a poodle, a rooster, and a swan.

Four years later, 1957, this series was produced with transparent plastic in blue, red, and yellow. They can be seen on the webpage Plastic Dangles in Amber and Ruby.

Carey Cloud made the initial molds for this toy using clay. To create the bumps he used carpet tacks pressed into the soft clay to create the bumps that cover these dangles.

From his autobiography, Cloud Nine, "I had ten different subjects in the set which had to be modeled four times larger than the finished product, then engraved down to 1 3/4 inches by engravers. I had never touched clay for modeling, nor had I ever used a knife for wood carving. It was all new to me. I purchased a book on carving and on sculpturing. I decided to try clay modeling. With much experimentation and some difficulty, I succeeded in turning out the models. However, I found one disadvantage in using clay: it shrank. On future orders, I carved my models in basswood."

The dangles come in a variety of solid colors, as well as marbled. To keep from wasting any plastic, any colors that remained at the end of the day were combined, giving us the marbled prizes.