You came across this story while reporting a Wall Street Journal article in 2009. Can you tell me how that all came about?
Sure. I was a reporter on the Money & Investing team, and as you probably remember, in 2009, there was just one depressing story after another. We all, kind of by default, ended up doing a lot of unemployment coverage.
In the story I was working on, I was going to include a throwaway line about Monopoly being invented during the Great Depression. I always have loved games and puzzles, I grew up playing games with my family, and my brother and I were big video game players. And I thought, oh, this will be easy, and there is so much irony because Monopoly is all about money and real estate. But I kept looking around, and the story just wasn’t adding up—it wasn’t making any sense. I was totally frustrated and I felt like an idiot. I was like, “Gosh, here we are writing about derivatives and I can’t get a board game anecdote right? What’s wrong with me?”
So I came across Ralph Anspach and his lawsuit against Monopoly, and figured he might know something. I contacted him on a whim and said, “Hey, I’m a reporter at the Journal and I’m trying to find out the truth about Monopoly.” He immediately got back to me and said, “Oh, I know all about the history of Monopoly!” And he started telling me all about it, and his lawsuit, and what it had unearthed and I thought, “This is crazy.”
So I wrote a story about Ralph Anspach’s lawsuit and Monopoly’s history. Usually, when you lock up a story, you’re kind of sick of it, right? You’re totally exhausted, and you know way more than you ever would have printed. But when the story closed, it was the first time I felt like I still had questions. And so I started reporting it from there on out.