Rubber Duckies- What Were They Thinking?

By Joni Johnson (with a lot of help from Wikipedia)

Rubber Duckies took on new significance at the Manor when they were distributed on Rubber Ducky Day. January 13th is a holiday that’s dedicated to the rubber ducky and is aptly named National Rubber Ducky Day.

At the Manor, the Rubber Duckies arrived in all sorts of disguises. Some wore the traditional yellow outfit with orange beak. But many represented a multitude of characters. One of ours was a woodland duck and the second was a unicorn duck. Some people at the Manor found the gifts silly and childish and others loved them.

Duck Collection 1

I’ve been collecting ducks since 2003 when a hotel in San Francisco gifted each of its guests with a medium sized duck with their name imprinted on the front. I thought it was cute as did my compatriots. I bought a few more during the year. And all of a sudden, I had a collection. It gave my

Duck Collection 2

friends something to give me. Now I have about 50 different ducks that adorn the counters of my two bathrooms. This does not even touch the 5,631 different ducks of Charlotte Lee, who has the largest Rubber Duck Collection in the world. Her name appears in the Guinness book of World Records. I couldn’t believe that the two ducks that appeared in my box were new to me, and so they have joined their compatriots.

All of a sudden, thanks to their hosts, many of the Manor ducks were involved in a variety of activities. People found them snow shoeing, ice boarding, swimming, and so much more. Some ducks were so bad that they spent some of their time in jail.

Ducks in Jail- Naughty Ducks

Ducks on Snowshoes?

Species experiments

So is the Rubber ducky just a silly little toy for children or is it more? It has engendered massive world wide Derby Duck Races with prizes over $1,000,000 a race. These are often used as a fundraising method for organizations. I believe someone also suggested that we hold a derby race here in the spring. In Aspen, Colorado, the derby now features 30000 ducks and takes place each August. Other cities include Fort Wayne, Indiana; Knoxville, Tennessee; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Lumsden, Saskatchewan; and Estes Park, Colorado. There are races in Australia, Scotland, Germany and other countries.

The story that Queen Elizabeth has a rubber duck in her bathroom wearing an inflatable crown caused the sale of rubber ducks in England to increase by 80% for a period of time. In 2013, along with the game of chess, the rubber duck was inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame.

Sculptor Peter Ganine created a duck made of vinyl in the 1940’s, patented it, including the famous squeaker, and reproduced it as a floating toy. More than 50 million were sold. What started out as the birthday of the character Rubber Ducky from Sesame Street has now bloomed into a holiday that’s celebrated all over. In Sesame Street, Ernie’s favorite toy is his rubber duckie, and he sings about it in the song by that name. The song was recorded in 1970 and charted at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100.

Scientists are studying them in global tidal currents. In 1992, 28,800 Rubber Ducks were washed off a ship during a Pacific storm. About two-thirds were found three months later in Indonesia, Australia and South America. Most were finally recovered by 2007 after having been through the Bering Strait, Greenland and/or Iceland. Donovan Hohn wrote a book about their travels called Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,000 Bath Toys Lost at Sea., available in paperback from Amazon for $18.

There’s a Rubber Duck Project in Pittsburgh that considers the rubber duck a symbol of happiness and childhood memories, giving comfort to people regardless of their nationality, age, and race, and without political distinction.

The University of London advises computer programming students to use a rubber duck to help them debug their code. If they attempt to explain the program out loud, line-by-line, to a rubber duck, they will often discover where a problem exists, and then they can resolve it. Clearly, the concept of Rubber Duck Debugging need not be confined to programming.

Personally, I find Rubber Duck Debugging to be quite useful when applied to my writing. If you are looking for some problem-solving help, perhaps you should try teaching rubber ducks!

In a 2006 article in The Journal of American Culture, Lotte Larsen Mayer writes, “Shared by adults and children in a symbiotic relationship, the irrepressibly ‘cute’ toy that fueled ‘duck mania’ brings pleasure and learning to children and leaves memories of childhood innocence and joy that are re-kindled in adulthood, promising fun as the duck reaches out to the inner child in all of us.”

Our Rubber Ducky experience at the Manor started small but grew and certainly has allowed us to reconnect with that wonderful inner child. May we continue to do so because that is what keeps us young.