Inside the company that has been bringing California fun to the world for the last 75 years

The company sold balls that could bounce over houses, flying discs that looked like UFOs, flexible foam boards for beach acrobatics and a slippery water slide that somehow worked on lawns. But for one 11-year-old boy, playing with these toys was not enough. He needed to know more.

When school was out, Todd Richards and a friend would bike over to the Wham-O factory in Pasadena, California, which churned out those toys and a lot more. There, he went on dumpster-dive treasure hunts.

"We'd find all kinds of cool stuff," Richards said. "Tubing that would stretch from one side of the parking lot to the other, toys that were maybe prototypes and we'd just try to piece them together. Once in a while we'd see if we could sneak inside the building, and the security guys would be chasing us back outside."

These days, Richards is still going to the Wham-O building, which is now in Carson, California, but he no longer has to sneak inside the place. Richards is president of the