By Judy Clabes
NKyTribune editor
Don Poynter who built and owned the Triple Crown Country Club in Union and started the World of Golf, has passed away at age 96. His creative work was far from done.
He was an entreprenuer (and entertainer) from an early age — at least 11 — and founded Poynter Creations, later Poynter International. He rubbed elbows with notables all over the world. At age 94, he called Walt Disney about doing some bobbleheads and was disappointed not to get better responses from the executive he talked to. “I used to just deal with Walt,” he told them.
His long time associate Pat Green said, “I worked for the man for 47 years and not once did anybody ever say a negative thing about him.
“He was sharp as a tack right up to the end, a good family man, and true to his word.
“We never had a contract. His handshake was good enough.”
Green said he went to work for Poynter right after graduating from Eastern Kentucky University when Poynter told him, “Forget everything you know — your education starts now.”
Green looks back on those words as absolute truth — as they set about to build and develop The World of Golf, Triple Crown Country Club, the Widow’s Watch Golf Course in Lexington — and more.
Poynter was living at Seasons retirement community in Kenwood but he was far from retired. He grew up in Westwood and apparently got his creative — and inventive — talent from his father, a painter and photographer who also liked to make things.
Born in Cincinnati in 1925, he began making and selling remote-controlled tanks with working cannons at age 11. He served a two-year stint in the U.S. Army and then attended the University of Cincinnati where he graduated with a business degree.
Poynter started making novelty items in the 1950s when Cincinnati was a center for toy manufacturing and ‘people want(ed) to laugh and have fun.’ As the Addams Family was a popular TV show in the 1960s, he created The Thing mechanical coin box — and sold 14 million of them.
His other creations (and patents) included Arnold’s Plumber’s Putter, Jane Mansfield’s Hot Water Bottle, the Talking Toilet, Crooked Dice, Might Tiny Records and Golfer’s Dream: Hold in One Golf Ball. (Really a golf ball with a hole in it). And whiskey- and scotch-flavored toothpaste. He also made the “melting wax” that appears to drip from the top of Marker’s Mark bourbon bottles.
He collaborated with Mansfield on the hot water bottle, according to reports, paid her $5000 and went to Hollywood to make the mold.
“I stayed in California sculpting her for the mold for a week,” he told a reporter. ‘I could have done it in two days but thought — why rush it?”
A champion baton-twirler at his alma mater, the University of Cincinnati, got him a gig with the Harlem Globetrotters.
His bio on the University of Cincinnati alumni website summarized a remarkable career path:
Once an 11-year-old maker of remote-control toy tanks and working cannons, Don Poynter incorporated Poynter Creations while a UC student to sell “Play Logs” — similar to Lincoln Logs, but large enough for children to play inside. He later changed the company’s name to Poynter International and spent nearly half his time in Asia manufacturing novelties.
Thanks to Poynter, the world got to enjoy the first basketball backboard for a wastebasket, “The Thing” coin box featured on the Addams Family (14 million sold), Uncle Fester’s mystery light bulb (also featured on the show), crossword-puzzle toilet tissue and the Jane Mansfield hot water bottle. Later, when the bottle aired on TV, Jack Parr covered part of its “anatomy” with a handkerchief. Poynter also created the world’s smallest working record player, sold with 39 tiny records that Poynter recorded with real orchestras, and a Steer-N-Go landscape for Matchbox cars, which grossed $75 million in its first year.
Retiring in the late ’90s, Poynter has held patents on 100 or so novelty items, admittedly a nebulous number because “I never really bothered looking it up,” he says.
Poynter is preceded in death by his wife, Mona, and survived by their four adult children, Amy Brewer, the mayor of Lebannon; Molly Maundrell, a career specialist at Scarlet Oaks Career Campus; Tim Poynter of Amelia, FL; and Donald Bruce Poynter of New York City.
Funeral arrangements will be announced.