---
title: "The Inventor of the Frisbee Was Cremated and Turned Into a Frisbee. His Family Honoured His Request."
id: "87437"
type: "post"
slug: "inventor-of-frisbee-cremated-turned-into-frisbee-family-honoured-request"
published_at: "2026-10-12T13:30:23+00:00"
modified_at: "2026-10-12T13:30:26+00:00"
url: "https://econopass.com/inventor-of-frisbee-cremated-turned-into-frisbee-family-honoured-request/"
markdown_url: "https://econopass.com/inventor-of-frisbee-cremated-turned-into-frisbee-family-honoured-request.md"
excerpt: "Ed Headrick invented the modern Frisbee. He spent his life throwing them. When he died, he asked to be cremated and pressed into one. His family said yes."
taxonomy_category:
  - "Stranger Than Fiction"
taxonomy_post_tag:
  - "AmericanInventors"
  - "Frisbee"
  - "OddFacts"
  - "StrangerThanFiction"
  - "WeirdHistory"
---

# The Inventor of the Frisbee Was Cremated and Turned Into a Frisbee. His Family Honoured His Request.

- ![Marco Bellinari](https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/c6e5c56ec7a682293ab60d57efa9213a336c3f2a2ef7c712fd2299e32ade4fa2?s=40&r=g) [Marco Bellinari](https://econopass.com/author/marco-bellinari/)
- October 12, 2026October 12, 2026

![The Inventor of the Frisbee](https://econopass.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/The-Inventor-of-the-Frisbee.jpg "The Inventor of the Frisbee")

![The Inventor of the Frisbee](https://econopass.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/11/The-Inventor-of-the-Frisbee.jpg "The Inventor of the Frisbee")Ed Headrick spent most of his adult life making Frisbees fly better. He was the man who took a wobbly tin pie plate fad and turned it into a precision flying disc, adding the concentric rings now known as the Headrick lines that stabilized the flight path and made the modern Frisbee possible. He held the patents. He ran the Wham-O Frisbee division for years. He founded the sport of disc golf. When he died in 2002 at the age of 78, he left behind a request that was either the most fitting farewell in the history of American invention or the strangest, depending on your tolerance for symmetry.

He wanted his ashes mixed into a batch of memorial Frisbees and distributed to his family and close friends. His family honoured the request. A limited number of memorial discs were produced, each containing a portion of Ed Headrick’s cremated remains. The people who knew him best received one. Several were thrown.

> **Headrick had not arrived at the Frisbee by accident.** He joined Wham-O in 1964 when the flying disc was already a phenomenon of sorts, selling millions of units but with no real product discipline behind it. The early discs wobbled unpredictably in flight, limiting what you could do with them. Headrick redesigned the mold, added the raised concentric rings to the underside, and filed the patents in 1967. The rings changed the aerodynamics. The Frisbee became a thing you could actually aim.

What followed was not just a toy business. Headrick understood that the Frisbee had a culture attached to it that Wham-O had barely begun to exploit. Under his direction the company began sponsoring tournaments, developing professional discs, and cultivating a community of serious players. The International Frisbee Association was established. Rules were codified. What had been a backyard amusement started to look like a sport.

After leaving Wham-O, Headrick went further. He developed the modern disc golf basket, the metal chain-and-basket target that defines the sport today, and founded the Professional Disc Golf Association. Disc golf now has millions of players worldwide and permanent courses on six continents. The man who stabilized the flight of a flying disc also built the infrastructure of an entire recreational sport around it, largely because he liked throwing things and could not stop thinking about how to do it better.

> **His final request was consistent with everything that came before it.** Headrick had spent his life in the disc. He saw no reason to leave it entirely at the end. The memorial Frisbees were not a stunt. They were the logical conclusion of a life organized around a single object, pressed into the shape of that object and handed to the people who understood why.

The Frisbee itself has a stranger origin than most people know. The Frisbie Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut, supplied pies to Yale University in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Yale students discovered that the empty pie tins flew in a satisfying arc when thrown, and the practice spread across New England campuses. When Walter Frederick Morrison began developing a plastic flying disc in the late 1940s and eventually sold the design to Wham-O in 1957, the company named it after the pie tins the students had been throwing for decades. The Frisbie Pie Company had no involvement and received no royalties. They just made good pies in tins that happened to fly.

Morrison himself had his own unusual exit. He asked to be buried with a prototype of his original flying disc design. The wishes of the two men most responsible for the Frisbee’s existence both involved, in different ways, taking the disc with them. One went into the ground with one. The other became one.

> **The memorial discs Headrick’s family produced were not made available commercially.** They were personal objects given to people who had shared his world. Some of them have been thrown on disc golf courses. Some sit on shelves. All of them contain what they contain, which is the man who spent forty years making sure a flying disc went where you wanted it to go.

There are stranger last wishes on record. But few are this coherent. Ed Headrick knew exactly what he was and exactly what he wanted to remain. The disc was the answer to both questions.

*The world is stranger than anyone told you. I am just keeping count.*  
**Marco Bellinari**

Think that was strange? These books will finish the job.

[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0911104534?tag=econopass01-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0911104534?tag=econopass01-20)
**[The Frisbee: A Practitioner’s Manual and Definitive Treatise](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0911104534?tag=econopass01-20)**

Stancil E.E. Johnson

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**[Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0816521433?tag=econopass01-20)**

William Rathje & Cullen Murphy

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[https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814788130?tag=econopass01-20](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814788130?tag=econopass01-20)
**[American Inventions](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814788130?tag=econopass01-20)**

James Cross Giblin

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## Sources

- [Ed Headrick, 78, Developer of Frisbee as Sport Tool (New York Times, 2002)](https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/14/sports/ed-headrick-78-developer-of-frisbee-as-sport-tool.html)
- [History of Disc Golf (Professional Disc Golf Association)](https://www.pdga.com/history)
- [A Brief History of the Frisbee (Smithsonian Magazine)](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/a-brief-history-of-the-frisbee-78629241/)
- [Headrick’s 1967 Flying Toy Patent (Google Patents)](https://patents.google.com/patent/US3359678)
- [Frisbee Pioneer Ed Headrick Dies (Los Angeles Times, 2002)](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-aug-14-me-headrick14-story.html)

![Marco Bellinari](https://econopass.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/marco-800.jpg "marco 800")

#### A Note from Marco Bellinari

Thank you for reading. Every fact in this article is documented and sourced. You will find the references at the bottom if you want to dig further. I hope it surprised you at least once. That is always the intention.  
  
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[Frisbee](https://econopass.com/tag/frisbee/)
[OddFacts](https://econopass.com/tag/oddfacts/)
[StrangerThanFiction](https://econopass.com/tag/strangerthanfiction/)
[WeirdHistory](https://econopass.com/tag/weirdhistory/)

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