SMALL BUSINESS: Zoom!

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On a plane trip four years ago, a seatmate told John Burton Tigrett about a new toy. It was simply a roll of paper on a stick. With a flick of the wrist the paper coil would shoot five feet into the air and snap back into position. Tigrett, an easygoing Southerner who had long made a hobby of buying up patents, tracked down the inventor, bought his patent for $100 plus royalties, and started producing the gadget in a small Chicago shop. Since then, 38-year-old John Tigrett has sold 15 million "Zoomerangs," and built a $2,000,000 annual toy business. This week fast-growing Toyman Tigrett put his 1952 models on sale. Among his new gadgets: a "Jet Zoom" pistol (98¢) and bow & arrow Zoomerangs (59¢).

Tigrett got into the toy business in a roundabout way. He quit the University of Tennessee after his freshman year, borrowed $150 and started an investment company in the depths of the Depression. By 1942, when he went into the Navy, he was making nearly $25,000 a year, and spending his extra cash buying up patents on everything from hair straighteners to paint-can handles. One of them was a bird that would sit on the edge of a water glass, dip its beak in & out for hours on end. At war's end Tigrett licensed a manufacturer to make it, cleaned up $100,000 on his "Glub-Glub."

Once he started to make money on the Zoomerangs, Tigrett felt as if he had hold of a boomerang. Taxes threatened to take more than half his profits. But he soon thought up a real taxeroo. He now forms a new company to handle each new toy he brings out (e.g., rocker toys, toy typewriters, the Charles Eames TOY), thus keeps his overall gross in the lowest corporate income-tax brackets. In addition to the Chicago parent, Tigrett Enterprises, Inc., he now runs seven toy companies.