HOLLIDAYSBURG, Pa. -- About 300 people slunk into this town to bid on the earthly goods of the late Betty James, a woman whose life required as much flexibility and rebound as the spring-steel coil she sprung on a toy-hungry world: the Slinky.

On the lawn of her sprawling Tudor home were nine televisions, three refrigerators, nine mink coats and enough Sinatra-era furniture for a rat pack reunion.

Still, beneath an auctioneer's tent where avarice mingled with nostalgia, every other eye seemed focused on a table whereon rested Mrs. James' personal collection of Slinkys.

"She probably just held a few things back that meant something to her," said auctioneer Ron Roan, who organized yesterday's estate auction, eight months after Mrs. James died.

The variety was stunning: original Slinkys in their orange-brown boxes, gold-colored 40th- and 50th-anniversary limited editions, a plastic one "celebrating the Syracuse student -- past, present and future." There was a Slinky board game, Slink the dog from the "Toy Story" movie, and a Slinky Santa who, instead of Ho-Ho, goes boing-boing.

Then there was the lone Nittany Slinky, coiled in honor of Richard T. James, Penn State College of Engineering Class of 1939.

Mr. James came home from his job at a shipyard in 1944 to show his wife the odd, fully compressed spring he'd been working with, convinced it had peacetime potential.

If Richard James was the father of the Slinky, Betty was its midwife.

"She named it. She went to a dictionary," said Tom James, Mrs. James's son, who was 3 at the time and played his own role.

"I was the one that discovered it went down stairs," he said. "I fell and it came after me."

When Mr. James set up a table at a department store in Philadelphia, desperate to make a sale, Mrs. James, in what her son described as an "I Love Lucy moment," corralled her friends and hurried down to assure him at least a few sales.

She couldn't get near the table. Store patrons, fixated by the back-and-forth flutter of the steel coil, captivated by its simple capacity to addict, bought them all.

Slinky made the James family rich. It didn't make the family permanent.

After building a fortune on a toy so simple it remains the quintessential merging of simplicity to marketing, the elder Mr. James bought a mansion outside Philadelphia and, by his son's account, went a bit odd.

"He got in with some cult people -- religious cult people," his son said. In the early 1960s he called a family meeting, announced he was going to Bolivia and wanted to know who cared to accompany him.

The elder Mr. James died in Bolivia more than 30 years ago after a run-in with a South American warlord, his son said. Details are sketchy. What is clearer is that Mrs. James kept the rights to the Slinky, moved the children to this Blair County town outside Altoona, where she was born and raised, and flirted with bankruptcy.

She opened the manufacturing plant in Hollidaysburg, gambled her house and savings and sprung her product on a new generation.

"Her representatives told her 'You have to go on television,' " Tom James said. She did. The Slinky, with its brain-freezing jingle walked, stretched and boinged its way across televisions nationwide throughout the '60s, making its "slinkity" sound.

Brad and Betsy Neff each had one.

"Didn't everybody?" Mr. Neff asked as his wife prowled through a rack of mink coats, coiled like a Slinky but ready to pounce like a jaguar once the auction began.

"I had the plastic one," lamented Mrs. Neff, of Osterberg, Bedford County. "When they get tangled they're done."

"You need that ching-ching sound," agreed Mr. Neff, childhood owner of a spring-steel Slinky.

"We're going to check out the jewelry," Mrs. Neff said.

Come auction time, Mrs. Neff found herself competing with a singular bidder: Mr. James. He wanted one of his mother's mink coats for his daughter, Samantha.

"She's 20 years old but very old-fashioned," he said. Nice memento, he added.

"Mom was mink and satin sheets," he said. "She always went first class. When we traveled, we'd stay at The Plaza."

Up came a box of Slinkys.

"I know something about every one of them," he said. "I bought the wire."

A box of loose Slinkys went for $45. A small hubbub began in the James family row.

"Somebody's getting a deal," he whispered. "There's a gold-plated Slinky in there. We sold them for $100."

Other Slinkys would go for closer to market rate and land on the laps of nostalgia buffs like Dee Stahl. She bid $40 on a regulation metal Slinky with its own book.

"I don't know why, but I did," she blinked, settling herself in a back chair, Slinky in hand. "Well, it's James and I'm from Hollidaysburg."

That connection was felt by Vickie Youmans, too. She's also $40 lighter.

"I played with them as a child. It's nostalgic," said Ms. Youmans, of Pennsdale, Lycoming County.

Conner Schilling, though, had all the nostalgia of a 14-year-old, which is to say, not so much. His mom, Tammy, of Altoona, bid $40 for one of the other Slinky-and-book sets. The book contains some history of Slinky, a few tips on how to play, some Slinky trivia.

Conner's plans?

"Keep it in the box," he said. It's an investment. Even adolescents grow up and become nostalgic.