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She was a resident of Rockford and she had made a doll for her grandson. One of the most important pieces of evidence was a testimony and a doll made in February 1951 by a lady named Grace Wingent. The company knew that people had been making dolls for the last two years, so they gathered up all the dolls that had been made the past two years so that they could have evidence proving that Helen Cooke should not have the patent. Levy contacted the Nelson Knitting Company hoping that they would declare the patent invalid. She sued a man named Stanley Levy because he sold sock monkeys but they were not the same design as hers. In 1953, a woman named Helen Cooke received the patent for sock monkeys. This red heel gave the monkeys their distinctive mouth and during the Great Depression, American crafters first made sock monkeys out of worn-out Rockford Red Heel Socks. Nelson Knitting added the red heel "De-Tec-Tip" to assure its customers that they were buying "original Rockfords" as opposed to the generic "Rockfords". The red heeled sock was marketed as "de-tec-tip". In 1932, advertising executive Howard Monk came up with an idea to change the heel of the brown sock from white to red. The iconic sock monkeys made from red-heeled socks, known today as the "Rockford Red Heel", emerged at the earliest in 1932, the year the Nelson Knitting Company added the trademark red heel to its product. These seamless work socks were so popular that the market was soon flooded with imitators, and socks of this type were known under the generic term "Rockfords". The seamless sock saved time and labor costs and it became so popular, companies began to imitate his idea. The original machine required workers to sew every seam at the heel. John Nelson's son Franklin created a machine that knitted a sock without seams in the heel. On September 15, 1880, the Nelson Knitting Company formed, producing "Celebrated Rockford Seamless Hosiery", and selling them under the name of the "Nelson Sock". John Nelson, a Swedish immigrant to the United States, patented the sock-knitting machine in 1868, and began knitting socks on an automatic machine in Rockford, Illinois as early as 1870. Tales like Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and Just So Stories inspired crafters to create toys that depicted exotic animals, however these early stuffed monkeys were not necessarily made from socks, and also lacked the characteristic red lips of the sock monkeys popular today. Craft makers began sewing stuffed animals as toys to comfort children, and, as tales of the Scramble for Africa increased the public's familiarity with exotic species, monkey toys soon became a fixture of American nurseries. The sock monkey's most direct predecessors originated in the Victorian era, when the craze for imitation stuffed animals swept from Europe into North America and met the burgeoning Arts and Crafts movement.
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