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| Boys in a Chicago schoolyard play with yo-yos. (Photo for the Sun-Times by Bob Kotalik) |
My wife sleeps late while I wake early.
"I'm going to walk the dog," I explained a few weeks back, after she stirred while I was putting on my shoes.
"Do you have a yo-yo?" she asked, sleepily.
"No," I said, puzzled, slow on the uptake, figuring she was coming out of a dream. "Why do you ask?"
"'Walk the dog,'" she explained. Ah. A yo-yo trick.
My next thought — I kid you not — was: I should get a yo-yo and learn tricks to entertain our future grandchildren. Then I wondered: Are there people who teach yo-yo tricks? Are yo-yos even still a thing? Or has technology completely killed them?
"Our demographic is 6 to 15 years old," said Josh Staph, CEO and president of the Duncan Toyscq Company, manufacturer of yo-yos for nearly a century. "There's smartphones, there's TikTok. A lot of elements that can provide immediate gratification to kids. A yo-yo does not provide immediate gratification. You have to try it a few times."
That you do. My only childhood memory of yo-yos is never being any good with them. "Walk the dog" is a trick where you throw the yo-yo down, hard, and it remains at ground level, spinning — like a dog on a leash — until you summon it back up with a snap of the wrist. My string tended to break.
Yo-yos are another classic plaything to emerge from Chicago, along with Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs and Raggedy Ann. Not that they were invented here — basically a vertical top with the string attached, yo-yos can be traced to antiquity. Women play with yo-yos on Grecian urns.
Donald F. Duncan was a Chicago entrepreneur in the 1920s who started a parking meter company. He visited California in 1928, where he saw Pedro Flores demonstrate a yo-yo. Flores was from the Philippines, where yo-yos were big, and had already trademarked the word "yo-yo," Tagalog for "come come." Duncan bought the rights then got busy, joining forces with newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst to get newsboys pushing yo-yos.
Yo-yos were a craze in Chicago in the summer of 1929 — newspaper columnists complained you couldn't enter a Loop building without fighting your way through crowds gathered to watch experts perform tricks. People grew annoyed.
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"Our demographic is 6 to 15 years old," Duncan says. That sounds about right. And I can attest to them being cyclical, like cicadas. Nobody would touch them for years, and you were a dork if you did...in fact, "yo-yo" was even a synonym for "dork." Then, almost overnight, every kid would be crazy about them, at least for a while. And they'd be everywhere...until the fad faded, as all fads eventually do.
ReplyDeleteThe craze hit my suburban high school at the beginning of my freshman year...the fall of '61. Everyone had to have a brightly colored plastic Duncan yo-yo. Wooden ones were very uncool. There was even a TV spot that proclaimed: "If it isn't a Duncan, it isn't a yo-yo." School administrators were not amused. We were warned not to bring them to school, and finally they were outlawed. They became contraband, and were seized. Users were given detentions, by the overlords of discipline.
Those were the years when principals and assistant principals were still the no-nonsense captains and officers of tight ships. Hell, we weren't even allowed to leave the building for lunch. And yo-yos became no-nos. But as suddenly as they had appeared, they disappeared. Unless you were one of the yo-yos who hadn't read the memo.
I was almost inspired to send for a half dozen Duncan yo-yos for my daughter, her husband, my 2 grandchildren, and me, to relive past encounters with walk-the-dog, round-the-world, rock-the-baby, etc. But come to think of it, the encounters from the 50s were all out of doors and generally didn't involve any destruction of windows, lamps and TVs. Not likely to happen that way these days. But I sincerely hope that you, your wife, your boys, and your prospective grandchildren have as much fun with their yo-yos as we did all those years ago, which maybe wasn't quite as enjoyable as I'd like to think it was.
ReplyDeletejohn
I certainly enjoyed yo-yos as a kid, and could do a fair number of the basic tricks, including "Walk the Doggie", "Spank the Baby", and "Around the World". Duncan was ingenious in changing the string from one strand glued inside the yo-yo to a loop that enabled the tricks by allowing the yo-yo to keep spinning while the string was totally extended. I can remember pricing various models then as I would cars now. The one I really wanted was one I couldn't afford. Some things don't change.
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