Life as I see it: A Science Guy’s Almanac #24. Duncan Yo-yos and Yo-yo Masters

A Science Guy’s Almanac #24. Year 2. May 16, 2016

Duncan Yo-yos and Yo-yo Masters

The Wienermobile was the highlight of the events in our neighborhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The second place event was the visit of the Duncan Yo-yo Masters at the drug store at the end of our street. I’ve recently discovered that the official title for those people was “Yo-yo Demonstrator.” I like Yo-yo Master better, so I’m sticking with it.

An Aside

My family moved to Spring Valley in 1957. From then, until 1971, when I married Leanne Stagner, I lived at 4166 Citradora Drive in Spring Valley, California. Citradora begins at Campo Road and ends about ½ mile North-ish at Camino Paz.

When I was growing up, a drug store/doctor’s office was on the East side of Citradora and a gas station was on the West side of Citradora where it met Campo. Doctors Webster and Contasti were the owner/occupants of the doctor’s office end of that building. I spent many Saturday mornings there following Friday night football game injuries. I spent many other hours in that doctor’s office, too. When I stopped going to Dr. Webster because he wasn’t on the health insurance plan I had, he showed me two file folders. It took a pair of folders, each over 2-inches thick to hold my records.

The drug store, Valley Pharmacy by name, end of the building wouldn’t have the same sign on its roof today as it did back then. The word DRUGS, stood tall and proud in four-foot-tall letters.

Ah, the innocence of that time…

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

I don’t know how often the Yo-yo Masters visited the Valley Pharmacy. I do remember what they did.

Unless we had money to buy a yo-yo or brought one with us, they gave us all a yo-yo to practice with. This was a masterful marketing ploy. I suspect that Valley Pharmacy sold more yo-yos the weeks of those visits than all the weeks the rest of the year combined.

The masters began by showing everyone how to make the yo-yo go down and back up. That’s sounds like a dumb thing for them to show, but I’ve learned that it’s harder for some people than others to do.

You need to know that real yo-yo strings are really one big loop that’s been twisted into a single strand. Hold that thought.

Once we were all yo-yoing, they worked on what I called the waterfall technique. That began by holding the yo-yo in your hand with the palm down. Next, you rotated your wrist and tossed the yo-yo off the ends of your fingers. You cradled the yo-yo as it returned to your hand as it returned up to it. Without stopping the movement of the yo-yo, you rotated your wrist and tossed the yo-yo. Poetry in motion.

The first trick the masters tried to teach us was the sleeper. After waterfalling your yo-yo, if you jerked your hand upward at the moment the yo-yo was motionless at the bottom of its downward flight, you might get it to spin without rewinding the string. That’s possible because the string is really a big loop. Remember that thought you were holding? I was a quasi-master of putting my yo-yo to sleep. In other words, I could get the yo-yo to sleep about half the times I tried.
The next trick up the difficulty ladder was walking the dog. For this trick, after the yo-yo was asleep, you lowered it gently to the ground. When the spinning yo-yo made contact with the ground, it would creep forward, much like a dog on a leash. I was a non-master of that trick. In fact, I never recall a time when I got my yo-yo dog to walk more than an inch before it climbed back up into the palm of my hand.
Other trick demonstrations followed. I watched while some of my friends did feats of wonder as they copied the Yo-yo Masters. I resurrected some bad memories for this blog post by searching for yo-yo tricks. This link https://yoyotricks.com/yoyo-tricks/ starts with videos of the basics and goes insane by the end of the Basics video.

You might recall that I told you that Valley Pharmacy sold many yo-yos during and immediately following the Yo-yo Masters’ visit. The cheapest yo-yo you could buy back then was made of wood. I don’t remember if it was a Duncan, but it probably was. The coveted yo-yo of choice was not a wooden yo-yo. It was the colorful, plastic Duncan Imperial.