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 Toys 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.
“Golly Gene, yesterday I met a friend who wasn’t bouncing a yo-yo,” the Chicago Daily News “Hit or Miss” column quipped sarcastically in 1931. “Honest, I didn’t know what to say.”
The earthquake for Duncan came in 1965, when a lawsuit found that the term “yo-yo” had lost its trademark status, like “zipper” or “aspirin.” Competitors sprung up. Then handheld computer games happened.
“Up until the late 1990s, it was a pretty cyclical business,” said Staph. “Every seven or so years. 1999 was the last big year.”
While the present is fairly constrained — Duncan Toys, now based in Ohio, has three full-time employees — the company has big plans to go high tech.
“We’re looking into modernizing the most popular toy of all time with a gaming component,” said Staph. “A patented technology, built-in sensors allow a person to perform tricks that are motion tracked. Playing with a yo-yo can be turned into a digital experience.”
Until then, Duncan sent me a dozen yo-yos. My 9-year-old neighbor is the prime yo-yo demographic, and I shot her mom an email asking for her help as a beta tester. They trooped over. I asked the young lady if she is familiar with yo-yos — yes, her dentist once gave her one. Are they fun? “No,” she replied. But she took two, and her mother took another two — one for herself, one for her teenage son.
A few days later the mom was aglow — she was loving the yo-yo, finding it both meditative and addictive. The girl was quiet. I asked her what yo-yos need. “Colors,” she said, and specialists, which I took to mean TikTok influencers.
A purist myself, I began with an Imperial, the classic $5.99 model. I couldn’t even get the thing to return back up. In truth, I had trouble winding the string — it kept slipping — and online guidance was useless. My wife, bless her, went straight to the Hornet, a more advanced model, and when I tried that I was off to the races. Not only could I made the Hornet go up and down, but a hard toss and it would stay there, spinning, until I summoned it back up.
“Look!” I enthused. “I’m walking the dog.”
