Looking Back
Yo-yo
By Ambeth Ocampo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 00:02:00 06/04/2008
Pedro Flores is so common a Filipino name that it goes largely unnoticed. Flores is not an unsung hero of the Philippine Revolution nor was he involved in the Philippine-American war, yet his is a name that should be remembered for something he gave to our times. Pedro Flores did not invent the fluorescent lamp. He was responsible for giving the world the yo-yo.
Our story begins in the last century, in the 1920s, when Flores, an overseas Filipino worker, was employed as a houseboy in an American home in California. One day, to amuse the son of his employers, Pedro took out a kitchen knife and fashioned a crude yo-yo from soft wood and string. Pedro taught the little boy how to use the yo-yo and also how to make a few tricks. Since his ward was the first kid on the block to own a yo-yo, Pedro was later forced to make new yo-yos for other children, starting with the classmates of his employer’s son.
It was Pedro’s master who saw the potential of the yo-yo as a toy. In 1928, he convinced Pedro to register a patent for the yoyo, and even provided capital for the manufacture of the toys, thus founding the first yo-yo factory in the United States. Then, a certain H.B. Preston from Chicago, who was so fascinated by the toy that he sought out the inventor, asked Pedro to show him what tricks and games could be done with a yo-yo. He was rather disappointed when he realized there was not much to do with it except to make it go up and down. He gathered Filipinos in Chicago and discovered they couldn’t do much better than Pedro Flores. Undaunted, Preston played with the yo-yo and developed the new tricks that have since become staples of the perennial yo-yo contests around the world: “The Spinner,” “Walking the dog,” “Breakaway,” “Around the World,” “Over the Falls,” “Creeper” and “Three-Leaf Clover.”
Having developed all these new tricks for the yo-yo, Preston convinced some of his friends to mass produce yo-yos. They incorporated, bought off Flores’ rights to the toy and in 1929 founded the Duncan Yoyo Company, starting a fad that spread around the US, Europe and later worldwide. By some unhappy twist of fate, the yo-yo as an American product returned, largely unrecognized, to its country of origin where it put its local cousins to shame. In 1933 Preston himself arrived in the Philippines amid much fanfare as “the yo-yo expert” and he delivered a press statement that read: “Our company guarantees 150 varieties that can be performed on our yo-yos. Of course, such tricks can only be performed on a genuine Duncan Yoyo, for the toys you make locally are hard to play with. In the first place they are not evenly balanced. The edges of the groove are sharp and the axle big. The weight too is not exactly right. Some of your yo-yos are either too heavy or too light and many of them are made so thin that they are not appropriate for the 50 or more tricks that we can do with a Duncan Yoyo.
“There is also another secret in the yoyo game. It lies in the kind of string used. I noticed that your boys play it here with the spool thread that can be bought from any corner store. In our yo-yos, we use a string specially made of Egyptian fiber cord. It is not only durable but also smooth, and gives the top an easy flow.”
I wonder what original Filipino yo-yos looked like before Pedro Flores made one in California in the 1920s. Jose Rizal, in one of his travels at sea, amused other passengers on the cruise ship by doing tricks with a yo-yo. When asked what kind of a toy this was and what it was called, Rizal is quoted to have said it was actually a pre-colonial weapon used for self-defense. Museums collect many kinds of artifacts to show us how people in the past lived, but I have yet to see a collection of yo-yos in our National Museum or the other museums in the US and Europe that still preserve Philippine artifacts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. My own mother surprised the whole family one day when she took a tangled yo-yo from her granddaughter and started to spin, throw and make competition-quality tricks with the yo-yo. I never got around to asking her where she learned to use a yo-yo like that, or whether she used a local yo-yo in pre-war Taguig, Rizal or had a State-side or American-made Duncan yoyo.
As a historian, I want to know what Pedro Flores looked like. I want to know if he even made money from registering and selling his yo-yo patent. I want to know what yo-yos looked like, what material they were made of, what tricks early Filipinos did with their yo-yos before the Duncan yo-yo came to town. Why did we allow this Mr. Preston to come to our shores in 1933 to promote the Duncan yo-yo? Why did we allow him to demean our locally made and original handcrafted yo-yos? Why did we allow the Duncan yo-yo to make our own yo-yos look provincial and inferior?
Our history has a number of similar examples that make us weep. Decades ago, Filipino minds stocked the International Rice Research Institute and Filipino teachers in the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, taught foreigners how to plant rice effectively; today we have to import rice.
Independence Day is just around the corner. Maybe we should remember lost opportunities like the yo-yo and realize that it is one thing to declare independence, and another to know what to do with that independence.
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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu.
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