Toy Story

Our biggest kite problem was having enough string. If you had five cents, you could buy a whole roll of kite string, but most of us had to scrounge enough scraps to make a long enough string. This was tough because flying out over the barbed-wire fences with a safe margin took over 100 yards of string! We were always on the lookout for packages and things wrapped in string. Often people would pick up their package to find no string around it, as we kids had already raided the room where mail was distributed. No one said anything, but I’m sure they knew why their string was missing.

We needed better string but shorter pieces for the yo-yo season. Most of us couldn’t afford a Duncan Yo-Yo, the gold standard. We could buy two Duncan strings for a nickel; then we would ask the old men to carve us a yo-yo. They found an old Duncan and took it apart. They began carving, and two days later, every kid in Block 26 had a serviceable yo-yo, carved from bare pine in three pieces.