March 6, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Here’s a local teacher who does not mind being called a ‘yo-yo’
by SALLY COHEN

A yo-yo champion since his days at Germantown High, Lenny Belasco, a.k.a. Dr. Yo-Yo, is leading master classes at the Moving Arts studio on Tuesday evenings. Here he is seen “rocking the cradle.”

By the time he started at Germantown High in the late ‘50s, Lenny Belasco was already a local champion. Yo-yo was his game.

Those were years when kids could roam their neighborhoods without the tether of a cell phone or hovering of a chaperone, and unfamiliar men might wander onto schoolgrounds after hours to entice kids with games. One day, when Lenny was about 11, one did, at Fitler Elementary (now Fitler Academy), where Lenny Belasco went to school.

The Filipino man wore a sweater with patches. A wad of strings hung around his neck — honorifics, it turned out, from past yo-yo competitions or from teachers who saw that the student had mastered a new trick. The man started performing amazing tricks. The kids were mesmerized.

The man told the children that he would be back in the neighborhood the following Monday, on the corner of Manheim and Wayne. “Just get your parents to buy a  yo-yo,” which then cost 25 or 50 cents at the drugstore.

“He wasn’t selling,” recalls Belasco, who declined to reveal his current age. “He was promoting the Cheerio brand, which got bought out years later by Duncan. It was a wooden yo-yo, a little larger than the current Duncan. My parents bought me one, and I couldn’t put it down. I wasn’t yet aware that I liked physics, although years later, as a public school teacher, I did help lead physics workshops.

“I went to the gathering on the corner and was able to do a little more than most of the other neighborhood kids who were out for the event. Most of the traveling guys promoting yo-yo’s then were Filipino. In fact, the first yo-yo brought to this country is said to have been carved by Pedro Flores, a Filipino, in 1923. He was a bellboy in California, carving one yo-yo at a time to occupy himself. He had a little company which Duncan bought and built into a much bigger enterprise around Flores.” Duncan kept Filipino guys in business, promoting yo-yo’s from the late ‘20s into the ‘50s. The word “yo-yo” means “come come” in Tagalog.

“Anyway, the Filipino kept coming back to the neighborhood. Every time, he gave me a string. I wear a necklace of strings to honor the teachers who taught me. You see hip hop guys today putting the yo-yo strings on their belt loops.

“Over the years, I picked up various patches, like ‘First Award, 10-Trick Mastery.’ My mother sewed them onto a sweater, which unfortunately has been since lost. But I still have five or six of the patches. By the time I was 14, I was helping to run the contests, getting paid with yo-yo’s and strings.”

By the time Belasco was in high school, the Cheerio people had disappeared, and Duncan was the big yo-yo producer.  Belasco said, “I switched over and began demonstrating the yo-yo’s at Woolworth’s on Chelten Avenue and at the Orpheum Theatre. I was a champion; it meant something to me. In the Germantown area, I was king.

“I mastered it to a level that gave me a great deal of satisfaction, learning some of the hardest tricks.” These are tricks that take months to learn and seconds to perform. It took Lenny six months to learn the “Brain Twister.” Two years ago, he mastered “Split the Atom.”

He calls the yo-yo his “hobby passion,” though it was not the only one. For a number of years, his interest in music trumped all others. Lenny played drums in a jazz trio with the now-esteemed Kenny Barron.

And then there was literature and theater and writing. Lenny went on to a career he describes as very satisfying from the beginning, teaching in the public schools. Recently retired, he continues to lead playwrighting and poetry workshops and does a lot of professional development work with teachers.

Regarding his favorite avocation, though, Lenny said, “A lot of kids start with yo-yo’s that are advanced. They shouldn’t. It’s like starting to ride a bike with 21 speeds, before you do the coaster bike or training wheels.”

Generally, 7-year-olds can begin learning yo-yo. Girls are a little better, earlier, than boys. Only after mastering 15 or 20 tricks is it time to move to a yo-yo that can be taken apart like a trans-axle where the string goes on a ring that goes over the axle. As to the more advanced yo-yo’s, there are many which most people haven’t seen. Lenny explains, “The technology has advanced to a point where there are tricks that are much more complicated. Some of the new yo-yo’s spin for a very long time — minutes. Some are hard to stop, actually. I haven’t mastered all these tricks. There’s a whole new generation of yo-yo’s and tricks. I’m an old-school yo-yo person compared to these young performers today. I can do some of the new tricks, but I haven’t seen them all.”

Lenny has been leading “Yo-Yo Mastery” at the Moving Arts Studio in Mt. Airy as well as a class “for several generations.” Classes are Tuesday, 6:30 – 7:30 p.m. Students can bring their own yo-yo’s or buy one from Lenny at the class for $3 to $6. The Moving Arts Studio is located at Greene and Carpenter Lane, behind the Environmental Home Store. Enter off the driveway. Reservations are necessary. 215-842-1040.