I remember that every fall the Duncan demo team would come to our school. One year they would demonstrate yo-yo’s and the next year it would be tops. This was in the 70’s. The wooden tops were the best. You would have to buy special replacement tips for the tops because they would wear out on the asphalt. I still look for those tops. I see Duncan makes still makes yo-yos, but I haven’t seen the tops in 20 years. Too bad.
My friends and I were lucky. We grew up in and around “The Big Six Towers” in Queens which was a self-contained couple of acres of trees, pathways, playgrounds, huge flower planters, lots of grass, etc. where we played Ringalario. (No “eve”-io for us) We would run around for hours evading the other team and charging the jail. There were plenty of bushes to hide in so stealth was also part of the game. Of course, the elderly residents weren’t too fond of us racing around, and eluding the security guards used to become part of the game as well.
Does anyone remember a candy bar called “Lunch Bar”? I think that’s the name but I could be wrong. The same luncheonette where I bought my weekly egg creams sold a little chocolate bar wrapped in a green and red wrapper. I remember that is was only 3 cents instead of the usual 5 cents that most candy bars cost. I had to make my weekly $1.50 allowance stretch — after I bought a few Superman, Flash, Green Lantern and Archie comics, there wasn’t much left. After the luncheonette closed down, I never saw the “lunch bar” again.
For little girls, I remember a game called something like, “Mother, May I?”. Someone would be Mother and the player would say, “Mother, may I take a giant step?” and Mother had the option of saying, “Yes, you may” or, “No, you may not”. If she said, “No!”, the player would have to beg and demean herself in front of Mother, eg. “Mother, may I take an eensy weensy step?” or “Mother, please, may I take an itty bitty step?” I can’t remember how the game ended; it may not have. It definitely involved a lot of begging and laughing.
Anyone out there from Flatbush old enough to remember the “I cash clothes Man’? If so, did you know that Dorothy Fields wrote the lyric for a wonderful song in the Broadway musical “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” called “I Cash Clothes”. It was a chorus number and it summoned the spiirit of my young Brooklyn experiences in its music and lyric as if bt magic.