Image licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy of flickr user slayer23.

The BRU Close-Up is back, introducing you to some exciting people, places, projects and organizations – right in your back yard.

This week, Marielle Segarra pays yo-yo champion Larry Sayco a visit in his Pawtucket studio.

The Close-Up was originally aired as part of the Brief, WBRU’s weekly news magazine, which airs on Monday nights at 11:00.

Tonight’s Close-up featured “Traveling Man,” by Ricky Nelson.

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“Loop-the-loop. Around the World…Now, he’s some hard tricks with the yo-yo. Here’s one called third dimension, like a 3-d movie. You know the trick rockin’ the baby?

When Larry Sayco was your age, yo-yos were made out of wood. They also cost 35 cents. The 9-time national yo-yo champion is old school. He performs in bloomers – 1930s style – and makes no-nonsense yo-yos with wooden axles in his workshop on Clifford Street in Pawtucket.

Sayco can do tricks like the “yo-yo limbo,” the “Star of Rhode Island”, and “the Breakaway” with ease. But he should be able to – he invented them.

The 76 year-old started yo-yoing professionally after he graduated from Notre Dame High School in Central Falls. But it all started one fateful day on Dexter Street in the same town, at a small variety store that sold Duncan yo-yos. Sayco can’t recall the name of the place that got him started on yo-yos in the 9^th grade, but he remembers the effect it had on his career.

“It was a small variety store. They were selling Duncan yo-yos, so they would have the Duncan champion come down and you know, have a contest. So I entered and to my surprise, I won the contest.”

Duncan was one of the first yo-yo makers. The company started selling its spinning marvels back in 1929. They got the idea for a yo-yo with a looped string that could do more than go up and down from Filipino immigrant Pedro Flores, who started the Flores Yo-yo company. Until the late 1960s, Duncan even had a patent on the word yo-yo.

The company held its first world yo-yo competition in London in 1932, the same year the Arab-American Sayegh family welcome their son Lawrence into the world on the second floor of their grocery store in Central Falls. For show business purposes, Lawrence Sayegh would later become Larry Sayco.

Later in high school, Sayco entered a contest in Blackstone Valley with about 30 other kids. He won that too. In fact, he won so many local competitions, that after his high school graduation, Duncan representatives called and asked him to travel around the country, demonstrating for the company.

When Sayco was 18, Duncan sent him to Detroit, Michigan to perform for groups of people and hold contests. After a taste of the limelight, he decided to stick with the job.

In 1952, he performed at the Hotel Ritz in Paris. He demonstrated tricks like the “Overhand Crossfire” and the “Yo-yo Limbo,” where he sent yo-yos spiraling with both hands while bending backwards, on his knees, and touching his head to the ground.

Over 12 years, Sayco traveled to 25 different countries with Duncan and held yo-yo contests in each city before he left. His scrapbooks are filled with postcards and pictures of the people he met along the way.

In 1958, Sayco got so good, An Australian television program filmed him yo-yoing on the roof of a moving Ford in Tasmania.

After two years, Sayco’s boss convinced him to enter the National Duncan yo-yo contest.

“I figured I didn’t have a chance because some of these guys, they were wizzes at it, you know. The first time I entered, I won. Surprised the heck out of me.”

He won it for the next nine years, until the early 60s, when Duncan lost the rights to the name “yo-yo,” and the company went bankrupt and stopped doing contests. Flambeau, Inc. later bought the company, and Sayco went on to patent and make his own tournament yo-yos in Pawtucket.

32-year-old Ed Haponik, professional yo-yo player and North Carolina state yo-yo champion met Sayco last August while visiting family in New England.

Haponik says watching Sayco was like watching an old film come to life.

“It was really cool watching him with this really old style yo-yo, doing these tricks that have largely been forgotten, and doing them really, really well. He did this trick called the bank deposit, which is this trick that virtually no players can do now, where it goes directly into your pocket, and he did that three times in a row.

Larry Sayco hovers over his yo-yos like a meticulous maternity nurse. His machines are homemade – a little bit of this, a few of these parts, and viola! He carefully dissolves the plastic from the yo-yo side to stick the pieces together and then pops them on a conveyor belt and waits for them to slide on down to the end. He even measures the string to your height so your shiny new yo-yo doesn’t hit the floor when you practice the fancy tricks he taught you – some of which he came up with 50 years ago.

Haponik says Sayco has had a lasting influence on the yo-yo community – whether modern players know it or not.

“A lot of today’s yo-yoers, especially the younger generation, really kind of blissfully ignores a lot of the yo-yoing that’s gone on prior to them. And that’s to their detriment, because they don’t realize it, but I mean, they’re standing on these great shoulders.”

Larry Sayco used to his yo-yos for a dollar to neighborhood kids, until someone started buying them from him and selling them online for profit. But he still sells the yo-yos when people hire him to perform.  And every once in a while, he makes one for a very lucky guest.