Curious as the Boomer Club is materializing, when was your first introduction to yo-yo? Maybe in the comments also add when you returned to playing if you had a hiatus.
I got caught up in an early 70’s boom and got back into it in 2019.
My Grandpa bought my cousin and I each a Smothers Brothers yoyo in 1988. He had recorded a number of episodes of the Smothers Brothers for us to watch when we stayed over and taught us both a few tricks. I got a Duncan Butterfly shortly after that. Not sure what happened to the Butterfly, but I still have the Smothers Brothers, and a backup that a friend sent me.
I played off an on up until 1995-96 or so when the Boom began. I had one of Duncan’s trick books until that point and had learned most of what was in that book but had never thought of making my own tricks at that point. But when we got our first YoYo Mall cart that’s when it changed.
Several good friends started playing and we played during our lunch hour every day in high school. ProYo/Playmaxx would come around a couple times a year and have a contest at the mall, that’s when I learned there were more tricks than just in the Duncan book, and when I started seeing people trying their own things. That’s when yoyo really opened up in my mind.
When I saved up the $39.99 for my first Playmaxx Bumble Bee is when things opened up even more. I couldn’t believe how long this yoyo would spin! A friend showed me a “bind” on his Bumble Bee. He couldn’t get to the mall to get new cork pads, but he discovered if he dropped extra string in the gap he could get it to return. There was no thought as to what direction the yoyo was spinning, it was just a “get as much string as you can in the gap, and it’ll come back” type of thing.
After high school I played less, but still played semi-regularly, and bought yoyos at Walmart from time to time. Then a friend gave me his collection in 2013. He had bought out one of the mall carts and gave me everything. That got me wondering how many people still played. I did a google search and found YYE. Since then I’ve played regularly, everyday pretty much.
In 1997.
Pretty sure I threw a wooden toy yoyo before that at some point, but it‘s impossible to say when.
Terraria was my gateway to yoyoing in earnest although I did have a butterfly growing up. I bought my first unresponsive in 2017 but only knew how to bind until I started last Christmas out of boredom at work
Real specific? I remember getting a green butterfly when I was like 3-4? Never learned how to throw it up and down or anything I just know that was my first yoyo like ever. Actually starting to yoyo and learn a couple basic tricks I wanna say 2008-2009. Yo-yoed for maybe several months on and off till 2014ish. Didn’t learn much or practice at all lol, just kinda followed everyone/contests, collected a few CLYWs and stuff here and there. Sold mostly all of it and went to college, now since last year I’m back and more into it than I ever have been, and I don’t see myself stopping I think this time around is for life haha. There’s my story literally no one asked for
In the early 90’s, my dad had a Butterfly and showed me how to do some of the basic tricks like walk the dog and rock the baby.
I discovered modern yoyoing in the Summer of 2019 through r/Throwers. I saw the One Drop documentary posted and having known about OD from playing Terraria I was intrigued. I sat and watched the entire video and felt like this was something I had to try for myself. Ordered a Sage and that’s where my journey really began.
Here I am, 4 years later, still playing every day.
1992 in the Navy in San Diego California, I was having lunch in an art area of town at a soda and hamburger place in the Hillcrest community. The waiter was playing with an SB2 yo-yo doing double or nothing. It was the moment I was bitten by the yo-yo bug. It is an amazing journey.
Early/Mid 90s to mid 2000s then came back 2016 ish and have been enjoying yoyo ever since. More so since 2021 when i learned to bind a yo-yo and it wasn’t just fixed axle and responsive play.
In the 90s my dad had a roadster he played with I had a few cheap yo-yos i played with and a raider. It was good times. I got a proper career in the mid 2000s and just got too busy and also had a falling out with my dad at the time. Left my home town and all the material things and family I had behind and moved on.
I think what brought me back to yoyo was finding one after my dad died at a kite shop in ocean city. My wife convinced me to buy it if I wanted it. It was a Raider like I had in the 90s. That same Raider brought me to the forums when my son broke it and I was looking to see if it could be repaired. I’ve now got a Raider from the bst here that’s similar to what I started with. Full circle.
I also have a roadster I got off the bst here recently that now lives next to my dads ashes which are in a nice handmade box on a shelf in my office.
Duncan showed up to our elementary school for a demonstration back in the early/mid 90s. I think I was in 3rd grade? We were all so enamored and had to have a yoyo!
Of course, I road my bike home that day and said “I need yoyo money!” My frugal father had other plans, though. He gifted me his old purple Duncan Imperial from his childhood, and that was the beginning.
Next day at school, everyone had a yoyo! We spent every recess learning new tricks out of booklets from string packets and anywhere else we could find 'em. It was recently recanted to me by a longtime friend that I was apparently the trick tutor to most of my peers (I surely don’t recall this myself).
Didn’t take long before I was saving my lawn mowning moneys for trips to the local science shop in Downtown Melbourne to acquire more yoyos. Most memorably was my first ball bearing yoyo, the Spintastics Terminator Tornado. I definitely felt like one of the coolest kids in school with that throw.
Unfortunately, Dad’s old imperial was lost to time. Don’t remember if it was lost, broken, or given away. However, I do still have that Tornado and even my old X-Brain!
That Tornado got played daily until sometime in Jr. High. Not sure what happened, but one day it landed in a drawer and there it sat for many years. After high school, it got boxed up and moved with me mutliple times.
Fast forward to 2016, I was ready to revisit this beloved past time from my youth. The bearing in that Tornado had morphed into a block of rust, so I picked up a Fireball from Amazon. Deterred by the “high price” of modern yoyos like the Shutter, haha, can you imagine? I used that Fireball daily to replace my smoking habit. After 16 years of cigarette addiction, and several previously failed attempts at quitting, yoyo broke the cycle.
A few more years later and it was 2020, yoyo boom 2 electric plague-a-loo was in full swing! I finally gave in to the allure of the modern unresponsive and picked up a Recess Snack from the A2Z Science Center.
Next thing I knew I was learning new tricks, picking up all sorts of different shapes of yoyos made in different materials, and getting involved in the community. It was all such a rush! The community quickly became incredibly important for me, as I was finally abandoning my barfly lifestyle. The pandemic shutdown made it easy to quit going out 5+ nights a week, but I hadn’t been prepared to lose the majority of my “friend” circle when I quit drinking nightly. Fortunately, yoyo was there for me again!
About a year or so after picking up the Snack, I was invited to help QC a Mk1 Yoyos production run: the Contact. Mark invited my wife and I into his home and taught us the ways of the boutique yoyo business! We had such a blast inspecting and packaging those yoyos. The whole drive home, all we could talk about was how much we enjoyed the experience. I immediately dug into his design tutroials and started researching as many resources as I could gather.
Then in 2022, we launched Turner Return Tops! And now, another year later, we are preparing our 3rd production release. Funneling our profits into the community to sponsor events and organize our local yoyo club, alongside building our team of sponsored players have both been so fulfilling. Everytime I get a message from someone telling me how much they enjoy our yoyos I feel validation, accomplishment, and so much joy!
We couldn’t have done it without YOU, the wonderful yoyo community. And I absolutely would not be the human I am today without yoyo. Thank you everyone. Thank you for your friendship, support, kindness, and shared love of this grand hobby!!!
Got a Green Duncan Butterfly in 1988.
Got back into Yoyoing as a Hobby in 2009. Fell off in 2011.
Came back recently in November 2022.
Born in ‘89, remember a green Imperial from when I was very little. Had yoyos as a kid until the end of the yoyo boom, last yoyo I had was a Duncan Bumblebee sometime between middle school and highschool, probably around 2004.
Got back into yoyoing during the pandemic, around December 2020. I had a thought of “i kinda want a yoyo”, and started watching youtube videos lol. Was given a Yoyoking Double Agent for Christmas from my little brother, and I knew at first throw I’d be yoyoing for a very long time.
I assumed 95-2004 would be the most popular during the yoyo boom. I spent hours playing with my Yomegas Saber Wing when I was in 4th grade around 1999. I was talking to a friend from elementary school recently and he reminded me about the time our music class teacher took a yoyo off one of our friends and stomped on it because he was so fed up with yoyos at school 
I’m pretty sure each choice includes at least one significant boom/fad/resurgence with possible exception of 1975 -1984.
A particular boom may seem more popular based on whose part of forum.
True I more so mean that. I’m basing it off a reddit poll someone did awhile back asking what age everyone was and 27-35 range was the most common. I imagine a lot of the people from prior booms of the past aren’t posting on here. I wonder what yoyo boom was the biggest ever?
I started more or less 10 years ago, I broke my leg rollerblading, while I was at home with nothing to do a friend of mine come to visit and randomly showed me a video of Hiroyuki Suzuki at Worlds (which I never understood how he found it being a non yoyoer and generally non interested in those things), he told me that maybe while my leg was broken I can mess around with it to pass the time, I did really enjoyed the video so I wanted to give it a go to mess around and have fun while with the cast and at home.
I had another friend called Fabio that for mysterious reasons was full of responsive yoyos at home (probably from when he was younger), he dig in his stuff to find them and so we started together.
I noticed from the first day that with a responsive yoyo from the supermarket was impossible to do those tricks (and also well, being at Suzuki level after one day of responsive yoyoing lol), so I went online and found the Italian yoyo forum, in the forum there was a guy from my same city (he sadly stopped to play he was so good) and we start to meet every other day, my friend Fabio get frustrated quickly and stopped, I bought my first yoyo the Velocity from Yoyofactory and from there I started and never stopped.
Fast forward to last November (if I remember well) I decided to take it up a notch and go out from my bedroom and start to do videos and be more active in the scene and here I am.
I’m guessing I got my first yo-yo in 1979 at the age of 8. It was either a Glow Imperial or I’m pretty sure it was a Duncan Wheels
That one is lost to time but I kept my Glow Imperial until I joined the Army in 92. Didn’t play again until a friend bought me a Stinger in maybe 99. I threw it occasionally and got motivated to buy a Fireball (also long gone). At that point (03-04) I had 3 kids and life took over and yo-yo disappeared from my life until the beginning of this year 2023. I ran across my Stinger which made me want to replace my Glow Imperial, which I did. That opened the flood gates and I made quite a few purchases looking for what I really liked. I now have a modest collection of maybe 25-30. I never knew anyone else who yo-yo’d so I never went much beyond loops, around the world, surely had never done a bind before. But I loved, loved, loved it every time I played yo-yo. And I’ve been love, love, loving it this whole year so far. I’m actually doing much better with unresponsive but it took a minute as responsive was just etched into my mindset on what yo-yo was. I’ve for the most part stopped trying to tug my unresponsives back (it still happens though). I’m not advancing through the tricks very quickly but I am advancing with help from this community and it has brought great satisfaction back into my life. I’ve found this community to be a bastion of sanity in an otherwise out of control world and I’m grateful for all of you. 
I played with yo-yos as a kid in the 80s, but never very seriously. I came back to them around 2011 and kept one near my desk as a fidget for when I was on conference calls and such. I didn’t start taking the hobby seriously until around mid-2022.
Origin stories are cute. Imma share mine again! I saw shu on agt looping and flipping around the stage and thought, “yo that’s sick.” A month or two later, like November 2022, I randomly bought a butterfly xt at target. It was only 5$ so not the worst loss if I didn’t enjoy it. I did and have played everyday since! It feels like a coincidence that I happened to find and fall in love with this hobby.
I’ve told my story before (intro post) but here it is again more detail. Yes this will be my longest post ever.
First Contact Circa 1970?):
Someone at school had yo-yo. Had to get one. Collected all my money and asked my mom to take me to Gray Drugs to buy one. Yellow Imperial (Research says it was $1.29) Remember playing primarily before school and recess. Future fad like 2-3 years later picked up a Butterfly.
Return (2019):
During work lunch break went to Ollie’s Store saw a Duncan Limelite for $3. Bought it. Read package and realized that Duncan HQ was like 1/2 hour from my house since like 1965.
Got on internet which we didn’t have as a kid and stumbled on WYYC being in Cleveland (1 hour from my house). Thought that would be interesting. My roommates from college always look for “crazy” reasons to get together about that time each year. Like this year we went to the Bigfoot festival. Year before the Goetta Festival and see Brit Floyd in Cincinnati, etc., etc. I pitched the idea to them.
They were not interested but my girlfriend and I went and had a blast. Learned a lot.
Met some really cool people. First person I met was Bryan Jardin.
At Guiness WR attempt, asked a stranger about yo-yos - how much do spend on yoyo?, what do you throw?, why that model? His reply was a MarkMont because I asked Mark Montgomery. I’m still laughing. Kinda felt like I asked Michael Jordan what kind of shoes does he wear?
I have found my imperial, butterfly. Also two fireballs and a BC which I can’t remember buying.
Had a heart attack (2021) and realize this Yo-Yo thing might be a hobby I can transition into as I become less capable for some other stuff I enjoy in my free time.
Here I am.
Gosh - for me is started in the 90’s
I remember having a Yomega Fireball and just having the time of my life on the playground. Teaching each other tricks, sleeper contests. Just exactly what you would imagine in the 90’s.
I was really into it- learned tons of tricks from my dad and friends. But just kinda faded as things do.
A few years ago my daughter brought a Duncan home from school I messed around with and wondered what Yo-up’s are up to now.
My mind was blown. I bought a “starter” kit from yo-yo factory and then a shutter and just started learning everything I can.
It’s such a wholesome hobby with an absolutely amazing community, and it all takes me back to my childhood so much.