Yo-Yo Club Returns to Bucktown-Wicker Park

A group of yo-yo fanatics with its roots in a Bucktown game shop will return to the neighborhood this Saturday.

The Chicago Yo-Yo Club will be moving its monthly meetings to the Bucktown-Wicker Park Library starting on Jan. 26. The group, which got its start at Bucktown's Cat & Mouse Game Store in November 2010, has been holding meetings at locations all over the city since outgrowing the store's space last August. Club founder James Buffington hopes the library will serve as a more permanent meeting space for the group.

"We met once over in Chinatown, we met once at Logan Records," Buffington said. "Just kind of different spots for a few months before we found a good new spot to book meetings at."

Buffington said he first checked out Cat & Mouse in October 2010 and brought up the concept of starting a yo-yo club for the city in a conversation with the owner, who was enthusiastic about the idea.

"A lot of cities around the country have yo-yo clubs where the people from their areas can kind of meet and get a team together, and it's something that Chicago was missing for a number of years," Buffingotn said. "So once I found Cat & Mouse originally, it just seemed like a perfect way to kind of start up a club here."

Meeting attendance varies from one month to another, but Buffington said the count usually averages at about 25 members, with larger meetings getting up into the high 30s.

"We have people from all over the state, and also we have some people from Wisconsin who come down each month," Buffington said.

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A typical meeting primarily involves members getting together, talking and just hanging out. Members will often teach one another new tricks in between all the social mingling, and Buffington said the meetings usually end with a couple of friendly competitions.

Members are invited to perform a one-minute routine of yo-yo tricks set to music, and there is usually a "sleeper contest" to see who can keep a yo-yo spinning the longest.

"It's usually just for bragging rights," Buffington said. "We do have a little made-up championship belt that we take a photo of the winner with, and I'll usually post that on our (Facebook page) just to show that they have the bragging rights for the month."

Buffington said that many of the club's members have competed in regional, state and national championships in the past, and that some have even placed in the top five in worldwide contests.

Some of them are even world record holders. Buffington himself set a world record in 2011 by creating the world's longest usable yo-yo string. He constructed a yo-yo with a string measuring 39 feet, 9 3/16 inches and demonstrated it by throwing it off the roof of a building and having it return to his hand.

The Chicago Yo-Yo Club will meet at the Bucktown-Wicker Park Library, 1701 N. Milwaukee Ave., from 2 to 5 p.m. on Jan. 26. The meeting is free and open to anybody who wants to attend.