The Stories
Flores of Vintar, 1929
Born in 1896—or was it 1893, or 1899?—this charismatic yet enigmatic man who immigrated from the Philippines to the United States launched a jazz-age craze that became one of America’s most enduring and best-loved toys: the yo-yo.
Pedro Flores was at various times a worker in a hotel, a hospital, and a cannery. Those were steps up from his start in America as a contract plantation worker in Hawaii. After his yo-yo company became successful, he owned several flashy cars yet never learned how to drive. He loved to cook and was excellent at it, and favored exquisitely tailored suits. At the same time he had an easy, jocular manner that drew people to him. Rumored to have lost a fortune in the stock market crash of 1929, he was nevertheless a lifelong investor with a healthy stock portfolio, at least until the end of his life. He always had a donation for the Salvation Army collection bucket in thanks for the coffee and donut they once gave him during the Great Depression.
Who was this man who owned and ran the first-ever yo-yo company in America? What happened to him? And why was he all but forgotten?
Joe Radovan, 1933
A native of Quezon province who dazzled with his smile and charm, he arrived in America just as the Great Depression overtook the country. He too knocked around in odd jobs until he answered an ad for Duncan Yo-Yo Company demonstrators and the adventure took him around the country and around the world to countries like England, France, and Brazil, among many.
Vital, with a genuine fondness for children and a nomadic streak that may have surprised even himself, Joe Radovan was, as his son called him, “a kingpin of the neighborhood.” He helped several relatives from his hometown in the Philippines immigrate to America and attend college. He drove around the backwaters of a pre-Civil Rights deep South selling yo-yos anywhere there were kids to buy them, and sidestepped the “white” or “colored” door at restaurants and hotels by grilling his own meals on the road. For all his bonhomie, there was tenacity, pride and grit in his personality that surfaced when Royal Tops was sued—by Duncan Yo-Yo Company.
Why did Radovan quit the regularity of Duncan’s employ deep in the middle of the Great Depression and start his own yo-yo business, Royal Tops? Why, when he mostly sold yo-yos, did he name his company after the other toy he sold? How did he and Flores cross paths, and for how long?