Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Yo-Yos, Sandboxes, and Encores

Summary

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Decoder Ring | Mailbag: Yo-Yos, Sandboxes, and Encores

Podcast: Slow Burn
Air Date: December 17, 2025
Host: Willa Paskin
Producers/Contributors: Katie Shepherd, Evan Chung, Max Friedman, Alexandra Lang
Main Theme: Listener mailbag episode exploring curious cultural phenomena: the rise of yo-yo assemblies in schools, the history of sandboxes, and the evolution of the concert encore.

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Episode Overview

In this lively and nostalgic mailbag edition of Decoder Ring, Willa Paskin and the team decode three listener-submitted cultural mysteries:

1. The Yo-Yo Assembly Craze: Why did mysterious yo-yo masters tour American schools in the 1990s, whipping kids into a yo-yo-buying frenzy?
2. The Rise (and Decline) of the Sandbox: How did corralling kids into pits of sand become a standard part of American childhood—and why has it faded?
3. The Modern Encore: Why do encores at concerts feel so perfunctory and staged, and how did this tradition start?

The episode is rich in personal recollections, expert interviews, and archival audio, blending history, economics, and the sociology of play.

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1. The Yo-Yo Assembly Mystery

[03:29–29:28]

Listener Question

Sebastian from Montana remembers a mysterious assembly in elementary school, circa late 1990s, where a charismatic man performed yo-yo tricks, sold yo-yos to every kid, and then vanished. Why did this happen? Was it educational, or just showy salesmanship?

Personal Memories & Simpsons Parallels

• Evan Chung shares: He too experienced the same event at his suburban Chicago school, echoing Sebastian’s account.
• Reference to a 1992 Simpsons episode parodying the phenomenon.

  "This is basically a captive audience sales presentation to the most impressionable group of people you could probably imagine..."
  — Willa Paskin, [06:50]

The Traveling Yo-Yo Man: Real and Ubiquitous

• Evan locates Dazzling Dave (Dave Schulte), a National Yo-Yo Master who’s toured the world performing and selling yo-yos in schools for 25+ years.

  "I've been to Japan, Korea, France, Australia, all over the US doing yo-yo assemblies and demonstrations."
  — Dazzling Dave, [11:09]

The Origins of Yo-Yo Craze

Pedro Flores: The Filipino Pioneer

• Pedro Flores (b. 1896, Philippines) immigrated to the US, popularized the yo-yo through hands-on community demos in the 1920s.

  "He made the yo-yo what it is today."
  — Rob Pena, author “Pedro’s Yo Yos”, [12:27]

• The company was soon bought by Donald Duncan, who industrialized the approach: teams systematically mapped and targeted schools and toy stores.

  "You plot out the city, you know, you plotted all the schools and all the stores. And once you did that, then the next day you'd start."
  — Dale Oliver, former yo-yo salesman, [18:01]

From Sidewalks to School Gymnasiums

• In the 1950s–60s, yo-yo men were banned from school property, so they waited for kids outside.
• By the 1980s: Science centers and regulations changed, and yo-yo assemblies entered the classroom. Tricks were paired with lessons on physics, and assemblies paid for by selling yo-yos.

The 1998 Yo-Yo Boom

• 1998 marked the all-time peak for global yo-yo sales—fueled almost entirely by school assemblies.

  "More yo-yos were sold in 1998 than any other time."
  — Dazzling Dave, [24:37]

The Sales Pitch

• Schools typically chose to waive the presenter’s fee in exchange for letting him sell yo-yos to students.
• About 65% of kids would buy a yo-yo; schools received a cut of the sales.

  "So if it's a school of, you know, 300 kids, you're selling quite a few yo-yos."
  — Dazzling Dave, [26:53]

Ethics and Legacy

• There’s an inherent tension: “Is this education or captive-audience sales?”

• Some schools opt out to avoid highlighting economic inequalities among students.

• A Simpsons teacher voice echoes a real-world concern:

  "I question the educational value of this assembly."
  — Simpsons clip, [27:32]

• Dale Oliver defends: “Well, you're going to turn your TV set off. It's just another avenue…it’s no worse than just seeing a toy commercial on Saturday morning.” [28:14]

• Ultimately, the yo-yo assembly is both a blast of innocent fun and a business scheme—but one with some surprising virtues: skill-building, resilience, and peer mentorship.

  "I just see so much of the benefits of the kids learning how to do it…they've grown, they've learned. They just feel better about themselves."
  — Dazzling Dave, [28:48]

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2. How Did Sandboxes Become a Thing?

[29:28–43:01]

Listener Question

Aileen from Alameda wonders: Why do we buy sand, put it in boxes, and let our kids play in it? Where did sandboxes come from, especially when there’s a beach nearby?

Cultural Universality and Odd Specificity

• Panel reminisces about classic turtle-shaped plastic sandboxes in suburban backyards.

  "There's a turtle-shaped piece of plastic with a weird half lid that never worked. And that's a sandbox."
  — Alexandra Lang, architectural critic, [30:41]

Sandbox Origins: The German “Sand Garden”

• Alexandra Lang traces the sandbox back to c.1850s Germany and the innovations of Frederich Fröbel, inventor of kindergarten ("children's garden").

  "[Fröbel]...came up with a series of toys and blocks and other exercises that teachers could lead students through."
  — Lang, [32:17]

• The first “sand gardens” were open-air installations for play and learning—the sandbox as a “microcosm of the earth.”

  "The sandbox is kind of a microcosm of the earth to teach things about how water flows, how you can build a structure, all of this other stuff."
  — Lang, [33:07]

Expansion and Americanization

• American reformers imported the concept in the 1880s to get kids out of busy streets, sparking the playground movement.

  "The sand gardens kickstart the larger playground movement in America. They are the first move to give kids something to do off the streets."
  — Lang, [36:18]

• From vast sand gardens, the concept narrowed to the more familiar, contained sandbox as playgrounds became standardized.

The Sandbox’s Heyday—and Decline

• Up until the 1970s, the sandbox was a playground staple, especially for younger children.
• Concerns over maintenance, hygiene (rats, cat waste), and lawsuits in the 1970s–80s led to their removal from many public spaces.

  "The issue with sandboxes is not so much physical safety as it is the cost of maintenance. People start becoming worried about...rats nesting in the sandbox, and also toxoplasmosis from cats..."
  — Lang, [38:30]

The Private, Miniaturized Sandbox

• Enter the 1979 Little Tikes Turtle Sandbox: protected by a shell-lid, ubiquitous in backyards.

  "The turtle sandbox was really everywhere, I think, because the turtle shell was a cover."
  — Lang, [39:33]

Social Costs and Virtual Sandboxes

• Private sandboxes restrict spontaneous, multi-age, and cross-neighborhood play inherent to the urban sand garden.

  "When you have a suburban backyard...it's really like limited in its social value and limited in size."
  — Lang, [39:57]

• In today’s world, true communal sandboxes cluster in “designer” playgrounds—sometimes a marker of privilege and investment, as in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

  "The sandbox…has become a kind of status marker."
  — Katie Shepherd, [41:47]

• Parallel migration: from physical sandboxes to digital “sandbox games” like Minecraft—open-ended, creative, and libertarian in spirit.

  "I think it's one of the ironies that as the number of sandboxes in the country has diminished, there has been a rise in those sandbox games."
  — Lang, [42:29]

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3. Why Are Encores a Thing at Concerts?

[43:01–60:20]

Listener Question

Kate from Indianapolis, a live music fan, wonders: Why do bands always perform encores, even when everyone knows it’s part of the script? Isn’t it supposed to be spontaneous?

The Ritual: Scripted Surprise

• The familiar routine: band “ends” show, skips big hits, crowd claps, band predictably returns and plays the hits.
• "It's all pre-planned. Everyone at the show knows this. And yet we go through the motions every time."
  — Willa Paskin, [44:44]

Historical Roots: From Opera to Rock

• 18th-century opera houses: rowdier, freewheeling; audiences demanded repetition of favorite arias by shouting “encore” (French for "again").

  "If they wanted to hear more music, they would ask for it."
  — Brian Wise, journalist/musicologist, [46:28]

• This sometimes disrupted performances; by the 1920s, institutions like the Metropolitan Opera banned encores mid-performance.

Piano Recitals: The Legacy Encore

• At recitals (e.g., Rachmaninoff), performing a signature encore after the program became an institution.

  "Going to a piano recital, people expect a certain number of encores. It's just part of the experience."
  — Brian Wise, [49:32]

The Rock Era: From Spontaneity to Ritual

• In the early days of rock, package tours and tight schedules left no room for encores (cf. “Elvis has left the building,” [50:59]).

• Woodstock (‘69) changed the game—larger crowds, longer sets.

• The shift to arenas and stadium performances after the 1970s: tickets got pricier, shows more spectacular.

• Alice Cooper’s “Billion Dollar Babies” tour (1973) institutionalized the fake ending and the scripted encore:

  “The spontaneous call for encores...got a little bit ritualized because it just seemed like good business....And audiences...knew it was coming, so you didn’t have to work for it anymore.”
  — Michael Walker, music journalist, [55:02]

• Initially some resistance (Rolling Stones, The Who), but soon, encores became inescapable:

  "It became a tradition. And at this point, nobody really wants to break that tradition. Because you don't want to piss the audience off, especially if they paid all this money."
  — Michael Walker, [55:52]

Today: Cliché, Subversion, and Reinvention

• In recent years, some artists refuse to play encores, explicitly telling audiences it’s “stupid and fake.”

• Yet most bands stick to the ritual—out of nostalgia, showmanship, or the practical need for a “pee break”.

  "There is something fun about it. It's not like encores are all bad. … it is fun to have a moment and then get a little bit more music."
  — Willa Paskin, [58:25]

• Surprise or authenticity: Lady Gaga’s “Mayhem Ball” ends with her taking off makeup and clothes backstage while singing—creating a more intimate, behind-the-scenes feel.

  "She's sort of singing the song as Stephanie instead of Gaga, and that is a really, really incredible way for that show to end."
  — Kate, listener, [60:08]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• [06:50] Willa Paskin: “This is basically a captive audience sales presentation to the most impressionable group of people you could probably imagine…”
• [24:37] Dazzling Dave: “Yes, 1998 was the height of the yo-yo boom. Across the world, more yo-yos were sold in 1998 than any other time.”
• [33:07] Alexandra Lang: “The sandbox is kind of a microcosm of the earth to teach things about how water flows, how you can build a structure, all of this other stuff.”
• [39:33] Alexandra Lang: "The turtle sandbox was really everywhere, I think, because the turtle shell was a cover."
• [55:02] Michael Walker: “The spontaneous call for encores when you got into stadiums got a little bit ritualized because it just seemed like good business.”
• [58:25] Willa Paskin: “There is something fun about it. It's not like encores are all bad… it is fun to have a moment and then get a little bit more music.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps | |------------------------------------------|---------------| | Yo-Yo Assembly Mystery | 03:29–29:28 | | History of the Sandbox | 29:28–43:01 | | The Modern Concert Encore | 43:01–60:20 |

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Tone and Style

The episode is nostalgic, inquisitive, and playful, mixing personal recollection with critical analysis and historical research. Guests and hosts express genuine curiosity and a fond, sometimes bemused, wonder for these quirky cultural institutions.

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Conclusion

With wit and warmth, Decoder Ring peels back the sometimes strange, sometimes commercial, sometimes nearly magical layers of familiar American childhood and entertainment experiences—revealing the tides of commerce, social innovation, and cultural tradition that shape our everyday fun.

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Transcript

[Willa Paskin]

With its two juicy beef patties, three slices of melted cheese and tangy Big Arch sauce. The Big Arch is what happens when you start making a McDonald's burger and never stop. The Big Arch, the most McDonald's McDonald's

[Katie Shepherd]

burger yet for a limited time.

[Evan Chung]

With almost half a million customers and over a trillion dollars of secure payments, Bill isn't new to intelligent finance. It's the proven way to simplify bill pay and maximize cash flow. Want to learn more? Visit bill.comproven for a special

[Katie Shepherd]

hi, it's Willa and I have a request which is that you really listen to what I'm about to say. I have a pitch for you. It's not an advertisement though. It's something more important to the long term health and survival of Dakota Ring than that you may or may not be aware. But the kind of show that we make or that we strive to make, one that is reported and researched and polished and belabored and obsessed over until hopefully the whole thing gets so good that it achieves a kind of liftoff and you don't even know how hard we worked on it. And it all just seems easy and fun and buoyant and engaging. Well, that kind of show is becoming a rarer and rarer thing in the world of podcasts. And for us to be able to keep doing it just straight up, we need your help. If you enjoy decodering, if you get something out of it, if you've learned something, if you've laughed, if you've thought something new, if you've gotten a fun fact to share at a party, I am asking for you to sign up for Slate plus through the end of the year. We are running a 50% off special on slate plus membership. To get that enormous discount, all you have to do is go to slate.com decoder/ and at checkout enter the code decoder50. It will give you access to a full year of Slate's content for just $59, which is less than $3 per episode of Decoder Ring. And that's not all our exclusive Slate plus content, which we've been running all year and we're going to continue to stuff that includes extra interviews, segments and mailbag questions. And a Slate plus membership gets you more than just access to Decoder Ring. You get ad free listening and access to plus content across all Slate podcasts. You get unlimited reading on Slate.com and the Slate app. You get every Slate game and you will be supporting Slate's independent journalism at a time when it independent journalists, Slate and we here at Decoder Ring could really use your help. As you will hear in this episode, we could not make decodering without our listeners. We get so much from you guys, and we work really hard to give you back something good in return. Please consider joining Slate plus to help us keep doing that again. Slate plus is 50% off through the end of the year. All you have to do is go to slate.com decoder+ and enter decoder50 at checkout. I thank you in advance. Please enjoy the show. One day, when our listener, Sebastian Madenze, was about nine years old, he and his classmates were called into an assembly that he's been wondering about ever since.

[Willa Paskin]

I don't think we'd had much intimation of this being on the horizon. It just kind of happened one day.

[Katie Shepherd]

This is around the turn of the millennium at a Catholic grade school in Billings, Montana.

[Willa Paskin]

So they bring us into the gym, which is where we typically have assemblies. I mean, it was a Catholic school, so I think we would have sometimes kind of conduct assemblies where they would just talk to us about how to behave in a Christlike manner.

[Katie Shepherd]

But immediately it became clear that this was not that kind of assembly. There was a man in the gym Sebastian had never seen before.

[Willa Paskin]

This upbeat white guy. I don't think he had, like, a fancy outfit or anything.

[Katie Shepherd]

But what he did have next to him on the gym floor was a table full of yo yos.

[Willa Paskin]

And he just goes at it and pumps us up for the yo yo lifestyle. He gave us this demonstration where he's, like, doing all these cool yo yo tricks and trying to make us think that yo yos are the new hotness.

[Katie Shepherd]

So, like, he comes out, he's, like, walking the dog. Like, he's just, like, doing cool yo yo tricks.

[Willa Paskin]

Yes, like, very advanced yo yo tricks. Like talking about how we could do the same tricks if we are willing to take the leap.

[Katie Shepherd]

Were you guys, like, agog?

[Willa Paskin]

Like, I think so, yeah. We definitely wanted to be a part of this and devote our lives to yo Yoshi. And after he's done, they have the yo yos for us to purchase.

[Katie Shepherd]

There were all sorts of yo yos to choose from. Basic yo yos in a wide array of colors, more expensive, professional grade yo yos Iridescent green Yo yos light up yo yos. And the kids lined up to buy them.

[Willa Paskin]

As I recall, everybody got a yo yo.

[Katie Shepherd]

What did your yo yo look like?

[Willa Paskin]

I want to say I got the glow in the dark one. And I think we normally would not have Been allowed to have a toy like this on the playground, But I think they gave us special permission. We might have even had permission to bring them, like, into class with us if we were, you know, not disruptive. Like, the school was making a lot of concessions to the yo yo man.

[Katie Shepherd]

How much did you guys play with the Yo Yos?

[Willa Paskin]

I mean, that was like. All we did was, like, try to replicate the demonstration that the man had done because he made it look so easy. He was such a natural.

[Katie Shepherd]

But try as they might, the kids could not approach the yo yo mastery of the yo yo master. And after that initial frenzy, the toy began to disappear from the playground.

[Willa Paskin]

Probably after a week, we all started leaving our Yo Yos at home, and the whole thing was quickly forgotten. I remember mine being maybe in my bedside table drawer for a long time, Just kind of sitting there as a memento of that glorious week.

[Katie Shepherd]

But as the years have passed, Sebastian has begun to see that week through adult eyes and to wonder what the heck was going on with the yo yo salesman.

[Willa Paskin]

Because I don't recall other demonstrations of this sort where somebody came to our school, got us out of class, did a demonstration of their product, and then we all purchased the product from that person. So, yeah, I'm like, why Yo Yoshi?

[Katie Shepherd]

It's very. It's sort of like the music man. It's like very traveling salesman with this guy's like, I have a briefcase full of Yo Yos. I'm going to the school.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah. This is basically a captive audience sales presentation to the most impressionable group of people you could probably imagine, because it was so odd. It was so out of the blue, like, this. This guy steps into your life, shows you the wonder of Yo Yoshi recedes back into the shadows, and you're left wondering for 25 years the meaning of it all. Who was that yo yo man?

[Katie Shepherd]

This is decoder ring. I'm Willa Paskin, and we're back with another listener, mailbag. We are so lucky to get so many great questions from you, the people that listen to this show. And today we're spelunking into three of them. We're starting with the mystery of yo yo assemblies. And actually just take a second right now to try and guess when in the last century yo yo sales were at their peak. Okay, Remember that. It'll pay off later. We're also exploring how and why it became totally normal to plop children down in a playpen of beach dirt. Or in other words, where do sandboxes come from? And finally, why do all rock concerts end with that little bit of theater known as the encore? So today on Decoder Ring, thanks to our listeners, some mailbag mysteries. Sebastian has pored over his memory of the mysterious yo yo man coming to his school and wondered why he was there. Was it supposed to be educational? Was the school getting a cut? Was this some weird thing unique to his Billings, Montana Catholic school? For what it's worth, I had never encountered this yo yo thing. No yo yo assemblies ever rolled into any of my schools. But Decoder Ring supervising producer Evan Chung assured me that Sebastian was not alone in his experience.

[Evan Chung]

Yes, because it happened to me, too. We had a Yo yo assembly come to my public school in suburban Chicago. This would have been in the mid-90s, probably just a few years before Sebastian's. And I remember it going down pretty much the same way that he does. The only difference being that I don't think it ended so much because we lost interest. It was that the Yo Yos became so distracting that they eventually banned them from school property. And I can name at least one other school where this same thing happened. Kids, this is a Yo Yo Springfield elementary.

[Willa Paskin]

Kinda though, huh? Not much competition for a video game. Or is it? Presenting the Twirl King champions.

[Evan Chung]

This is from a classic Simpsons episode from 1992, where a yo yo assembly comes to the school and wows all the kids.

[Willa Paskin]

Those guys must be millionaires. How big they get? All kinds of girls.

[Evan Chung]

And just like at Sebastian school, every kid ends up buying a Yo Yo.

[Willa Paskin]

How much do those Yo Yos cost? I don't care.

[Evan Chung]

This suggested that the strange appearances that Sebastian and I experienced in childhood were not isolated incidents. I wanted to know who exactly these mysterious Yo Yoers popping in and out of schools were. And I found one.

[Willa Paskin]

Remember, everybody, crisscross applesauce. The kid behind you wants to see, too.

[Evan Chung]

This is Dave Schulte, better known as Dazzling Dave.

[Willa Paskin]

And I'm here today to talk about these. Right here. What are these called? Yo Yo. That's right. These are Yo Yos.

[Evan Chung]

We met up with Dazzling Dave at an elementary school in Minneapolis, where he opened with a freestyle routine of yo yo tricks.

[Willa Paskin]

And now, here is the DNA. You've seen one Yoyo guide, but we're not done. Now's the time for two.

[Evan Chung]

Dave is a national Yoyo master and an inductee into the Yo yo hall of Fame, and he's traveled the world showing off his skills.

[Willa Paskin]

Well, I've been to Japan, Korea, France, Australia, all over the US Doing yo

[Evan Chung]

yo assemblies and demonstrations. Has been his full time job for over 25 years. When we caught up with them, it was already his third show.

[Willa Paskin]

That day it's run from one show to the next show to the next show. It's great. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Evan Chung]

This wasn't the life Dave had planned for. He was a middle school teacher who entered yo yo competitions on the side. He even took first place at the world championships one year. And then in 1998, he got a call from a Yo yo company in

[Willa Paskin]

Honolulu asking me if I would be interested in leaving my teaching job to become a Yo yo professional.

[Evan Chung]

A Yo yo professional. You may never have known such a thing existed, but the roots of the profession go back a century to the moment America first fell in love with the yo yo, which is thanks in large part to a mostly forgotten figure named Pedro Flores.

[Willa Paskin]

I never knew who Pedro Flores was, and as I would talk with other people, even in the Philippines, nobody had heard about him.

[Evan Chung]

Rob Pena is the author of a children's biography called Pedro's Yo Yos, which he was inspired to write once he realized how important Flores was.

[Willa Paskin]

Maybe he didn't invent the yo yo, but he made the yo yo what it is today.

[Evan Chung]

Pedro Flores was born in the Philippines in 1896, shortly before the US took over as colonial rulers. Over 100,000 Filipinos migrated to America over the next couple decades, and Pedro was one of them. He worked a lot of jobs in a lot of places. Sugar plantations in Hawaii, aboard ships up and down the West Coast. He tried studying law for a while, but he was back to doing odd jobs in California when he made his mark on the world. There's a lot of competing lore about how it happened exactly, but here's one version of the story. In the 1920s, Pedro was working as a hotel bellhop and lodging in the home of a white family.

[Willa Paskin]

He was renting a place in the basement and the landlord's son wanted to play ball.

[Evan Chung]

But it didn't take long for Pedro to get a little bored with playing catch.

[Willa Paskin]

And he thought, well, I can come up with a better toy.

[Evan Chung]

And he had a specific toy from his childhood in a top that spun up and down on a string. This kind of toy is actually very old. The first version probably originated in China a couple thousand years ago. The ancient Athenians called it the disk. To 18th century French aristocrats, it was an incroyable. The Duke of Wellington knew it as the Bandalore and was reportedly an enthusiastic. But in the US these toys had never made much of an impact. And so Pedro thought he'd introduce his American landlord son to what the kids back in the Philippines called a yo Yo Pedro.

[Willa Paskin]

Carved by hand a yo yo in the basement of the home he was staying as a boarder. He twisted the twine and set it up in such a way that it would not only come back to you, but you could start making up tricks.

[Evan Chung]

Pedro showed off his creation and what it could do to his landlord's son, who showed it to his parents and friends and neighbors.

[Willa Paskin]

It was different. It was unique. And so they were fascinated.

[Evan Chung]

Word spread around town, and soon Pedro found himself hand carving dozens of yo Yos.

[Willa Paskin]

As demand continued to grow, he was able to get capital to open up a factory.

[Evan Chung]

And he realized quickly how to sell the wooden yo yos now pouring out of that factory. He had seen how people reacted when he yo yoed in front of them. He understood that a piece of wood with some string sitting on a shelf doesn't sell itself. Kids needed to see a yo yo in action.

[Willa Paskin]

So Pedro would demonstrate one on one or in groups in front of stores, street corners, stages, anywhere you could gather people.

[Evan Chung]

And soon, Pedro wasn't doing it alone.

[Willa Paskin]

And this is my version of the slingshot. There you are.

[Evan Chung]

This is a 1970 film of Nemo Concepcion, one of several Filipino men Pedro hired in the 20s and 30s to demonstrate yo yo tricks and teach kids how to do them.

[Willa Paskin]

How do you know which fingers to put it through? Look. 1, 2, 3, 4. There. Then before it goes down and before it dies out, you got to catch it. Do you go from this, this one onto the Peaky? Yeah. Oh, she go like that. Yeah, that's. You'll get it. Don't worry. That marketing involved interacting constantly with people. Pedro took what could have been a solitary toy, and he made it a social phenomenon.

[Evan Chung]

When Pedro's demonstrators would schedule an appearance, the newspapers would trumpet their arrival, emphasizing the exotic nature of their new Filipino toy. And across the late 20s and early 30s, they helped set off a yo yo craze.

[Willa Paskin]

And some of them became almost like celebrities. It's. It's astonishing how it just took off. Oh, yo yo my yo yo.

[Katie Shepherd]

You know I'm cuckoo as a cuckoo clown.

[Evan Chung]

Within a few years, Pedro Flores sold off his company and his trademark to a white businessman and inventor named Donald Duncan. Duncan really knew how to work the publicity machine. Over the next few decades, he transformed the yo yo from an exotic depression era fad to an all American toy every kid should have. And he did it by taking the marketing strategy that Pedro had already established and systematizing it.

[Willa Paskin]

The whole idea is to teach kids how to yo yo.

[Evan Chung]

Dale oliver was hired as a traveling Duncan yo yo demonstrator in 1957.

[Willa Paskin]

Because the best yo yo salesman in the world is a kid that knows how to yo yo because he's going to go show his friends, and all of his friends are going to want to do it, too. Well, if that kid can do it, I can do it, you know? There you have it. Duncan marketing in a nutshell.

[Evan Chung]

Dale was just 11 years old when one of pedro flores, original filipino yo yo men, rolled into his hometown of kansas city in the early 50s. By the time he was 17, he was good enough at yo yoing to hit the road himself. He and his crew chief were one of several sales teams Duncan employed, each with their own territories. When they pulled into a city like detroit or baton rouge or poughkeepsie, they would plan to spend two months there. They'd find a place to live, visit the local toy stores and wholesalers, and then they'd get a map.

[Willa Paskin]

You plot out the city, you know, you plotted all the schools and all the stores. And once you did that, then the next day you'd start.

[Evan Chung]

They plotted the schools and the toy stores because in order to sell yo yos to kids, you gotta know where the kids are. They'd post up in the most likely spots to intercept them on their way to school.

[Willa Paskin]

In the morning, you have to go find a spot on the sidewalk Where a lot of kid traffic came by.

[Evan Chung]

And if a kid happens, you see a kid walking down the street, what do you do?

[Willa Paskin]

You just start yo yoing, you know, walk the dog, rock the baby, make a star. So they're going to stop and look at you, and then you can talk to them. So I'm telling kids after school, I'm going to be at so and so at 3:30 or 4:45. Well, I can't yo yo. You don't have to. You get free lessons, and you can win a free yo yo.

[Evan Chung]

After school, the kids would catch up with dale at a nearby toy shop or five and dime store for what they called yo yo contests. But really, they were a chance to teach kids some basic tricks and get them hooked so they could go off and get their friends hooked.

[Willa Paskin]

That was the secret. We know that the kids we taught would go back into school, and the whole 400, 500 kids at that school would see them.

[Evan Chung]

But you know what the kids wouldn't see at school? A yo yo assembly in the 1950s, Dale and his peers were not welcome on school grounds, which is why he had to sneak in every day at recess.

[Willa Paskin]

And I would just walk out onto the playground, you know, playing yo yo. And the kids would see me and. And the teachers would run to the school to call the cops because there was some weirdo on our playground. I think probably every place we went, they called the police, but we were gone by the time they got there.

[Evan Chung]

So how did all this change? How did the yo yo professional go from Persona non grata to invited guest? Well, first, Yo Yos had to go back. Bust Duncan's traveling sales techniques worked until the early 1960s, but then the company decided to shift its marketing strategy toward television.

[Willa Paskin]

I'll tell you what we do. We're going to run down the 10 basic tricks, and we start off by demonstrating. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, this Saturday morning on the Duncan school of yo yo the spinner. Television was very powerful. Basically, the only thing we had to do was to show up at the contest spots.

[Evan Chung]

Dale no longer had to sneak onto playgrounds so much to attract kids. When he held a contest, a crowd of 200 might now show up because they'd heard it was happening on tv. But this did not prove to be the blessing that it seemed. Facing a mob of children crammed into one store.

[Willa Paskin]

How much teaching do you think went on? All you could do was put on a show, but when there was 10 kids, you could go individually to each and every one.

[Evan Chung]

The whole one on one interaction that Pedro Flores had built. The American yo yo craze around back in the twenties had disappeared in the age of tv.

[Willa Paskin]

So as a result, there were very few kids that learned how to Yo Yo. What's the best yo yo salesman in the world? A kid that knows how to Yo Yo.

[Evan Chung]

Now, when the Duncan demonstrators came back to a town after a year, they found fewer and fewer kids who had stuck with the yo yo sales began to plummet. In 1965, the bottom finally dropped out.

[Willa Paskin]

Dunkin yo yo went bankrupt.

[Evan Chung]

The Dunkin brand would eventually be purchased by another company. But the golden era of yo yo demonstrators crisscrossing the country, stirring up yo yo crazes in town after town was over. We are talking about Yo Yos here, though, and what goes down must come up. And when they did come up higher than ever before, it happened inside schools. Flash forward to 1989. Dale Oliver is now living in Seattle, paying his bills, primarily in the restaurant business, but still as devoted to the yo yo as ever.

[Willa Paskin]

And the Pacific Science center called me and said, every year we do a kids program during the Christmas break, and this year, we're doing things that spin says, could you do a show reasonably well connected with science? And I said, yeah, I can do that.

[Evan Chung]

Dale put together a show full of dazzling yo yo tricks that also included physics lessons on gyroscopic stability, rotational inertia, and friction. And when he performed it at the science center, everyone ate it up.

[Willa Paskin]

And I said, school program.

[Evan Chung]

And so soon after, Dale began advertising to schools his brand new yo yo assembly for hire.

[Willa Paskin]

So was born. The science of spin.

[Evan Chung]

What was your pitch to them? How would you convince them it was a good idea to have you, you know, taking kids away from classes to do this?

[Willa Paskin]

Well, you teach these lessons in your fourth and fifth grade anyway, and it will stick with the kids far better than what you try to teach them in the class. So it just fit. It was perfect. And a lot of schools thought so too.

[Evan Chung]

The way it worked is that he would offer schools a choice for how to pay for the assembly.

[Willa Paskin]

You say, well, the cost is $800. Unless you sell the Yo Yos for a week after we leave, then it's free. So what percentage of the schools do you think took the sell the Yo Yo's option? 98%.

[Evan Chung]

Over the course of the 90s, Dale spun the science of spin into a popular and lucrative business. And he wasn't the only one who saw the potential in this pricing scheme. There were several yo yo assembly programs competing with each other for time in schools across the country throughout the decade. Some purported to be based around science lessons, while others were more motivational, like the Ned show or team high performance. That's the one that dazzling Dave Schulte was first recruited into.

[Willa Paskin]

And we would have a message behind our yo yo fun called Dream Dare do to set goals that would be your dreaming and then dare, you know, get over obstacles and avoid all the pitfalls in life and to then finally achieve your goals and do so Dream, dare, and do.

[Evan Chung]

Dave was hired to do this in 1998, meaning it was right around the time when our listener Sebastian remembers the yo yo man coming to his school, which Dave says checks out, because believe it or not, that was the moment of peak yo yo.

[Willa Paskin]

Yes, 1998 was the height of the yo yo boom. Across the world, more Yo Yos were sold in 1998 than any other time.

[Katie Shepherd]

Yo you want to ride the string?

[Willa Paskin]

Yo yo yo this thing yo Mega and everywhere. I swear, every school in 1998 had a yo yo demonstrator so the yo

[Evan Chung]

yo's greatest moment came not during the depression, not in the Eisenhower administration, but in the same year the Game Boy color was released. Dale Oliver personally reported selling a million yo Yos in 1998, and he was far from alone. And he attributes the craze entirely to the existence of the school. Yo yo assemblies.

[Willa Paskin]

That was it. There wasn't any other thing. It was only a craze when it came to your school, okay, Like a school mile away. They weren't playing yo yo at all.

[Evan Chung]

And that's why the 90s yo yo phenomenon might have passed you by if you weren't a kid there to see wasn't a huge national news story, a top down mass media craze like Power Rangers or Pokemon. It was a thousand local crazes sparked from school to school individually by demonstrators just like the old time yo yo men going back to Pedro Flores, traveling to towns one by one until each city's kids had caught the buck. And just like the old time yo yo men, the 90s school demonstrators were fundamentally there to sell yo yos. An estimated $200 million worth in 1998 alone. Each school program was operated by or represented a different yoyo manufacturer. The Ned show was super yo team. High performance was yo mega. Dale Oliver had his own company called spintastics and it continues on up to today. Dazzling Dave has a line of yo yos too.

[Willa Paskin]

When you get a yo yo, make sure it's a good one. If it came free from your parents work or cost less than 10 bucks, that's not a good one. You want to make sure it's heavy duty. Make sure it can unscrew all the dazzling Dave yoyos do that. So I bring the yoyos with me and I do the show and I teach them how to do it. And I say, hey, kids, if you'd like to buy a yoyo, you can buy one.

[Evan Chung]

How many kids actually buy a yo yo?

[Willa Paskin]

Most schools for My average is 65% of the kids.

[Katie Shepherd]

Wow.

[Willa Paskin]

So if it's a school of, you know, 300 kids, you're selling quite a few yo yos.

[Evan Chung]

Dave gives around a dollar for every yo yo sold back to the school, though plenty of schools pay him the flat fee instead and opt not to have him sell yo yos there at all.

[Willa Paskin]

It makes sense, actually, in some situations where, you know, if you have a school where there's a lot of kids that have money and some kids that don't, it could cause strife at that school. If you're bringing a product in.

[Evan Chung]

And school yo yo assemblies have indeed caused some strife and controversy because it's not inaccurate to view them ultimately as sales presentations to a captive audience of kids. Even the teachers on the simpsons were wary.

[Katie Shepherd]

I question the educational value of this assembly.

[Willa Paskin]

Hey, it'll be one of their few pleasant memories when they're pumping gas for a living. Well, most of the complaints, I am sure, came from the other progress because my program was teaching science, so that kind of knocked that kind of complaint out.

[Evan Chung]

To be clear, though, your business still

[Willa Paskin]

was selling yo yos? Yes. I mean, that was the way we made a living.

[Evan Chung]

But what about the idea that you're kind of pressuring kids to buy things?

[Willa Paskin]

Well, you're going to turn your TV set off. It's just another avenue.

[Evan Chung]

So it's no worse than just seeing a toy commercial on Saturday morning.

[Willa Paskin]

Yeah, same thing. Except we just figured out a new way to. Instead of paying for television commercials,

[Evan Chung]

There is a cynical way to look at all this that they got away with a lot that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to because what they were selling were innocent, harmless yo yos. But at the same time, what they're selling are innocent, harmless yo yos. It's pretty hard to get worked up about them, especially when you see some kids getting dazzled.

[Willa Paskin]

Let's go for it. 4 and 5. This trick is the corkscrew. I just see so much of the benefits of the kids learning how to do it. Teaching each other skills, nurturing each other to get better at it. They get past that thing that's really resistant, hard. And when they get past it, they. They've grown, they've learned. They just feel better about themselves. Oh, hit the floor. Are you supposed to hit the floor? No. Is it okay to make mistakes? Of course it is, guys. You're going to make tons of mistakes when you're learning, but that's okay.

[Katie Shepherd]

Coming up after the break, we dig into another childhood mystery on the mind of one of our listeners. Our next question comes from a listener out in California. My name is Aileen, and I would

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

really like to know when sandboxes became a thing.

[Katie Shepherd]

I am super curious as to when

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

and why we started putting sand in

[Katie Shepherd]

boxes and then corralled our children into them as a place to play. Because it's kind of weird, right? It's so weird. And our local.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

This is why I thought of it.

[Willa Paskin]

There's a brewery in town here in

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Alameda, and they have massive sandboxes. Like, you can go.

[Evan Chung]

You can have a Beer.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

You can let your kids play in the giant sandbox.

[Willa Paskin]

But I was just thinking to myself,

[Evan Chung]

we're only three blocks away from the beach.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Like, why, why do we have this thing?

[Katie Shepherd]

Did you growing up ever experience like the playground sandbox, like the big ones?

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

You know, we really didn't have sandboxes in the big playgrounds near me, but

[Katie Shepherd]

most of the backyard playsets had a

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

place where you could put one underneath it. I, I have this imprinted on my brain.

[Katie Shepherd]

The turtle ones.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

There is a turtle shaped piece of plastic with a weird half lid that never worked. And that's a sandbox.

[Katie Shepherd]

Why?

[Willa Paskin]

How?

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Like why are we buying sand in

[Willa Paskin]

bags and considering it clean and then putting it here as just like a

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

completely acceptable place for our kids to gather? This is crazy.

[Katie Shepherd]

So basically I want to tell you.

[Willa Paskin]

Tell me the answer.

[Katie Shepherd]

What we figured out.

[Willa Paskin]

Amazing.

[Katie Shepherd]

We figured out the answer with some help.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Where do sandboxes come from? Sandboxes come from Germany.

[Katie Shepherd]

Alexandra Lang is a critic and the author of the Design of Childhood. She's spoken with us before for our

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

episode about malls circa 1850 in Germany. That is the origin of much of what we do and see and think is good in early childhood education today. Because up until this time, children were basically considered to be kind of useless, both in terms of productivity and educability. Before they could read, enter an educator

[Katie Shepherd]

named Frederick Frubel who was not ready to write kids off learning wise.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

He felt like there were things that children could learn before then if you made it non word based, the principles of geometry and math and gravity and nature.

[Katie Shepherd]

And he thought kids could learn all these things if you engage their curiosity, that they learned best not from instruction, but by observing, touching, playing, doing.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

So he came up with, with a series of toys and blocks and other exercises that teachers could lead students through. And this is like 4 year olds and 5 year olds.

[Katie Shepherd]

In 1837, he began opening schools for very young children based around these blocks and exercises. They would also often have outdoor workspaces which might contain something like an herb garden. He actually thought of his schools as a place to nurture and grow children themselves. So he called them children's gardens, though you are probably more familiar with the term in German. Kindergarten. Soon, kindergartens modeled after Flubels opened in England, France, Belgium and India. And then a former student of his added another element to the outdoor workspace next to the herb garden. A sandbox.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

So the sandbox really kind of went along with like, okay, you have blocks inside and you have a garden outside, and then you also have a sandbox, and we can use. The sandbox is kind of a microcosm of the earth to teach things about how water flows, how you can build a structure, all of this other stuff.

[Katie Shepherd]

Why sand? What is special about sand?

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Sand is incredibly malleable. You can basically do whatever you want with sand. So it lends itself to all different kinds of play. You can do make believe play with sand. You can do structural play with sand. You can kind of run around, like, climb over a mountain of sand. So it's just something that really lends itself to the maximum amount of childhood creativity and in the best case scenario, a minimum amount of adult input.

[Katie Shepherd]

The sandbox was so fantastic, so fun, so casually educational. It broke free of the kindergarten itself in 1850 when one opened in a public park in Berlin. It was quite different from a contemporary sandbox, though, down to its name. It was known as a sand garden.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

A sand garden is actually, in my opinion, way more fun than a sandbox because it's bigger.

[Katie Shepherd]

So a sand garden would be like the entire lot is just, like, covered in sand.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

The entire lot is covered in sand. And there are, like, mistresses who are minding the sandbox. And the kids from the neighborhood can just flow in and out and play. And, you know, it's like all the sand gets piled to one side and then it gets brushed back and it rains, and then you can make sandcastles with it. So there's something, to me, much more beautiful and anarchic about a sand garden than a sandbox.

[Katie Shepherd]

German children can now revel in the messy liberty of a big lot full of beach dirt. But American children, meanwhile, were being left in the dust, because at this time, not only were there no sand gardens or sandboxes in America, and there were no designated public spaces for kids to play in at all.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Children historically just played in the street with whatever they could find.

[Katie Shepherd]

By the 1880s, there started to be more widespread concern about the welfare of children, especially immigrant ones living in cities on increasingly trafficked streets. And this motivated a number of female philanthropists and educators to seek guidance abroad. And where better to seek it than a place where they were doing all sorts of innovative things with childhood education?

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

They went to Germany, and so they saw the Froibel kindergartens, and they saw the sand gardens, and they were like, oh, you know, we need that in our cities.

[Katie Shepherd]

In 1885, the first American sand garden opened in Boston's North End. It was basically an empty lot next to a church they dumped a bunch of sand into. But out of it grew something kind of spectacular, because it was way more than just America's first sand garden.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

The sand gardens kickstart the larger playground movement in America. They are the first move to give kids something to do off the streets. They're the precursor to playgrounds.

[Katie Shepherd]

Sand gardens made people see the virtues of designated play spaces for children. Cities across the country began investing in these spaces, which soon expanded to include slides and swings and seesaws. But to make room for all these different elements, the Antarctic and giant sand garden had to come down to size as just the sandbox.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

As the playground becomes something that cities want to invest in, they become regularized. More people get involved in thinking about what they think is best for children and all the different things that they think children should be doing in a playground. And so the sandbox becomes just one of a set of apparatuses that children are supposed to use to strengthen their bodies, strengthen their social skills, etc. And the sandbox becomes more of a way station for the younger children before they can use the climbing structures of the monkey bars, the swings, and the slides, and then eventually move on to organized sports.

[Katie Shepherd]

But even if the status of the sandbox had been downgraded to just a temporary way station for toddlers and little kids, Toddlers and little kids need a place to play, too. And so the sandbox remained a standard feature of just about every playground until the sands began to shift in the 1970s and 80s.

[Willa Paskin]

Did you know that every year, thousands of children like you are hurt in playground accidents? That's why you need to learn and practice the rules of playground safety.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

That is the era in which there start to be some major lawsuits around playgrounds and tighter regulations on playground equipment.

[Katie Shepherd]

Is this really a serious problem?

[Willa Paskin]

It's a very serious problem.

[Max Friedman]

We have reports every other month of

[Willa Paskin]

accidents, injuries that could be prevented.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

The issue with sandboxes is not so much physical safety as it is the cost of maintenance. Replacing the sand and cleaning the sand, People start becoming worried about, like vermin, rats nesting in the sandbox, and also toxoplasmosis from cats peeing and pooping in the sandboxes. So a lot of cities just decide they're too much trouble and take them out of the playground.

[Katie Shepherd]

And so playground sandboxes shared by thousands of children began to disappear. But at the same time, the sandbox was becoming available in individual kid sizes, Perfect for private backyards. Slow and steady wins the race. And the little ones have raced across backyards to play in the little tykes classic turtle sandbox. For decades. In 1979, Little Tykes, the toy company behind the kid sized plastic red and yellow cozy coupe car, which, yes, you can picture it, it's that one also introduced the turtle sandbox that our listener Aileen grew up with.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

That turtle sandbox was really everywhere, I think, because the turtle shell was a cover. So if you bought that sandbox, you could cover it at night when you were done and you didn't have to worry about some of these problems.

[Katie Shepherd]

But while the turtle is cute and useful, it's a far cry from the glory days of the giant sand garden or even the standard community playground.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

When you have a suburban backyard and you have your own climbing structure and your own sandbox and your own paddling pool, the assumption is, I think mostly that you'll be playing in those things with your siblings and maybe, you know, one other set of siblings that you'll invite over. So it's really like limited in its social value and limited in size. But the beauty of the urban playground, you know, really from the origins of the urban playground, was that you could end up playing with so many different kids.

[Katie Shepherd]

This version of a communal playground is still thriving, but rarely with a sandbox anymore. They had pretty much disappeared in New York City by the time my kids were little. In fact, generally speaking, the only playgrounds with sandboxes left are, are the fanciest playgrounds of all, like the one in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

[Willa Paskin]

A great day for Brooklyn and really a great day for all of New

[Evan Chung]

York City because people from all five boroughs are going to come over here and enjoy this most wonderful park.

[Katie Shepherd]

Brooklyn Bridge park is a $350 million redevelopment project. It's home to a very impressive playground that includes huge slides emptying into deep blonde sand, and also a $19 million penthouse that was the most expensive home ever sold in the borough of Brooklyn. It's in these kinds of places where you see sandboxes today.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

Over the past 10 years, there has been a new period of investment in urban parks, and they're now seen as this way to make your city a world class city. In that kind of marquee park that often has some private funding or a conservancy for maintenance, you can have that kind of big sandbox, and I think they're more likely to put in that kind of big sandbox because it can double as a soft surface to land

[Katie Shepherd]

on the urban sandbox. That anarchic, low key, generative patch of basically dirt has become a kind of status marker. And so if you happen to be near a State of the art playground, backed by some kind of private investment or have a backyard. The sandbox is alive, if not quite well. It, or at least its ethos, is doing better in another place, though it just happens to be a virtual one. In the extraordinarily popular video game Minecraft, players don't have any particular mission. They just get to build whatever they want. And it belongs to a category of game referred to as a sandbox game.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

There's none of the kind of like competition and violence of most video games. Basically, you enter a world and then you can do whatever you want. I mean, I think it's one of the ironies that as the number of sandboxes in the country has diminished, there has been a rise in those sandbox games. Now that we have fewer sandboxes, that we have fewer places for kids to go, we're only giving them that kind of freedom in this video game world.

[Katie Shepherd]

It's enough to make me want to go touch some actual sand. Up next, an encore presentation. No, literally a segment about encores. Our last question comes from a listener named Kate in Indianapolis.

[Willa Paskin]

I am a big music lover and I go to live shows pretty often.

[Katie Shepherd]

And she's wondered about something that almost always happens at the end of these shows. A kind of game between the band and the audience.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

The ritual always goes like this.

[Willa Paskin]

The band says, this is our last song, and then they play it. Then they leave. But oh no, they didn't play their two biggest singles. I guess they're not going to. But the lights don't come up.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

The venue doesn't play like the regular music.

[Willa Paskin]

And if you're in the front, a lot of times you can see that the artist is just standing back there waiting.

[Katie Shepherd]

The band lets a minute or two go by and the crowd continues clapping. A few people might even try to squeeze in a quick visit to the merch table or the bathroom. And then the artists dutifully return to the stage.

[Willa Paskin]

Everyone cheers. They do their two biggest songs that they have saved for this moment, and then they leave again.

[Katie Shepherd]

And this time the house lights and music come up and you know, it's really over. This whole ritual, the ritual of the encore, is treated like it's a special surprise bonus gift to an audience who demanded a couple more songs. But everybody knows it's not. Of course, the band is coming back for another song or two. It's all pre planned. Everyone at the show knows this. And yet we go through the motions every time. This is not how Kate thought it was supposed to be.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

You Always hear stories about kind of

[Willa Paskin]

the 60s and 70s concerts with these spontaneous, authentic experiences of an encore between the artist and the audience. But these days, it seems honestly, kind of pointless.

[Katie Shepherd]

Which brings us to Kate's question.

[Willa Paskin]

How did the encore evolve from when it first was started as a norm a long time ago, to now, where it feels like just a charade that everyone is kind of doing for no reason?

[Katie Shepherd]

Decoder Ring producer Max Friedman has wondered about this himself.

[Max Friedman]

It's pretty weird. We all know the show's not really over, but we sort of pretend like it is, and then we pretend like we have to clap to bring back the band. Like we're trying to revive Tinkerbell. Why do we do this? Turns out the answer starts way before the advent of rock concerts, way before there was rock music at all. Encores come from the opera.

[Willa Paskin]

I think in the 18th century, there was a much more kind of freewheeling atmosphere in concert halls.

[Max Friedman]

Brian Wise is a journalist with a background in musicology.

[Willa Paskin]

People would just chat and gamble and gossip and drink and eat, and if

[Max Friedman]

they wanted to hear more music, they would ask for it.

[Willa Paskin]

There would be an aria that had a lot of ostentatious effects and vocal flourishes that excited people and got their attention. It was just kind of a, oh, we like that. Let's hear it again.

[Max Friedman]

They'd ask to hear it again by yelling out the word encore. And they often did this in the middle of the opera.

[Willa Paskin]

All the action just stops. The singers stop what they're doing. The prima donna or whoever just sang. The big number usually repeats what they just sang.

[Max Friedman]

If that sounds strange to you, consider this. Until pretty recently, there was no recorded music. The only way that you could hear a song or a singer you loved was live. Once you left the opera house or the concert hall, that was it. So when Mozart's the Marriage of Figaro premiered in 1786, the audience loved it so much, they demanded almost every scene be played a second time, immediately extending the performance to the length of two operas. But over the course of the 19th century, when singers heard calls for an encore, they started to just sing whatever they wanted to, even if it came from a completely different opera.

[Willa Paskin]

There was no regard to trying to fit it into the drama and do it in kind of a nuanced, seamless way. It was just, here's an aria that I like, and let's hear it.

[Max Friedman]

This type of encore tore a hole right through the opera's dramatic integrity. And it was happening all the time,

[Willa Paskin]

this constant encoring that would disrupt the flow of the evening. It had just gotten out of hand.

[Max Friedman]

And some of the era's most important composers and conductors and opera house managers decided enough was enough.

[Willa Paskin]

By the 1920s, the Metropolitan Opera actually had a sign within their program saying positively no encores in all caps. So I was telling the audience, don't ask for any encores because it's not going to happen.

[Max Friedman]

So the mid opera encore largely went away decades before the advent of rock and roll. But at the same time, encores flourished in another part of the classical music, piano recitals, where they started to look a little more like the encores you might be familiar with today, in that they were reserved for the end of the program.

[Willa Paskin]

Rachmaninoff was rarely allowed to leave the stage without playing his Prelude in C sharp minor. It was an early piece of his and he actually didn't like it that much. He got tired of people asking for it, but he obliged. Other encores also piled on top of that. And so that whole kind of phenomenon built off of his example.

[Max Friedman]

Thanks to the influence of superstar pianists like Sergei Rachmaninoff and his contemporary Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the post recital encore became an institution.

[Willa Paskin]

Going to a piano recital, people expect a certain number of encores. It's just part of the experience. It's a rare piano recital that doesn't have at least one encore.

[Max Friedman]

At least one encore, but there can be many more than that. In 1937 at Carnegie hall, the pianist Joseph Hoffman gave no fewer than 18 encores. At recitals like these, so called encore hounds, the super fans of their day would rush to the front of the stage before the first encore and sometimes sit on the stage itself. This was common as late as the 1940s, until fire departments intervened. So it's tempting to just draw a straight line between piano recitals and rock concerts, but actually it took a while for encores to catch on. In the world of rock and roll at the dawn of rock, there wasn't really room for them. In the early 50s, most rock concerts in the US were package tours. As many as 15 different bands, everybody traveling the country on a bus, each act playing maybe a 20 minute set before the next was hustled on stage. There was no time for encores, but that doesn't mean that audiences never asked for them. When Elvis Presley played the Louisiana Hayride in December 1956, the crowd screamed for more, but he was just one act in the middle of the program. So the announcer, Horace Logan, had to tell the audience they weren't going to get anymore. And in the process, coined a phrase.

[Willa Paskin]

All right, Elvis has left the building. I've told you absolutely straight up to this point, you know, that he has left the building. He left the stage and went out the back with the policeman, and he is now gone from the building.

[Max Friedman]

So the impulse to call for an encore was out there. But encores themselves remained pretty rare over the next decade, even as Beatlemania took America by storm and the rock concert business was basically created out of whole cloth. And when they did happen, they were still, by and large, spontaneous. Like at Woodstock in 1969, where the crowd began calling for more from the very last act of the festival, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix didn't usually play encores, so he had to think of something to play on the spot.

[Evan Chung]

Okay, now, don't laugh at us.

[Willa Paskin]

We're gonna try this one song called Valleys of Neptune.

[Max Friedman]

He told the crowd he was gonna play one song, then realized he didn't know the words before finally landing on hey Joe, his first hit. Woodstock was a turning point for rock music, and the changes it brought to the music industry would eventually lead to, among other things, the encore. We know and love, or maybe hate

[Willa Paskin]

Woodstock incentivized the concert business to blow up a little bit.

[Max Friedman]

Michael Walker is a longtime music journalist who's written extensively about this period.

[Willa Paskin]

The labels did not know the audience was the size that it was for rock and roll music. They found out when woodstock happened, and 350,000 people showed up to see bands that were popular bands of the day, but no one saw that coming. They realized there was a lot of money they were leaving on the table.

[Max Friedman]

After Woodstock, bands were booked into bigger and bigger venues like arenas and stadiums. And as the audience grew, so did the shows themselves.

[Willa Paskin]

It's to the point now where rock groups just can't go up on stage with their Levi's on and say, come on, let's jam.

[Max Friedman]

This is the shock rocker Alice Cooper.

[Willa Paskin]

You know, that's dead. That died in the 60s. This is a whole new thing where you have to come in and put a little icing on the cake.

[Max Friedman]

In 1973, Cooper would seriously up the ante for rock concert showmanship with his Billion Dollar Babies tour.

[Willa Paskin]

Hello, Hooray. Let the lights grip in I've been ready. That show had originally been scheduled to go into a run on Broadway as a kind of a stunt. So they designed this incredibly elaborate stage.

[Max Friedman]

Broadway fell through. So they took their elaborate show on the road. Glowing staircases, costume changes, psychedelic lighting, and all. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube. It's really something. At one point, there's a dancing tooth in silver heels. And Alice Cooper uses a giant toothbrush to pleasure her. He impales a baby doll on a sword and swings it around. He has his head chopped off in a guillotine. But most importantly for our purposes, there is a very obviously fake ending.

[Willa Paskin]

Thank you very much, good night. At the end of this show, that was pretty elaborate to begin with. You know, you're not just going to walk off and say, thank you very much, we'll see you next time. We're through.

[Max Friedman]

And so they returned for a scripted encore, one of their biggest hits, followed by the national anthem, during which the band members beat up a Richard Nixon impersonator. Now, Alice Cooper didn't invent the pre planned encore. And he certainly wasn't the first musician to do some wild stuff on stage. But Billion Dollar Babies was the biggest tour of 1973. And the show epitomized a kind of self conscious theatricality that was about to dominate arena rock. Soon everybody was gonna go bigger, with more spectacular lights and props and costumes, more deafening sound. All of that stuff was expensive. So tickets prices went up accordingly. And Michael thinks those prices made a lot of bands feel obligated to offer, as Alice Cooper might have put it, a little more icing on the cake in the form of an encore.

[Willa Paskin]

The spontaneous call for encores when you got into stadiums got a little bit ritualized because it just seemed like good business. I suppose it just became part of the plan. And then audiences began to just absolutely expect it. And they knew you knew it was coming, so you didn't have to work for it anymore.

[Max Friedman]

But not all bands were on board with this, at least not right away. The first time Michael saw the Rolling stones in the mid-70s, they did not play encores.

[Willa Paskin]

They always ended the same way. They would turn on all the house lights and then they would play Street Fighting man, and then they'd leave. No matter how much you yelled, they wouldn't go back on. They would leave the halls. And the who did the same thing.

[Max Friedman]

But both bands got on the train eventually. By 1979, the who was ending almost every show with an encore. And the Stones soon followed suit.

[Willa Paskin]

It became a tradition. And at this point, nobody really wants to break that tradition. Because you don't want to piss the audience off, especially if they paid all this money.

[Max Friedman]

And the tradition of the encore has filtered down from the biggest bands and biggest venues to basically everyone. That's what the Washington Post writer Travis Andrews noticed. When he first started seeing live music,

[Willa Paskin]

the very first band I saw live, like, by choice, when I was, like, I don't know, 13 years old or whatever, was Guster.

[Evan Chung]

When you look in the mirror, I

[Willa Paskin]

remember they, like, announced the encore. Like they were playing into it, and they said, I remember this so well. They were like, well, if we were Def Leppard, we'd go backstage and do a lot of low and hang out with some hookers. But we're Guster, so we're gonna go eat some gummy bears and come play a few more songs for y'. All.

[Max Friedman]

Even as a kid, this was not exactly what Travis thought an encore was supposed to be.

[Willa Paskin]

I expected in my head, just reading books about music and stuff that, like, oh, the crowd's gotta go nuts, and the band's gotta feel it. But, like, Guster made it very clear, we're coming back out.

[Max Friedman]

When Travis became a rock critic as an adult, he would see the encore ritual play out night after night at show after show. But a couple of years ago, Travis started to notice a shift.

[Willa Paskin]

I had gone to, like, three or four shows in a row, and there weren't encores. And the bands would talk about it. If you've seen us before, you know that we don't do encores. Cause encores are stupid as shit.

[Evan Chung]

If you like it, you clap.

[Willa Paskin]

If you clap, we're not coming back. Got it?

[Max Friedman]

That was Pup and Frankie Arrow, But Travis also saw the Afghan Wigs, the Gaslight Anthem, and the Foo Fighters all do some version of the same thing.

[Willa Paskin]

The fact that they all, like, felt the need to acknowledge that they weren't playing an encore told me that this was something that was changing because they knew the audience expected one, and they were saying, no, no, that's not what's happening.

[Max Friedman]

He wondered, was the encore going out of style? So he talked to a bunch of these musicians about it.

[Willa Paskin]

These bands were just like, well, this is kind of bullshit. And why are we doing something so inherently fake when the whole idea of music, particularly rock and roll, particularly hip hop, is authenticity? And so I do wonder if it's

[Max Friedman]

going away for now. These refuseniks are still in the minority. But if the encore is inherently antithetical to the animating spirit of rock and hip hop, if, as our listener Kate said, it just feels like a charade, why does it persist?

[Willa Paskin]

One part of it's probably nostalgia. Most people in bands grew up watching bands, and that's how things were done. And I think sometimes a brand needs a break. They need to Go pee. They need to check their text messages. I remember seeing the national once and Matt Beringer, the singer, he literally said just that. And there is something fun about it. It's not like encores are all bad. While they might be performative, it is fun to have a moment and then get a little bit more music.

[Max Friedman]

Giving the audience a little bit more music might also be strategic. Live shows are basically the only way that musicians make any money these days. At the same time, the tickets to those shows are more expensive than they've ever been. So pee break or no pee break, you need to make people feel like they got their money's worth. Which may be why even the haters don't necessarily want to do away with the encore entirely. They want to make it special again. For example, you can bring out a surprise special guest or perform an unexpected cover. Even our listener Kate saw an encore she loved just a few months ago. It was on Lady Gaga's latest tour, the Mayhem Ball.

[Willa Paskin]

She ends the show, she goes off stage.

[Guest Expert (e.g., Alexandra Lang or similar)]

She basically takes off her makeup and

[Willa Paskin]

changes into more of a normal clothes, the Gaga version of normal clothes.

[Max Friedman]

And then she starts her encore while she's still backstage. There's a live video feed so you can see Gaga taking off her makeup while she sings. You see, literally behind the facade of this ridiculously elaborate show, It may still be canned, a sort of performance of authenticity, but it had the intended effect on Kate.

[Willa Paskin]

She's sort of singing the song as Stephanie instead of Gaga, and that is a really, really incredible way for that show to end.

[Max Friedman]

Worth the price of admission and then some.

[Willa Paskin]

Foreign

[Katie Shepherd]

this is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. Please consider supporting us by becoming a Slate plus member. Now. Through the end of the year 2025, Slate plus membership is just 59. If you go to slate.com decoder+ and enter the promo code decoder50 at checkout, Slate plus members get to hear our show without any ads. You also get access to our bonus episodes and you are meaningfully supporting the work that we do. So please go to slate.com decoder+ and use decoder50 at checkout. Decoder Ring is produced by me, Katie Shepherd, Max Friedman, and Evan Chung. Our supervising producer, Merritt Jacob, is senior technical director. We had additional production from Joel Meyer. We'd like to thank Lucky Meisenheimer, Carl Angel, Jeremy Nicholas, and Winnie Holtzman. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decoder ringslate.com or give us a call at 347-460-7281 we love to hear from you guys. Thanks for listening. Thanks for sticking around. Everyone's having a good time. We got a little something for you. Actually, just this joke, nothing else. We had to do it. Good night.

[Willa Paskin]

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[Katie Shepherd]

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[Willa Paskin]

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[Katie Shepherd]

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[Evan Chung]

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[Willa Paskin]

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[Evan Chung]

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