The Boy Toymaker

Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 1. Tondo on my Mind                                                                                                              

Essay 6. THE BOY TOYMAKER

The second property we owned was just three houses away from the Nazareno compound. Mama Ninay bought it in1966. She said that she bought the house and lot for just two-thousand pesos, which wasn't surprising because it wasn't titled yet and the two-storey house was only made of wood all throughout.

But come to think of it, two thousand pesos was already a lot of money in 1966. It came from my father's extra earnings as marine engineer on a ship plying the Philippines- Vietnam route. The Vietnam war was already heating up and the extra money he was getting was war hazard pay.

It was in that house that I discovered another of my talent, the talent for making toys. My other talent, my aptitude for drawing, I already knew I had even before I began going to school. I loved to draw. That's what I did day in and day out. I was almost always doodling during the years when we still lived in our Kagitingan house. What I remember I was very fond of drawing then were images of firefighters aboard firetrucks on their way to put out fires somewhere, and Japanese and USAFFE soldiers too, on board their respective war vehicles: the Japanese on their trucks and the USAFFEs on their jeeps mounted with 50-caliber machine guns.

Papa Nene began working aboard ocean-going vessels in 1960. It was thus routine for him to buy toys abroad for me and my siblings. What he bought for us boys were battery-operated cars, tanks, and aircrafts, and pistols and air-powered rifles.

Those rifles were cowboy rifles, the sort you bend in the middle, looking like you're breaking them, and then straightening them up again before pulling the triggers. The act of bending the rifle put air in its mechanism so that a cork inserted in its muzzle will be expelled forcefully like a bullet when you pull the trigger.

Unfortunately, one of those rifles was almost broken in two by Noy Jose when he exerted too much force in bending the rifle. But we weren't saddened much by that because we knew that Papa Nene can always buy us another one.

We played with those pistols and rifle for a long time. But the cars, tanks, and aircrafts were just stored in the glass cabinet after they ran out of batteries.Those battery-operated toys were not for play for long. They have become just for show---things we showed to our playmates whenever we feel like bragging.

I therefore have to resort to making toys with my own hands to keep myself amused, and to have variety. With only the pistols and rifles as toys, all l and my brother can play with our playmates, aside from hide-and-seek, skipping rope, and other sissy games, were mock Western shoot-outs and Second World War combat, which will bore us all sooner or later.

There was a digging at the intersection of Leandro Ibarra and Lualhati Streets which was never refilled with soil. The streets in our neighborhood then were all soil and gravel. Not one road was asphalted yet. That digging turned into a pond in time because of the rains. Grasses grew along its edge, and aquatic creatures like tadpoles soon made their appearance. That pond opened new opportunities for games for us city boys. We saw that what the pond lacked were toy boats, so I put myself to work and began making boats.

The first boat I sailed on that pond were made of old rubber slippers without straps on top of which I stuck banana-cue sticks as masts for the sail. I soon made an innovation, and found a way to add a propeller to it. The propeller was just  a piece of flat popsicle stick cut less than half, and inserted in-between a stretched rubber band at the tail of the boat which I twisted many many times. When I stopped twisting and laid the boat on the water, and then released the popsicle stick propeller, this propeller will revolve rapidly and thrust the boat forward. The longer I twisted the rubber band, the longer will be the run of the boat.

I later on levelled up, when I got hold of a chisel, to making real wood-carved toy boats. I remember that the last wooden boat I made even had a name lettered on its bow. The name was Vaya con Dios.

Our youngest sister Teresa was being groomed even then to be a nurse. So, I took it upon myself to provide her with improvised medical gadgets like a stethoscope made from wire, a length of rope, and soda bottlecap; a syringe made from clear ballpen tubes and needle made from wire; a nurse' cap made of white cardboard on which I drew a red cross using a crayon, and even a medical worker's bag made of cardboard to put those toys in. Nursing was truly her calling, She became one. She graduated from UST, and when she took the professional board exams for nurses, she placed sixth. She's now a nurse in California. A very successful one, I must say.

I even 'invented' a television set. It was a discarded shoe box, the front of which I cut open to imitate a tv screen. Behind the screen was a long scroll rolled around two cardboard cylinders on which I pasted drawings and colorful cut-outs from magazines. The ends of the cylinders protruding on the side of the box  served as dials. If you want to 'change channel' or see different pictures, you just roll the dials either up or down, and the scroll will also roll up or down.

There were many other toys I made during those years, like bamboo swords with coconut-shell and wire knuckle-guards, and futuristic-looking ray guns made up of dozens of popsicle sticks. I also made my own kites, on some of which I pasted the longest tails ever.

November was when the winds became just right for flying kites. During that month and on until December, almost all of us boys deserted the streets and climbed the rooftops where we can be seen flying kites of different sizes and shapes. I was very agile and quite adept in climbing rooftops then, sometimes using the septic tank exhaust pipe at the side of our house as means of hoisting myself to the top. The way I climbed that pipe was like the way a boy would climb the bamboo pole in palo sebo. But most of the time I just climbed out of the little window at the back room on the second floor of our house. From that window, I stepped on to the roof of our neighbor's house and from there transfer to our own roof.

The gap between houses then was so narrow, or even nil, that we boys could run from one roof to another without missing a beat to catch descending loose kites. Those were stressful days indeed for house owners whose roofs became playground for kite flyers.

There were three kinds of kites boys of our time flew. They were the boka-boka, the fighter kite, and the gurion. The gurion was the least flown in Tondo. I saw one flying only once or twice. The gurion resembles the Malaysian kite 'wau bulan'. I made a gurion one time, but I couldn't make it fly, maybe because of its weight.

Papa Nene said that gurions were the type of kites they flew in his hometown, Oslob, Cebu. Gurions were the popular kites, or perhaps the only kind of kites being flown, during the pre-war era, especially in the provinces where there are plenty of wide spaces---like rice paddies and hills--- ideal for flying those big ponderous kites.

The boka-boka was the poor boy's kite. It was just a rectangular piece of paper folded twice on either end where the cross string is tied. The string wound around the milkcan-spool was then tied to a loop at the exact  middle of the cross string. Boys during our time practiced flying kites using boka-boka, after which they graduated to flying real kites.

The real kites I refer to were called fighters. They were made preferably from papel de hapon or Japanese rice paper. But any thin paper will do. There were even kites made of thin transparent plastic sheets. Fighter-kites were diamond-shaped, with strips of fin-like  triangular papers pasted on both sides. They seldom have tails because these will lessen their maneuverability. The perfect fighter-kite was one which a flyer could make dive, soar, turn left, or turn right swiftly, which a fighter kite with tail can't do. And why were they called fighter-kites? Well, that's because they were flown to engage precisely in duels with other kites.

The strings connected to these kites, through which signals to dive, soar, and turn were communicated to the kites were abrasive. The strings were capable of cutting the strings of other kites. And that was the objective of those aerial duel, to cut the string of your opponent's kite so that it will float away loose and descend to the ground. We described those loose losing kites as 'umalagwa'.

Neophyte kite flyers who were only into boka-bokas as of yet made their strings seemed abrasive by rubbing cooked rice paste on them, which when dried would make the strings feel gritty and sharp to the touch. But they were not abrasive of course, and can't really cut other strings. On the other hand, the paste applied to their strings by the bonafide fighter-kite flyers were a mixture of kola (glue) and powdered flourescent tubes or incandescent light bulbs boiled in water.

In all my years of kite flying I have won an aerial duel only once. What a flyer should do when the string of his kite gets in contact with that of another kite was to let loose or unwind his string from the spool faster than his opponent can. The friction of the abrasive string sliding over the opponent's string will do the job of cutting it. It is a must therefore that one's kite and it's string should be the one above. That's why the dive maneuver was very important.  One's kite should always be the one diving to engage it's opponent.

I was in high spirits after that duel which took a while to finish. I almost run out of string. I remember my and my opponent's kites as way way up in the air and very very far and very very small. I was congratulated afterwards by Pate Pangan, who was also on the roof a few houses away watching the duel. Pate was the foremost and best fighter kite flyer and kite-maker in our neighborhood. A true master. Compliments coming from him were worth a lot to us aspiring fighter-kite flyers.

Now, about that longest kite tail. Although tails on kites make them less responsive to tugs on the strings to make them dive or swerve, it somehow made it easier to fly them. I don't know why, but that's what I discovered. I wasn't really a top-notch fighter-kite flyer, so I just did an odd thing to my kite to get noticed.

I don't know how I came up with the idea, but I just found myself one day cutting the leaves from our used notebooks into strips about an inch wide. I pasted this strips end to end to I don't know what exact length. But it was very long indeed. Trying now to recall its length with my mind's eye, I presume that it could be more than thirty feet.

Flying a kite with a tail that long can be cumbersome because the tail could get entangled with itself. I therefore asked a playmate to assist me. That playmate was Rody Ollegue or Rody Tuko. We didn't call him that in derision. It's just our joking way of distinguishing him from our other playmates also named Rodolfo.

They are four, in fact. One was Rodie Hamor, with the 'bansag' or monicker Rodie Lapad, because the back of his head was quite flat. He was the one I mentioned in the robbery incident at Isla Puting Bato who owned the wallet with a snapshot of a boy in karate pose and attire. Another was Rhody Valiente or Rhody Popo. Popo was derived from the repetition of the last syllable of his name Rodolfo. But behind his back, we refer to Rhody Popo, again jokingly of course, as Rody Hika. (Oh, how judgmental we were then! Hahaha....)

Both of them have passed away---Rodie Hamor when he was just 26 years old and Rhody Valiente when he was in his forties. Another Rodolfo is my brother Rudy. But that's not how we called him. All of us his childhood friends called him Buding, which must be a variation of Ruding.

Back to my collaboration with Rody Tuko. As I've said, he was the one who assisted me in flying those long-tailed kite. His task was to gradually and gently let go of the kite's tail, and make sure that it didn't get entangled with itself. Other kite flyers upon seeing my kite, were amazed and amused by it's very long tail. First time they saw one. The kite was already way up high in the air, yet several feet's length of its tail was still lying on the roof waiting to be pulled up by the slowly rising kite. It was exciting for a while. But before long, the novelty wore off. I stopped flying long-tailed kites altogether because nobody was amazed and amused anymore.

(Above: Pictures of Papa Nene.as a seafarer)