Knots in My Yo-Yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid

The memoir opens in medias res during a crisis in Jerry Spinelli's sixteenth year. His younger brother Bill arrived at a friend's house to report that their dog, Lucky, had been hit by a car on Johnson Highway in Norristown, Pennsylvania. As Jerry ran toward the scene, he wanted to keep running out of his life entirely, because "it was too few hours ago that I was king" (1); he had recently been crowned ninth-grade prom king. This moment frames the memoir: Everything that follows traces the arc from Jerry's earliest memories through his brief reign and the losses that followed.

Jerry's first memory is of standing in the yard of his family's apartment on Marshall Street in Norristown's East End, overwhelmed by the smell of hops from the adjacent Adam Scheidt Brewing Company and the blast of a World War II air-raid siren on the brewery roof. His father sawed a Louisville Slugger down to seventeen inches so four-year-old Jerry could hit balls over the landlady's fence. Out front, tiny Jerry gripped the gate bars and sang "Jesus Loves Me" to passersby; after baby brother Billy was born, Jerry brought his performances indoors to compete for his mother's attention. The family moved to Chestnut Street, where Jerry began first grade, and then his parents bought a house across town.

The move to 802 George Street in the West End becomes the defining event of Jerry's childhood; he lived there from ages six to sixteen. The house sat at a dead end, and Jerry explains that while a dead end means "Stop" to a grownup, to a kid it means "Go." Beyond the wooden barrier lay an expanse of railroad tracks, woods, Stony Creek, dumps, Red Hill, and a spear field where neighborhood boys threw homemade spears. On the civilized side, alleyways formed a second grid where kids roamed freely beyond the reach of cars and adult rules.

Jerry recounts his early fascination with war as a game. During a stone fight at Stony Creek, he aimed at his best friend Johnny Seeton's eyebrow and hit it exactly, drawing blood. In recurring daydreams about interrogation, he imagined talking his way out of a firing squad, discovering that "Words can save me" (14). Around sixth grade, he targeted Joey Stackhouse, a harmless classmate, and punched him; Joey's tearful astonishment ended Jerry's warrior ambitions for good.

Around age five, Jerry decided to become a cowboy, secretly idolizing the whip-wielding Lash La Rue. In third grade he wore his full cowboy outfit to school and performed for his class, but an attempt to camp out cowboy-style failed, and he conceded he was "strictly a living-room cowboy" (20). Cowboys gave way to sports after a mortifying debut: For his first football game, Jerry arrived in full pads only to discover it was two-hand touch and every other kid wore jeans. From then on, his seasons became baseball, football, and basketball, encouraged by his father, Lou Spinelli, a longtime scorekeeper for Norristown High School games.

Jerry reached his athletic peak at twelve, leading the Little League in stolen bases and winning the fifty-yard dash at the grade-school track meet, where he crouched in a proper starting position while every other runner stood. His sole ambition crystallized: to become a major league shortstop. At fourteen, his Connie Mack Knee-Hi squad, a youth baseball league team called Norristown Brick Company, went undefeated and won the Pennsylvania state championship.

Throughout grade school at Hartranft Elementary, Jerry describes himself as a "Good Boy" who never got in trouble. He evokes the sensory world of George Street through coal deliveries, the transition from radio to television, and portraits of the block's inhabitants. Henry Doerner, who was born with one leg shorter than the other and an incomplete hand, ran constantly and dared anyone not to pick him for games. Mrs. Seeton called her children home with a two-note whistle that carried across the neighborhood, a sound Jerry associates with belonging.

Jerry recounts his family history: his parents' 1936 wedding, his Italian grandfather Alessandro "Alex" Spinelli who came to America alone from Italy at fourteen as an orphan, and Christmas as a family occasion where his parents spent almost nothing on themselves yet lavished gifts on their sons. Jerry's relationship with Bill, shaped by a four-and-a-half-year age gap, is reframed when Bill shares his own memories, including riding on the bar of Jerry's bicycle and feeling safe within his big brother's arms around the handlebars.

Jerry explored Norristown extensively on foot and by bicycle, catching salamanders and snakes and swooning over the speed of light and the endlessness of the universe. Yet he read almost no books, preferring cereal boxes, comics, and baseball statistics. Small indicators of a literary inclination accumulated: his spelling bee success, his father's work as a typesetter, and a comic-book phrase he whispered to himself for days. In sixth grade he wrote an unassigned poem about Mexico; his teacher accused him of plagiarism, and his mother had to intervene. Five years passed before he wrote another poem.

Jerry describes his extreme neatness and devotion to rules as defining childhood traits. The one time he rebelled in ninth grade, refusing to accept a false accusation of a messy locker, he was stripped of the baseball team, his homeroom president position, and all other school offices; he apologized within a day. He addresses the racial divide in Norristown, which ran along DeKalb Street, and traces how organized sports dissolved his unexamined assumptions by erasing racial distinctions behind team uniforms. His close friend Louis Darden, who is Black, later fiercely defended Jerry when another boy attacked him during a pickup basketball game.

Jerry traces his evolving relationship with God and church. His Sunday school teacher, Garfield Shainline, endured the boys' merciless mockery with unwavering kindness. When Garfield fell ill and died, none of the boys visited or attended the funeral. Jerry carries deep regret, recognizing Garfield not as the teacher but as the lesson itself.

Jerry recounts his progression through girlfriends, from Judy Brooks in first grade through a teeth-clacking first real kiss at thirteen. In ninth grade, he was elected class president and began dating cheerleader Judy Pierson. They became a serious couple, and at the prom they were crowned King and Queen.

Then Jerry's sixteenth year brought a cascade of losses. He became a nobody tenth grader at Norristown High School. Judy Pierson broke up with him. He lost the class president election, remained on junior varsity in baseball, and lost his speed in foot races. The family moved from George Street to Locust Street. Lucky was killed on Johnson Highway, completing the litany.

The turning point came on October 11, 1957. Norristown's football team faced Lower Merion, winners of 32 consecutive games. With Norristown leading 7–6, Lower Merion drove to the one-yard line, and the defense stopped four consecutive running plays. Jerry replayed the miraculous stand in his head but could not reach satisfaction. He sat down, picked up a pencil, and wrote "Goal to Go," a rhyming poem about the game. Days later it appeared in the Times Herald sports section, and everyone at school praised it. This, Jerry believes, marks the beginning of his identity as a writer.

The memoir concludes by tracing how Jerry's childhood fed his career. He attended Gettysburg College and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, served in the Naval Air Reserve, and worked as a magazine editor while writing novels. Four novels over thirteen years went unpublished. After marrying Eileen, also a writer, and gaining six children, a pivotal incident occurred: Someone ate all the meat off his leftover fried chicken overnight. He first wrote about the confrontation from the father's point of view, then shifted to the kid's perspective, drawing on his twelve-year-old memories, and the result became Space Station Seventh Grade, his first published novel. In subsequent books, Jerry transforms Norristown into the fictional Two Mills and weaves his childhood throughout his fiction. At a 1992 event where he accepted an award for Maniac Magee, a boy asked if being a kid helped him become a writer. Jerry answered, "Yes, I believe it did" (148).