My dad's magic string trick
10/12/03 11:58 AM
Isn’t it wonderful when a child looks at you in total awe and just knows that you are the smartest person in the whole wide world? That's how I felt about my father, Albert Stallman. My dad had this string trick to beat all tricks and when I learned it I also believed he and I had this fantastic string trick that no one else could EVER learn. It went like this: Tie the ends of a piece of string (15-20 inches long) together. Drape one end of the loop over someone’s upheld index finger and the other end of the loop over your own upheld index finger then put the tips of the fingers together. A few clever twists of the string and voila … the string comes off without ever having to disconnect the two index fingers. I used to try to teach my children this trick (to pass it down the family line), but it must be a change of the times. I didn’t even impress them. There must be someone out there who would like to learn this magic trick.
And my mother … she had the ability to pull a string on the top of a 5 or 10-pound bag of sugar and the whole top would become untied. HOW DID SHE DO THAT??? Even after I got married (I was practically pre-pubescent) it was some quite time before I mastered that feat.