Toggling an object on and off?

Hello

I am making my website in Flash, and have not met any problems until I tried to make a button that deletes several objects, all of which are Movie Clips and have the instance name of s1. The code in my button is very simple:

on (release) {
delete s1;
}

For some reason, it will not delete all of the objects, or any at all. I have tried changing the statement “delete s1;” to things such as “s1._alpha = 50;” to test it, but the objects are not responding. As I just started Flash yesterday, I do not know if I am violating any rules of ActionScript, or if I simply am forgetting to include something. Also, I am wondering if it would be possible to toggle the objects on and off. For example, when I hit the button they would all disappear and be deleted, then get reloaded when I hit the button again. Any input as to how to solve my problem or how to toggle the objects is appreciated.