Some little stories

In another forum, I told a story about extending recess one time during elementary school by sneaking off and hiding in a cave. Our mothers had to be called to school to help find us and return us to school. We also were talking about jacks, marbles and other games involving rhymes passed down for the ages. Like: Betty and Johnny sitting in a tree/ K - I - S - S - I - N - G/ First comes love, then comes marriage/ Then comes Betty pushing a baby carriage.

We also played with tops. The kind where you wrapped a string around the top, whipped them out of your hand just-so and they spun like a top. Naturally we turned it into a macho thing by modifying our tops. We'd drill holes in them to make them howl threateningly or add burrs to rip up other tops when they got close (like on Ben Hur's chariot). If you sharpened your point that the top spins on and threw it right at another top, you could destroy that other top.

We didn't play marbles with a circle, we played marbles with a hole. You had to hit someone else's marble from the hole to claim it. That is, if you were playing "keepsies' in which case you had to lay down the rules about "lagging" and "blowsies" and the use of "steelies." Steelies were employed if you got into the hole at the same time as somebodyelse. Since getting into the hole gave you anoter shot, just like hitting somebody else's marble gave you another shot, if you knocked his marble out of the hole, you could claim it. Yu would switch to a bigger marble for this move or a steelie if you had one. A steelie was a steel ball bearing about 1 to 1.5" diameter. Thrown hard enough, you could dislodge a hippopotamus with a steelie. If your opponent was caught in the hole without HIS steelie, its likely you would crush his marble at the least. You didn't use a steelie all the time in case someone hit it and they claimed it, or because it was so heavy and not suitable for a shooter marble. If the ground was particularly hard, like an asphalt street, for example, you'd use a ball peen hammer to make the hole. A few good whacks and you're done.

Enough for this post. Have a nice day, my friends!