Did the marble players here play Shooters or Bootsie-Shoves?
Panzade - Dog poop...well of course! I was thinking of when I was VERY small.....
Joe -I don't recall the NAMES of the marble games but I do recall these terms:
Purees
Alleys
Boulders
er...I forget them all...jog a gal's memory would ya?
We'd pitch pennies, too. Closest to the wall scored. Like that.
Cav - I love the crazy things we believed were true just because we did, like somehow you would just KNOW yiddish when you got old....love it, love it.
My husband used to tie string around the doorknobs of people's homes and snicker away because he believed, that THEY would believe, that ghosts had been there in the night (because of course everyone knows that string around the doorknob means that).
I'll think of others...
Joeblow, once, as a serious youngster, I was tapped for a little TV short about what Jewish kids thought of 'god', and what 'he' does. I think it probably aired on public access, but my answer, which has a nice family history, was "I think he flies around the world picking up gold."
From the mouths of babes...
I was born a smartass it appears....
They whipped me with soaked Matzoh, which didn't hurt, but it was way gross....
I can't believe I got such a kick out of pinning playing cards to my bike spokes...vroom vroom
How to play Bootsie-Shoves.
First, make a hole about four inch deep and six inches wide between third and second on a ballfield. (The clay makes a nice surface to shoot on) Decide if you are going to Inners or Allers. In an Inners game, you win all the marbles you get in the hole. Allers is cut throat, whoever shoots in the last marble gets them all.
Okay, now, pick how many you are going to play for. Six, ten, twelve?
Okay, ten. Standing about twenty five feet away each player tosses his marbles one at a time toward the hole. The person with the closest marble or the one with the most in the hole goes first in the next round.
Now the fun begins: to shoot the marbles in the hole, a player must use a bootsie-shove or a shovsie-boot. A shove is just that, you take your rolled up fist and push the marble into the hole. A bootsie: you place your left foot next to a marble then turning your right foot ninety degrees from your left foot and using the heel of your right foot like a hammer, you boot the marble into the hole. Maybe.
So you get two chances at shooting each marble, one shove and one boot, if you miss, it's the other guy's turn. Allers is the game with the most strategy, getting the marbles close but not so close that they'll be an easy shot, figuring whether to take the easies first and then the ones way out.
There's a lot of psych-out stuff going on too.
You say you'll play ten for allers but only if the other guy will play his big clearie.
==
Next time: who played baseball card flip-matches for keepsies.?
Clearies! That's one. "Beauties," too -- I remember now.
"Keepsies," ah me.
Bootsie-Shoves shall be added to my otherwise newly resurrected arsenal.
We were less supervised. Ten year old, or so, girl group who checked out the construction about six blocks away, climbing down into the basements via the (now I know as) rebar protruding, er, into the space. An enlarged version of all our playhouses that we did with pine trees and sheets and blankets and chairs and whatever we could grab...
hmmm, I had a girl builder in me, that I didn't pay attention to for years. Wonder if that was just the thing then, or if people let alone in a room now would start to build...
We built forts in the woods by Bigelow Pond, hauled lumber, fliched from our fathers' basements, high up into the elm trees and whacked together platforms from which to survey our realm.
And, Joe, one of my 11-year old friends posted this hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard nailed to the base of the tree of our treehouse (this is true, really):
NO GRILS ALLOWED!!
Priceless! All of you!
When I was about 12, we moved into a new house in a subdivision being developed on the edge of town. There were lots of open fields around us where our cats caught field mice, rats, snakes, moles and all sorts of "presents" for us. There were only a handful of houses completed, so only five or six other kids had moved in so far. Everyone's parents had given them strict orders not to venture far into the open fields with the snakes and other creatures.
Naturally, it didn't take long for us to form a plan.
Dodging detection by hiding behind clumps of tall grass and weeds, we moved with the precision of a seasoned SWAT team until we were all safely out of sight in a small hollow about 1000 yards from the last house. That's when Ron found it. A washed-out hole about six feet across and four feet deep. It would make a perfect hidey-hole. Or clubhouse. We met there after school every day for a week before it occurred to us that it would be a lot better hiding place if it had a roof.
Well, that was easy enough. There were all these new houses being built, so construction materials were always lying around. Ron and his little brother managed to pilfer a nice big sheet of plywood the next day. It almost covered the hole, leaving just enough clearance on one side for an entry.
It was dark down in there. We called it "The Cave."
It was our regular meeting spot for a couple of months. Several kids brought stuff for The Cave. We had some old throw pillows, some Hot Wheels cars, and other things. It was pretty creepy after it rained, though. All sorts of bugs down in there. But it was still our special place. We just sent the boys down there first to kill anything that moved. Looking back now, we were fortunate that they never ran into anything more dangerous than spiders.
Eventually, somebody ratted. The adults were horrified, and a lot of us were grounded. The parents dismantled The Cave and we were all forbidden from ever going there again. We were also threatened with serious bodily harm if we ever so much as thought about making another Cave. We never did, but our parents were suspicious of all of us for years. Even when I visited my parents 20 years later and there was only one small corner of that field left undeveloped, they still cast it a watchful eye.
I wonder if the hole is still there?
Hiking. For a time, we were in Calwa, which is pretty much part of Fresno, CA. We lived on Mason Street before and during the time it was paved. There was a cow pasture on the way to Calwa proper on the right and a residential neighborhood on the left. Going the other way, as the road intersected our little street there was a cottonseed plant on the other side. After it went by there the road made a sharp turn and then parallelled the train tracks. There was a Pima Indian camp near these tracks, built for them by the railroad. My brothers and I went walking in that direction every Saturday. First, we played with the hand cars at the switch yard. For some reason, nobody ever came around to run us off. Some industrial tanks, with ponds of black sludge around them came next. We got dangerously familiar with that ugly mess. Then into the trees and finally to the gate of the Indian camp. The camp had a high fence all the way around it and a wooden stairway that went up and over it. Everything that went in and out of there had to go over that stair. I was only allowed into the camp once or twice, then quickly shooed off. My older brother became blood brothers with one Houston Chino, a classmate and resident of the Pima camp. He got to spend whole weekends as a guest. During his stays, there would be partying and dancing. Apparently he drank and danced also, waking up one morning in bed with one of the girls. Her brother gouged his arm with a beer opener in retaliation. Sometimes coming home we went by a truck garden and snatched a few veggies to chew on.
Our family being nomads, we next lived in Campbell, near San Jose. We resumed our hikes by going down the highway to Los Gatos. It was all wilderness in there, though now I believe it has something to do with Silicon Valley.
Yes, hiking was a thing we kids would do a lot of, and our parents never questioned what we did. When my own son went off like that, I demanded to know where he was going, when he would be back, etc. I was never sure if I rode herd on him too closely or not.
Hiking was an integral part of youth. I remember hiking long distances to see a girl I fancied. Now it's hardly worthwhile to hike a little extra to your car in the mall parking lot.
