Marbles
I was watching Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and Mike Rowe was working at a marble factory. My first thought was “Who’s still buying marbles?”
When I was a kid marbles, or at least playing marbles, was a big deal. I went to a small private school and we didn’t exactly have playground equipment (unless you count the three gigantic tree stumps situated in the field behind the school) so playing marbles was about it in the spring.
We didn’t play marbles like they do on TV. Near as I could tell from TV-marbles was, the kids would make a circle, throw a bunch of marbles in the center, and you had to shoot them like you were playing pool. The kids would sort of rest a marble on their index finger and then launch the marble with their thumb-nail in the hopes of caroming another marble out of the circle.
Well, when you live in a place built upon an old lake bottom you can’t really play that way because marbles don’t roll well in sand, in fact they don’t roll at all. What we did was dig a hole, drop your marbles about five feet away, and then snap your marble into the hole like you were snapping a bug off a counter-top. Every marble that you shot into the hole you got to keep.
One version of the game involved catching “pinching bugs,” the black June Bugs with the fearsome clasping mandibles on its face, and putting them in the bottom of the hole so if you wanted to win you had to reach in and get the marble while avoiding the pinchers. Nobody ever got pinched but it did make the game seem a little more manly.
A little.
The only time the game moved out of the sand was when kids played on the Lincoln Park Little League baseball field, kids would dig their heel into the infield clay, spin around until they had a big enough hole, and go from there. This was great until you actually had to play a game of baseball and the infield looked like the lunar surface.
“Oh, look, a simple ground ball to third;” moments later the third basemen is rolling on the ground wondering if he’ll ever produce offspring.
There was a pecking order to the marbles, too, kind of like poker chips. Your run of the mill white swirley marble was last, followed by “Cat’s eyes,” “Purees,” and “Steelies.” If you had a steelie that meant your dad worked at Sealed Power.
My go-to marble was a dark blue Puree boulder (about double the size of a regular marble), that I purchased from Bectel’s Pharmacy. I was lethal with that baby, I ruled the playground until Greg Keusche won it off me when the marble made it into the hole but not all the way to the bottom. He tapped it about an inch and I lost.
I don’t know if kids still play marbles, I sure haven’t seen any, because you were outside, you were kind-of moving around, and you got exposed to gambling at an early age which is helpful. I realize snapping pieces of glass with your fingers can’t hang with Madden 19 but hey, it’s all we had. And it allowed us as individuals to become more well ... rounded.
Printed by permission of the author. Email him at Lorenzatlarge@aol.com.
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