Hey Big Daddy,

I absolutely remember triangle baseball. I lived in the bed-stuy section of Brooklyn. We used to play on Pulaski St. Between Stuyvesant Ave and Willoughby. It was a one-way street where we played most of our neighborhood games and we played them all. Stickball, chinese handball, fast pitch stickball with automatics, off-the-point, stoopball, boxball, ringalievio, hide-and-seek, kick-the-can, johnny on the pony, skelleys, marbles.
All these games were great but I haven’t heard anybody mention – Spinning Tops – a wooden top (shaped like a hot air ballon) with a metal point on the bottom and we would wrap a string around the it then throw the top on the asphalt making it spin. We would play games like crack-the-top. This game was played by two or more players and the object was to shoot your top at the top on the ground in an attempt to crack it.You would choose to see whose top would be layed on the ground. Then taking one turn at a time each player would spin his top attempting to hit the top on the ground. If you didn’t hit it in one shot you could pick up the top in your hand while it was spinning and throw against the top on the ground then you would get another chance.If in your turn, you couldn’t hit the object top then you would have to lay your top down to be the target top. –Making wooden carpet guns–. The easy way to make one was with a piece of 1×4 or anything similar about three feet in length. Then we would attach a thick rubber band to the front with a nail. Toward the back part of the gun on the top edge, we would then attach a clothes pin with one leg cut off using a few rubber bands to hold it in place.This would act as the trigger. We would then cut little squares from a section of linoleoum flooring to use as ammo. We would then pull back the front rubber band holding it in place under the clothes pin. We would insert a piece of ammo between the the two legs of the rubber band and to shoot the ammo we would press down on the leg of the clothes pin thereby releasing the ammo. How about –Scooters–, made out of a wooden box a two by four and a one skate. We would decorate the box with bottle caps, paint and anything we could think of.

I live in Florida now and we have a group of about 20 to 30 ex New Yorkers. Every year we have an annual xmas picnic. At the picnic we have a fathers against sons stickball game and we play a serious game of skelleys. Those were the best days of my life and if had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t change one thing from my childhood days growing up on the streets of the big city. By the way if someone knows where I can find some Spalding HI-Bouncers if they still exist please post the info on this site.