I grew up in the early 60’s…

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I grew up in the early 60’s on Lacombe Avenue in the Castle Hill Avenue projects in the Bronx. We were privilaged enough to have a skully (skelly) board neatly painted in yellow on the playground area outside. We experimented with a myriad of bottle cap types and fillers. The best “shooters” were the little white (soft) plastic prescription bottle tops. (This pre-dates child-proof caps.) Since the precription bottle caps were much lighter than metal bottle caps, we would weight each of them down with a penny and then fill the cap up to the top with candle or crayon wax. When the wax dryed, we would rub the top of the cap on the ground until it was super-smooth. The plastic precription bottle caps were the best shooters. When you would shoot one, it would ride smoothly along the ground, travel farther than a metal bottle cap, and, with the weight of the penny, it had enough weight to smash a competitor’s cap a mile away. I moved to Long Island, NY when I was 12 and miss playing skully.

I lived in the Fort Green…

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I lived in the Fort Green Projects when it was a family place. One day the housing put tar in the playground area’s which were in a couple of spots. We would all put on our skates and everyone would be skating, their had to be at least 30 of us, all ages. The bigger boys would start the whip game. Almost like a conga line the big boys would be in front and and back of the line and the younger would be in the middle. We would start slow but man it got real fast. I remember I went flying one day I think i was near the end. And we would skate till dinner time and then return all over again. I also found a pair of roller skate with the big clamps in a fleamarket and i have the skate too. I also remember at leat in Fort Greene if a guy gave you a skate key to hold oh man he liked you it was also like having been pined. I love my childhood, my sisters and i are always going back to our childhood, there are four older two years apart and were still hanging out with each other.

I was a child in Gerritsen…

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I was a child in Gerritsen Beach Brooklyn in the early 70’s before moving to rural Virginia in 1976. For years I have described this game to people (primarily transplants from NY) and until today have never found anyone who remembers, even my sister and brothers only have very vague memories of it. The one game that I really missed playing was skully after we moved. I was just in Brooklyn last week and I asked my much younger cousin if they had ever played, but she had no idea what I was talking about. I decided to look up “street games” tonight and lo and behold, here I am. I am definately going to teach both of my kids to play. As I read the directions, I realized that my memory of this game was pretty good, except I remember a tail of sorts going down from the “1” square that I think you finished down. not too sure about that. My favorite part of the game was making the bottle caps with melted wax crayons. I was so happy to find all your posts, fellow skully afficionados! Skully on!

Thank you for creating this…

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Thank you for creating this site. I grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn in the early 70’s and have many fond memories of playing skully. While reminising with old friends about all the games we played, I decided to search on the internet. Thank you for clearing up our fuzzy memories of all the rules. I plan on marking up my driveway and practicing my skills again.

I grew up in Long Beach…

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I grew up in Long Beach on Long Island in the early 60s. As I recall the Pinsie Pinky was .19 and the Spaldeen .29 The Spaldeen was more durable but the Pinky really flew if you hit it on the nose with a good stickball bat. Now I have a 14 year old and we live in Mission Viejo Califonia. I don’t understand it, he’s a Yankee fan and loves to play stickball with me at least twice a week as long as my 51 year old arm can take it. I had to have relatives from NY send us a real stckball bat from Spalding and a few dozen balz. These are great memories to share and make with him. …Tom

I’m on the job as a magazine…

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I’m on the job as a magazine designer, looking for an image of a spaldeen. No time to read the postings here, so this is probably not news, but… the image you have here leaves out the most important feature of a spaldeen, the seam. Without it, curve-ball/screw-ball pitchers like me would have been tatooed all over the park. As spaldeen made the balls cheaper and cheaper, the seams became even more outrageous. It doesn’t get any more rewarding than when you and the batter are cracking up over the dipsy doodles those balls used to take.

Growing up in Queens Village…

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Growing up in Queens Village in the 50’s/60’s (JHS 109, Van Buren), we used to fashion girls’ metal bobby pins into ‘bee stingers’, with a backward twist in the spring-quality steel, and set ‘just right’ (so it wouldn’t go off in your pocket), it delivered quite a painful jab when pressed on a victim’s shirt of pants. The problem, of course, was that it was an extremely close range device.