Streetplay Discussions
I used to play this in Southern…
I used to play this in Southern California in the 60’s, when I was 10 or so. It was like hopscotch, except you drew a grid of 9 squares, and started in the lower right square. Each square was labeled. We labeled the first one “girls”, the second one “boys”, the third “fruit”, and so on. All I remember was, we had to jump in a counter- clockwise pattern, name the square, then name an object from that square for the rest. Sounds confusing. Let’s see if I can make it clearer. First, jump in first square and say “girls, girls”, then seconds square, say “mary, mary”, third square say “jenny, jenny”, etc., until you got to center square, hopefully coming up with 8 girls names. Then you’d start over, but this time, you’d jump in the first square, saying “girls, girls”, then jump in the second square saying “boys, boys”, then proceed to name 7 boys names without repeating. 3rd time around, it would be “girls, girls”, “boys, boys”, “fruit, fruit”, then name 6 fruit as you jumped into the next 6 boxes. Does anyone out there remember this game? I’ve been racking my brain to remember more of it, what the labels on the other boxes were, and whether you had to throw a stone into the boxes or anything. I played this with my cousins, whose parents were German, so maybe it’s from Germany. No one at school played this. I’d love to find the rules for it on line, or in a book, but everywhere I look for hopscotch games, it’s nowhere to be found. And, I don’t have a clue as to whether it has a name or not. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
well i’m from israel and…
well i’m from israel and we have a game similar to jacks. but they have no rule books and pretty much you make up things that you don’t know along the way. but i never knew what all of the levels were and what to do and how people in my class know all these deferent levels and i pretty much only know all the rules for four or five of those levels. So if you know any way to find the rules to a game called five stones, or çîù àáðéí, thanks a bunch.
Skully comes to Massachusetts!…
Skully comes to Massachusetts! See http://www.geocities.com/chesler.geo/Woburn/woburn_skully.html This morning I demonstrated Skully to my daughter’s kindergarten class at the Charles Goodyear Elementary School in East Woburn, Massachusetts. See http://www.geocities.com/chesler.geo/Woburn/skully_goodyear.jpg and http://www.geocities.com/chesler.geo/Woburn/skully_mahoney.jpg My most optimistic hope is that the game spreads virus-like through the school and the rest of the community. If this is not the northeasternmost Skully board in existence, it may be the most colorful. I used dimensions suggested in Hugh M. McNally’s rules here but "about a square foot" seems awfully big. Even for kindergarten beginners I reduced it to 8″ by 8″ and that seemed big. If the board is only 4′ on a side, 1′ boxes would meet! My recollection from Co-op City was a board no more than 4′ on a side, and boxes maybe 4″ or 6″ on a side. I don’t recall numbers in the Skull, nor did we play much more than a straight race 1 to 13 and back. It wasn’t a particularly popular game in the 1970s — paddleball was popular, and there were enough grassy areas that sidewalk games took a backseat. For the mathematically-inclined, I did use the rope-stretcher’s 3-4-5 triangle (with a tape measure and a metal yardstick, not knotted ropes) to lay out the square.
There were other simple…
Anyone know anything about…
—I can’t believe someone…
I bought a chinese jumprope…
I bought a chinese jumprope for my kids this weekend at toy r us in WI. The directions on the back said to start with the rope 6 feet off the ground! No, not inches, FEET! I remember playing on the playground at school. The school staff “out-lawed” going beyond the level of thighs because 2 girls went to the nurses office with “goose egg” bruises on their foreheads! Someone in the middle landed on the rope at a high level and the two “enders” smacked heads! Be careful when teaching your youngsters. I don’t remember songs we just chanted what we were doing ahead of the jump so the others could catch us if we were cheating. i.e., If you said “on” you’d better land on, and if not then you messed up.
My friends and I have been…
My friends and I have been playing stickball for years in the suburb of Cranford, New Jersey. We play on a grass field behind a local elementary school. The school has columns that mark out where the batters end up on base, and a beautiful 100+ year old oak tree about 100 yards in dead center that gathers up the tennis balls for the big home run blast. After testing bat after bat we found a winner. It is the handle of an old shovel sanded down and varnished. It is slightly thicker than a broomstick, so it doesn’t quite get the torque of the thinner bat, but with a solid swing you can’t go wrong. Not much else to add except that it is good to see that people still know how to go out and get a good game together with nothing on the line except for pride…db
For me the Bronx of 1953-1959…
For me the Bronx of 1953-1959 in the Throggs Neck Housing Project was also an innocent paradise. Our apartment building had whites, blacks, Hispanics, and everyone got along GREAT. If there were racial problems, we kids were blissfully unaware of them then. We were neighbors. It was OUR neighborhood. We took care of it… I was dragged kicking and screaming away from that HOME in 1959, at age 12, by parents looking for “The American Dream”: A chicken in every pot, two cars in every garage, 2.2 kids, and, most of all: A home of your own in the suburbs… When they told me we were moving I wanted to run away from home instead. 🙁 Nassau county LI was already $$$ out of reach, so we went to Suffolk county. A place called Deer Park which, for all I knew, still had Indians lurking in the woods! Who was I going to play stick-ball with? Or ringalievo? How could I leave the only life I’d ever known? I think that’s what we miss most, the carefree innocence of a youth in a different world, with friends that stuck by you cause you all “BELONGED”. I suppose in the long run, it was beneficial to the family to move, but I wish I could have stayed in the Bronx a few more years…