I played skully in cypress Hills, brooklyn. My son would like to play it now but I can’t remember exactly how you played or the rules. I do remember using bottle caps filled with melted crayons. I played it on the street. can’t remember how to draw the box. Please post the rules and instructions or email them to me. thank you. Sure does bring back nice memories.
Flipping baseball cards was one of many gambling games played in Far Rockaway, N.Y. The others being marbles and tops. We had two variations: 1. Closest to a wall – Standing a determined distance from a wall, each player would flip a card frisbi-like with a flick of the wrist towards the wall. The winner would be the closest card to the wall. A leaner (leaning against the wall) would beat a card laying flat on the ground touching the wall. If two card were touching the wall laying flat on the ground, the top one won. If two cards were leaners, the most vertical card won. The winner kept all of the card in play. The big dilemma was that crisp new cards flipped best, but who wanted to lose a crisp new card? 2. Flipping Heads or Tails – By swinging your arm in an upwards motion and releasing the card just as the arm started up, the card would overturn and land on the ground either heads up or down. There were alternate ways of flipping the card, but this one was by far the most popular and effective. The goal was to meet the pre-negociated arrangement. Sometimes it would be simply to match the number of heads and tails. Sometimes it would be to match the exact order and number of heads and tails (ie; 6 heads, 1 tail, 3 heads). The number of cards could be 1 to whatever. Of course, if the matcher met the challenge, he kept all of the cards. As with the flipping dilemma, the crappier cards that you didn’t care about were more difficult to control. Gottem, needem was the universal language for trading.
In Far Rockaway, N.Y., Johnny on the Pony was played mostly on the beach. As described by others, one person would stand as what we called the pillow (as opposed to pillar). The rest of the team would line up crouched over head to butt with the pillow holding the head of the lead croucher. The other team would then run and jump leap-frog like to land stradled on the line of crouched kids. The object of the game was to support the weight of the entire team long enough to say; “Johnny on a Pony 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3”. Of course, the prevailing strategy would be to target one weak link (or unlikeable kid) in the chain and to have the entire team try to pile drive on that kid. More often than not, the pile would tip over sideways and fall off. Only brave and dopey kids played this game without shirts. The beach sand could file the skin off of your back when kids would leap as high as they could to crash down on you. In spite of the sand playing field, it’s a miracle that no one broke their back playing this game.
We played Ringaleavio almost every summer night in Arverne, Far Rockaway. Like Greg of Big Six Towers, I lived in a self-contained block of buildings with parks, benches, bushes and grassy areas in the middle. As soon as enough kids (boys & girls – mostly boys) showed up, 2 captains would choose teams and then one team would go out to hide while the other team waited 10 minutes or so. Generally, kids moved in small groups, although there were some slippery hard-cores who like to hide alone. The park bench that everyone started from, was the home base (jail). Kids were captured when someone had contact for the duration of saying; “caught caught Ringaleavio 1-2-3 1-2-3 1-2-3.” They would be escorted back to the home base where they had to stay unless one of the hiders could get to the base uncaptured and yell; “HUMPFREE-ALL!” Incredible game . . . started around 7pm and usually went til about 9.
In my neighborhood in Philly, we called the game “Killers”, but it appears to be the same game as described by the NY kids as Skullie or Skillies. I have great memories of rigging-up a magnet on a string and fishing bottle caps out of the soda machine at the Flying A station on the corner of 5th and Sommerville. An entire side industry developed around collecting the caps. Not that we didn’t take the game seriously. We eventually painted the squares on the street; it was a dead-end so traffic was limited to occasional trucks going to and from the factory across the street.
What a find! I was always interested in collecting baseball cards because I had some from my older brother, and loved baseball. Back in about 1970 or 71, the official “hobby” of collectibles was still quite young. I was starting to buy cards from dealers. By today’s standards they were quite cheap. Cards like Jackie Robinson or Willie Mays from 1956 sold for $6 or $7, as shown in publications like The Trader Speaks. My friend David and I, also a collector cards, heard of a sale in Brooklyn. We lived in eastern Queens, so we understood this would be a long ride. We decided to take the bus and train and each brought a couple of hundred bucks, hoping we’d get “lucky.” When we got out of the train, we realized were in a pretty tough section of Bedford Stuyvesant (2 Black Panther Storefronts within the couple of blocks from the train). David was black, and I’m white and though we both had a fairly good street sense, we realized we were a bit out of our element. At 16 between the long ride, train transfers and different neighborhood, it felt like a long way from home. We went to the home of a guy named Ronald Moore, an early collector. Ronald was both friendly and very knowledgeable about the collectibles. He showed us his collectible items and early hobby publications “The Sports Hobbyist” (circa ’60, ’61). Ronald had to leave town, and in order to raise some cash was doing a big “fire sale.” He had stacks of excellent condition Topps baseball cards from 1957-1962, doubles and triples of Mays, Mantle, Clemente, Kaline. Oh Wow! Hobby-heaven. We walked out of there, each of us carrying 2 or 3 shopping bags of cards. David and I were both able to make nearly full sets of cards for those years, with plenty of doubles to spare. It was only years later that I realized what a “find” this was. This provided the base for my collection as well as a nice economic cushion, which helped me for example, to pay moving costs into different NYC apartments.
My Mother and Dad and their friends took me to Coney many times in the 1920’s when I was little..never allowed in the water and never learned to swim..Mom and Dad were really strong swimmers..I played with my sand bucket..imagine that? We had fun..Dad drank wine with a relative and they both got ‘smashed’..really common in those days of Prohibition…that was a stupid mistake banning booze.’ John