Category Archives: Other Games
Hey, what about us girls??…
Hey, what about us girls?? You guys may consider our games wimpy, but we hung out and played on the streets and stoops too! My memories are hazy and I haven’t thought about those days lately, so I can only provide titles and brief descriptions — perhaps it will jog someone else’s memory: I moved away from Brooklyn when I was 7, so I played the following at a tender age: 1. Red Light, Green Light, One Two Three 2. Giant Steps 3. Statues I can’t recall, though, just what these games entailed! Anyone remember? Of course, our basic sidewalk game was Potsy. Although it is generally known as Hopscotch, in Borough Park, Brooklyn it was always Potsy. And it was still Potsy when we moved to Old Bethpage, Long Island (of course, many suburbanites had emigrated to Long Island from Brooklyn…) Girls were into Spalding balls too. We bounced ’em off stoops and against walls, and of course did the classic “A, my name is Alice, and my husband’s name is Andy, we come from Atlanta and we sell anchovies…” You were supposed to go through the whole alphabet, but I don’t think I ever did. And now, a confession: there were times when I could be the annoying kid sister: Sometimes when my older brother played stickball or wiffle ball in the backyard with his friends, if I felt mischievious, I’d skip across their playing field, calling out in a sing-song voice, “Interference! Interference!”
Yeah … I know it sounds…
Yeah … I know it sounds deranged, but this is actually a pastime we spent numerous hours playing in the fall. Two player game.Possibly a local thing in East Flatbush in Bklyn. We had a nearby cemetery (Holy Cross) where Chestnuts were plentiful …. Basically you’d string Chestnuts on a lace from your pair of Chuck Connors Allstars (a.k.a. Converse)You’d then take turns whacking the other person’s Chestnut with yours & vice versa until one player’s Chestnut cracked and came off the shoelace. The surviving Chestnut was thereby a “1 Killer”. Each subsequent battle that you won with that Chestnut added a Kill to it’s lore. Nail polish was ferquently applied to the Chestnuts to toughen the outer shell. Sheesh. maybe the kids are right and we were deranged !
We spent every summer evening…
We spent every summer evening when I was in elementary school playing kick the can. Best places to hide were in the basement window wells and as high as we could climb in the apple tree. We also had a babysitter named Shirley Gamble and when she came to sit we played the “Shirley Gamble Game”, where she would hide everyone but the person who was It. My parents never learned that she once had my little brother (age 4) hang by his fingertips from inside the laundry shoot in the upstairs bathroom (the shoot ended in the basement!). How did we ever survive childhood?
OK I’m Jewish and grew up…
OK I’m Jewish and grew up in Brighton Beach, never even heard of Bocci till my honeymoon (’71) I remember that many parks had the sand pits for bocci (especially in Bay Ridge). Tried it out during our honeymoon and it was fun (kinda a like large size marble shooting)-so how about some good bocci rules- I live now in Tx they dont know from these street games
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Guess what? I still have all my marbles from the sixties. I don’t know how they survived but they are here and on the mantle piece. We used to play marbles but none of us knew any rules, so, we would make them up. I guess that’s the way it goes with marbles. In our old kitchen, the linoleum had buckled and my dad had nailed down the trough of the buckle. The coolest thing was that it created sort of an elevated highway for the marbles to travel along. The kitchen being an important place, my discovery of the unique properties of the lino forced a banning of the marbles from the kitchen floor. I guess that’s why I still have them. Last summer, I invited some kids from my block into the living room and they discovered the marbles. These two six year old girls had a chance to make up their own rules and play with my marbles. They are still asking if they can come over and play marbles. It’s great!
WOW, I came from the Lower…
WOW, I came from the Lower East Side, Forsythe Street and this was my favorite game. We called it Skell-zee. I thought it was a game that we kids had invented. No one has ever know what I was talking about when I’ve talked about this game. We used bottle tops and mostly used orange peels to weigh them down. It was a great clean game, of course, unless you laid flat down on the dirty sidewalk. We also had the park across the street where we would chalk the game down on the playing field. We also played iron tag.
> I guess I’ll have to play…
I also grew up in the Glenwood…
I also grew up in the Glenwood projects, 1952-1962 and I remember the “big kids” running around all night playing ringaleavio but I never knew what the hell they were doing. They were all over the place. I guess there was a jail somewhere. We moved before I became “old enough” to play, tho it seems to me it was all boys playing. What ARE the rules???
( grew up in Bluebird holler…
( grew up in Bluebird holler ,, knott,co. S.E. Kentucky,, with a lot of cousins uncles and aunts ,, oh yes there was seven of us children our dad was a coal mine, That was when they had to dig for the coal with pickaxes the roads were to bumpy (countryroads) to skate on and we only had one pair of skates so when one of the old coal camp houses got empty we used it to roller skate in two of us would each put on a skate and go round and round in the four room house,, with one foott up in the air. In the winter time when it snowed we didnt have ice skates, or a place for them living in the hills of Kentucky so we would get a wash tub lid the old ringer kind and slide off the hill we also got a few scrapes,brusies and broken arms, We had a feast of fun everyday ,,, And DEPRESSION,,, was the word for what the poor people were going through,,, like we had no money for fancy grocerys we grew everything in the garden and canned it in the fall so we always had plenty to eat in the winter,,, we tapped the maple trees for syrup , spring time we had the hills full of fresh greens we would go with our granny and pick a bag full for supper , in the summer time we also liked to catch june bugs and tie thier legs to a long string to let them fly way up into the air Gee what Memories having fun remembering thanks for the space,, COUNTRY WOMAN Kathleen (Turner) Mchugh