Category Archives: Skully

As a kid, I grew up playing…

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As a kid, I grew up playing this game. I’m now 36 with 2 boys and I thought that they’d love it. I grew up in Newark, NJ and we called the game “tops”. I never heard of scully until I started researching to refresh my memory to teach my boys. I know there has to be someone out there who knows the game by “tops”. I now live in OK and I’m going to introduce it to my sons and their friends. It brings back good memories to read about the game.

We played Skelsies on 174th…

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We played Skelsies on 174th St. Clay Ave. Tops were created out of plastic medicine caps with melted wax (usually crayons), glass tops made by scraping the 7 oz soda bottles (10 cents)against the sewers and also metal tops which were taken from the bottom of school chairs. We created a skelly field by digging out the tar in the street or painting it on. Hit a killer, be a killer!

We called the game “SKULLZIES”…never…

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We called the game “SKULLZIES”…never heard it as “Skully-etc.”. This was circa ’63-74, Bay Ridge…56th St between 6th and 7th ave. We would do the melted crayon, sometimes melted over a coin for weight. I remember running a coke bottle over manhole covers too…if you were lucky, the top lip would come off ala glass ring. PS: How about the 4th of July in Bay Ridge! Literally sounded like the bombing of Hanoi!

Cork was really in the bottle…

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Cork was really in the bottle caps then; so we would make a “double corker” by carefully prying out the cork in one bottlecap and gingerly placing it in another. The ones with the little silver paper circles in the middle of the cork were the best. Then we would scrape the cap on the sidewalk until it was silver and shiny…

Skelsies. Man that was…

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Skelsies. Man that was fun. Growing up on 53rd Street in Bayridge, we played all the time. We would melt crayon in the caps for design and power. Also, we would take a coke bottle and if you ran the top along a manhole cover, just hard enough, the ring ould pop off, you would then rub the cut side down, and voila, it would glide forever. Unfortunately loaded caps could literally smash you. I live in Charlotte, NC now and was amazed to pass a skelsies board in the street recently, I never found out where it came from.

Many things come to mind…

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Many things come to mind when I think of skelly. Here are a few: 1)New Jersey, 1964. We stopped at Tony’s Hot Dogs near lake Hopatcong on a Sunday as I recall. I asked the man behind the counter, actually my dad asked the man, if we could have some bottlecaps. I guess some meant all because he filled up a couple of paper bags full. It was a great ride home as a 7 year old digging out all of the cork and couldn’t wait to show my friends my motherlode of caps. 2)I can still remember the smell of melted crayons in my friend’s garage as we readied our bottlecaps for action. We lived in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn and if it wasn’t stickball or Spud it was all day skelly marathons. 3)About 1970 or thereabouts during my last glory days as a pre-teen and the end of skelly as a pasttime, I pulled one of the biggest miscues of my life, to that point. My dad had just bought me a new pair of Pro Keds and I proceeded to wear out the sides in a matter of days due to several skellythons. Needless to say, it was back to discount sneakers for me. I wish this generation could experience all of the great street games that I grew up with in Brooklyn and Queens.

I remember playing skelly…

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I remember playing skelly with my friends in the Linden houses in ENY Brooklyn. There was a coke-a-cola bottling plant on Linden Blvd, my best friend and I road our bikes there and asked one of the workers for some bottle caps to play skelly. He gave us a whole bag full of new caps, back then it seemed like a bag of gold. We melted lead fishing weights, crayons and anything else that would melt to fill the caps. Skelly was the best game. Kids on Long Island NY are missing out on a great game…. Thanks for the memories…. Rich

Didn’t see anyone here from…

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Didn’t see anyone here from my Brooklyn… I think that is cause most of the people are still there saying, “Yeah I live in Brooklyn, so F***ing What???” Since I was born (Brighton Beach 1968) till I left (Williamsburg 1999) I lived in Brooklyn all my life. Most of my childhood I lived in the Sheepshead Bay area, From Kings Highway to Graves End to the Bay. Man, it was hard, fun, wild, sad and wonderful. So much to say about it, for the things everyone remembers Wed. fireworks (think it was wed. or maybe Thurs.) at Coney, to the things people would like to forget, like seeing a black guy get his ass kicked, just because he was black or for that matter, me getting my ass kicked cause my friend had a big mouth. Learned a lot growing up there about people and life. I can’t see myself having grown up anywhere else. Miss being young there, skelly and Peas and butter, asses up, off the wall, Also, off the wall in mellet park, kick the can, ringaleavio, War, red rover, all the different tag games, the local drug store that sold the best eggcreams, Wonderful Mr. Iseman (hope I’m spelling it right) who used to run a few movies theaters in Brooklyn like the Kingsway and fortway, who used to let me in for nothing cause my brothers used to work there, to getting my first job that Joe’s Pizza on ave. U (that was a good slice), BLOCK PARTIES!!! Remember those?????? Wow… man… Halloween in Bklyn was always a blast, there was the house on AVE X and 15th or something and they alwasy put on a show, then you have 4th of July, where some blocks you couldn’t even get through because if the big fire in the middle of the street with the mats and block busters going off (got a few wax loads in my gut, from time to time). Anyone remember Sheepshead Bay Roller disco? How about Romeo and Juliet’s Disco? All the bars in Bay Ridge? Calm houses at the Bay? Spumoni Gardens? Man, I can go on and on. I’ll tell you, from 1974 when I was only 6 to about 1988 when I was 18, was some of the best times and the worst I have ever had and I miss it all.

I’ve posted here a few times,…

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I’ve posted here a few times, talking about skelly, (how we called it) and Red Hot Peas and Butter (thought no one knew that one and I was wrong) and lately Skelly came back to mind. Now, I am 33 and I don’t have kids yet but I’d like to soon and maybe that is why skelly has been in my thoughts. That and, I an now living in Los Angeles and I see the kids around my block riding bikes but not doing much else and I thought, ‘Man, these kids could use a skelly board!’ So, I am going to do it. I have built my first skelly piece since I was 12 or so. Felt really good. Been keeping my eyes out for sweet pieces that would make good skelly caps. Now, I’m looking for a nice place to put the board. First I would like to just try chalk but later get a little spray paint and go on a midnight tagging run. I mean, could you think of a better way to do it? I’m sure that some of the kids around would get a kick out of it and I am sure that if people saw us playing, they would want too as well. Also, I thought it might be nice to leave that out here on the west coast before I head back east. Anyone ever hear of Skelly being played in the west??? I doubt it but it’s worth asking. Hey, how about any games that were played out west? Seems to me, from reading this site, that all the cool games where big in the east. Looking forward to showing skelly and a lot of other games to my kid one day. And yes, I had thought that skelly would make a great computer game, what are people waiting for. Damn I wish I knew programing.