Category Archives: Skully
I’m from “Da Bronx.” We…
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I’m from “Da Bronx.” We lived at 500 Trinity Avenue, directly across the street from Saint Mary’s Park in the 50s and 60s. This is close to 149th Street and Jackson Avenue. I attended St. Anselm’s Catholic School until 1968 when my family moved to Miami, Florida. I have great memories of all these games, especially skellies, king queen and ringolevio. I often think of the other kids who grew up in my neighborhood. We’re all in our 40s now.
I am a 23 year old member…
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I am a 23 year old member of the United States Air Force, and I am from New York. While “surfing the net”, I happened to come across your website. For years, i thought I was the only person who might remember “skelsies”. I used to love this game when I was younger!!!!! I have tried to explain this game to my friends, and they look at me like i’m crazy. Skelsies is by far the greatest street game of all time. I’m glad to see that the older crowd is teaching the younger kids about this game at the Brooklyn festival of ’99. Maybe one day I can get some formidable competition.(HA!) Here’s an addition to your list of tops to use: When i was coming up we would the hold portion of a meat tenderizer shaker. They are so skinny and flat that it was easy to fly over the top of them if your top was not weighted down. They also glided well also. Another popular one was the Kodak film cap. These gray tops had a section in the middle where we would put our clay to weigh the tops down. In my area, in the Bronx, these tops were known lovingly as the “meaty” and the “Kodak” respectively. Keep up the good work and don’t let “skelsies” die!!
I started on the Grand Concourse…
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I started on the Grand Concourse in the early 60’s and never stopped having fun after that. Stickball, Skellies, Johnny on the Pony, Kick the can, watching the greasers and the new hippies stare each other down. My twin brother and I were nice Puerto Rican boys in an Irish / Jewish neighborhood. All my friends were Shemtobs, McNallens, ORielly, Buffa, Mehan, Schwartz. It was great, I learned a whole bunch of different cuss words. We had fake wars with sling shots and bottle caps. We would explore boiler rooms and roof tops and would make flashlights out of Bean cans with a lit candle burning the tin till it was too hot to hold. We could watch the parades on the Grand Concourse from any stoop on the street, All the US flags would wave from the windows. We had about 30 kids playing stickball on Marcy place and many of us would roof spaldings atop PS 88 on Sheridan. It was the perfect Stickball Street. We could also open Johnny pumps with a stickball bat and a coat hanger and spend hours grinding bean cans on the concrete to get the tops off.(boy were we dumb) We also built scooters with old metal skates and old milk boxes. Build tunnels in the mountains of snow that was built up by sanitation. We would sing Beatles tunes to our 3rd grade girlfriends and run like heck when they tried to kiss us. We all formed the Bronx Super Heroes club. I was 007 – James Bond and my brother Karl was Robin “The boy blunder” Between all the Bronx buildings were miles and miles of alleys and basements were we all would explore. We also would walk on Jerome Ave. to go Ice-skating or go to the Concourse hotel to see Mickey Mantle as well as the Original NY Giants in the winter. Then one summer every one moved to co-op City and from that time on it was never the same. That was until I discovered Handball and life in the Bronx was good again 🙂 I live in Dallas now and doing well. My kids are popular here because they are from the Bronx. It’s cool here. People don’t know whether to love us or hate us. In any event, when we have to be heard, no one stands in our way. Thank you my Bronx. I could not imagine my life without you in it. You are now in me and I will share you with all. We miss you all! Schools: PS, 44, 88, 90, 67, Catholic: Christ the King, Sacred Heart HS (Don
In Bensonhurst Brooklyn…
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In Bensonhurst Brooklyn in the late 60s and early 70s we evolved our bottle caps from the traditional wax(or crayon) and penny filled ones to using medicine caps (pre childproof)filled with pennies and clay. We found that you could get a much faster smoother slide with better accuracy for longer shots. Has anyone used this type of cap?
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> This guy would melt down Lead Fishing sinkers into the caps > the sodder cap I’m assuming that both of these caps involve melting lead or solder into a cap. I always wanted to do this but my parents wouldn’t let me operate a soldering iron in my youth, much less a plumber’s torch (which you need to melt a lead sinker effectively). However, in my adulthood and, as I mentioned earlier, armed with a Home Depot credit card, I have melted a fishing sinker into a bottlecap. The blasting power is tremendous, and you need relatively little lead (I filled a cap “to the brim” and it was so heavy as to be nearly unshootable). You sure as heck melt all the paint off the cap in the process, though! When I got a little older and was allowed to use a soldering pencil, I used it to melt the wax/candle into bottlecaps… probably safer than using matches, IMHO! Kids, don’t try this at home. Please look forward to the Streetplay instructional video series “Streetplay Skully 101” coming to this site in the next few months. -Hugh M. McNally hmcnally [at] streetplay [dot] com
I remember spending many…
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I remember spending many a summer playing in Brooklyn near the “safety zone” between Amersfort Place and E. 27th (?) Street near Brooklyn College. The “big boys” painted at least one, and possibly more, boards in the street on that bend – now, if anyone knows that neighborhood you can imagine how many times we had to get up to let cars pass in their search for the elusive thing known as a “parking spot” near the college. One thing no one else has mentioned is the sodder cap. We evlolved from empty caps to wax ones (I can still hear my mom yelling at me for using her good candles) to wax and penny ones and finally – the ultimate – sodder! What a blast you could get from that!
I was just at a playground…
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I was just at a playground (PS 35 on Staten Island) today and I saw something I described to my 9 year old daughter as a “skelly court”. I had seen it before today but this time I tried to explain the rules to her, but a couldn’t remember all of them, so I decided to try a search engine and lo and behold I found Streetplay, with a skellsie section, no less. This is fantastic!!!
I played what we called…
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I played what we called bottlecaps outside Philly Germantown area . We used corked bottlecaps and we had a skull and crossbones in the center referred to as the poison box. I have yet to hear anyone in the archives refer to the Handspam werein you spread your hand out as wide as possible and undercertain cicumstances you could move your bottlecap from thumb to pinky to advance towards a certain box. Any pointers on this? I plain forget.. Carol
I certinly remember skully…
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I certinly remember skully when i was a 1970’s kid. One time my friends and I went on a pilgrimage in bayridge from 93st to 79st(?)to visit the king of skully! This guy would melt down Lead Fishing sinkers into the caps. It was amazing….back then! Anyone recall using lead as a weight?