I grew up in Bayside, Queens,My Mom still lives in the same house.It was ringoleevio.I don’t remember thr rule. We also playe stickball with a broomhandle and a spaldeen.We also played punchball.skelly,boxball,stoopball and Chinesehandball The girls and sometimes th boys played Hop scotch,potsie?, jacks. Then there was Johnny on the Pony also known as Buc-Buc. I think all of this is almost gone
I grew up in the housing projects in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. There was an overhang above the front entrance and the mothers used to collect bottle caps for months and during a fine hot day in summer would stand on top of the overhang and yell bottle caps.We would come running and the filled cigar box was emptied in front of the door. The prize caps were White Rock and solid gold or silver. My father made his own lead sinkers for fishing and my caps were filled with the lead. I could blast anyone out of the skelly box. (We called to the center jail). someone used to come from the Bronx to play me – maybe he would visit his grandmother too!)
I grew up in Ridgewood, Brooklyn during the late sixties and we used to play Skellsy amidst the street traffic. We never filled our caps with any kind of substance, but my buddy Joe, who grew up in Howard Beach tells me he used to melt crayon wax into his caps for added weight. He and I have debated for years the correct name of this beloved game. He called it skullys and I called it Skellsy. I guess we were both right.
I remember the board like this: …………3………..5……….1 . …………7………..9……….8 . …………2………..6……….4 . . . . . . . . . . . ……………..———- ……………..start line . . There were 4 triangular boxes drawn around the 9 which was the “moat”. Does anyone remeber this board from their park? I would like some kind of confirmation, but I think I’m close enough. I plan on painting this board in my driveway before my kids outgrow the potentioal for playing. Thanks for the web site. Grape
Hi Grape, The WLIW documentary “New York: The Way It Was (The Bronx)” has brief footage of a 9-boxed skully board. As I recall, it was like the board in the rules I’ve written, but it had 1-2-3-4 in the corners, 5-6-7-8 along the edges (between the corners), and 9 in dead center, surrounded by some circular thing which, I presume, serves as the skull. If you have any further insight into “9-box Skully” (my new term!), please post them here! -Hugh M. McNally Skully Central discussion moderator
Wow. Much thanks to Hugh for inviting to this outstanding site. Just read through the discussions and glad to see so many remember the game. I played in “Da Bronx” in the seventies. I took a picture in ’94 of the old scully board we played on as youths in the Bronx Park near 219th Street. The URL is: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Studio/2561/scullpic.jpg While some used the sodatops with wax, the cap of choice was the “Push-UP” which we filled with clay. I had various caps (some heavy for blasting, others lighter for traveling great distances) but my primary cap was the “king checker.” The king checker was made of gold/yellow clay with a small plastic crown. We kept records and I was #3 on my block with a pair of Jamaican brothers as the two best. I once had the eldest trapped in ‘scully’ and would have easily beaten him but alas I was too kind, knocked him out of scully, and he came back to beat me. Every once in a while, like a habit that won’t die, I throw down a cap on the ground and see if my accuracy is up to par. I would certainly like to see in the future, an event of sorts where old time players could come together and compete. Maybe someday an Olympic sport? Okay, I’m reaching — but a competition would be very exciting.
Let’s not forget about shining up those bottlecaps by scraping them on the cement sidewalk till the name was erased. Then we’d choose our favorite crayon colors and melt the crayons in the caps over the stove. (What a mess for Mom!) The crayons really made the caps soar smoothly down the cement. Between handball and “skelly” I went through a pair of sneakers a month. And our fingers bled too until they became calloused from the caps. Winners kept the looser’s caps! Woodhaven rules!
Hi all, Well–Mick Greene, the fellow who runs streetplay.com, is taking a well deserved vacation this week. And, not unlike Tom Cruise’s parents in “Risky Business,” he’s left me the keys… not to the family Porsche, but to the “discussion board adminstration” area of the site! Whereas Cruise drove the Porsche into the drink and turned his house into a brothel, I went and organized this, the Skully Central discussion board! I think my efforts are more, um, noble… I’ve organized things into three main areas: 1) current discussion (this page right here) 2) archived discussion (old messages, rotated roughly every month into its own folder) 3) an area to comment on the Skully Central site itself (as opposed to reminiscing about Skully). I’ve added a message at the top of all areas to facilitate navigating Skully Central discussions. Of course, please let me know if you like what I’ve done or not, or if you have any more ideas. BTW, I’ve moved a category out of the Skully area–the Bocci section. I see the theoretical similarity between skully and bocci, but they ain’t the same sport. The section still exists; I moved it to the Special Topics area of the www.streetplay.com discussion boards.