Category Archives: Skully
The kids today have so many…
The kids today have so many sophisticated toys, and are bored stiff. We were fully occupied with so many games utilizing nothing more than a rubber ball, or bottle cap. I would love it if someone could refresh my memory on how to play the game of skelly and how to draw the court. I would love to teach my kids.
> if you landed on a line…
I gotta tell ya, the hair…
I gotta tell ya, the hair on the back of my neck stood up after reading some of the stories.I grew up in Jamaica, Queens( born in 51 ). The way the world is today, we need more sites like this. Skelly was the best! We would fill the cap ( beer caps ) with melted crayon then rub real hard on the sidewalk ( aerodynamic ):) After going around back and forth and making around center,( if you landed on a line you started over )the thrill of blasting was the best! This is great!!!!! Keep it up. I’m gonna look for pictures right now. Thanks
> rounded metal feet from…
> rounded metal feet from the bottom of > Catholic school desks This is the culmination of skully cap technology. Though I acquired some personally through the Catholic school route, my public school friends seemed have a wider variety of caps acquired in this way. I still have my cap (> 20 years old); I hope to get pictures of this and other artifacts here on the site in the future.
In response to a request…
In response to a request for the ‘weirdest’ skelly cap, I’d like to add that in Brooklyn, NY during the early ’70s we used the rounded metal feet from the bottom of Catholic school desks. Once we found how well they slid across the street pavement, many of the desks at school (St. Simon and Jude) were imbalanced. It quickly got out of hand and became an unfair advantage for those who were using the standard bottle cap with melted crayons (as the feet were much heavier). I’ll also note that most boards were made in the street with chalk (don’t remember any standard dimensions), but one year we carved a more permanent one into the tar with pocket knives. Thanks for the memories. Makes me think back on other street games like Johnny on the Pony, Ring-o-Leavy-o, Coco-Leavy-o, Slap ball, Box ball, the other game played on a box ball setup (2 adjacent sidewalk boxes) where you had to flip and/or move the popsickle stick or coin -sorry I can’t remember the name…
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Hello all, Welcome to the exploding world of skully! All the chat is gratifying… wow, I even found a “flicking-finger-game ethnologist” out there (thanks, Glenn Kuntz)! My first draft of the Official Skully Rules are now available in .PDF format only (too tired to do a decent HTML treatment right now): http://www.streetplay.com/skully/rules/pdf/skullyrules.pdf To read this document, you’ll need the popular Adobe Acrobat Reader, available at: http://www.adobe.com/ (just look for the yellow “Get Acrobat Reader” button on Adobe’s home page). I’m sure there’s mistakes, and maybe stuff you disagree with, but it’s a start! Let me know how you like it!
I grew up on 173 St &…
I grew up on 173 St & St. Nick. in Washington Heights back in the early sixties. Bottle caps with the melted crayons were cool, but for maximum speed and ease of shooting we used to rub the very top of the old glass soda bottles over the sewer covers until they broke off. Of coarse sooner or later someone would hit you hard enough to break it, but those old time bottles were pretty thick! Man this stuff sure brings back the memories!!!
I remember playing this…
I remember playing this when I was a kid growing up in Baltimore in the early 80’s. I think we used to call it skellet(s)? I live in nowhere Pennsylvania now and no one here has ever heard of it. We used to melt wax in them also, and when it got really hot out we would scrape the soft tar off the street and put it in the cap for weight and cover it with the wax. I sucked at that damn game.
I think the people have…
I think the people have spoken. I will upload the rules as I write them–the “installment plan” I suppose–and post the URL to them in this forum (the rules are far too lengthy to post here). I intend to do an HTML and Adobe Acrobat version of these rules, the latter for increased printability. Ken, no question is foolish. When you “shoot” a skully cap, you flick it with your finger and the cap then glides like a shuffleboard disk. After I am finished with the rules, perhaps I can get some photos if various techniques being employed…