To Anonymous who wrote in June: Charlie Never Returned on the Mta was a song by the Kingston Trio. It’s still played sometimes on WCBS-FM 101 in NYC. I remember only two lines from a song we used to sing: “Hotta, hotta, chocolata……. Square cake, round cake, pizza pound cake..” Anyone remember this?
Johnny-ride-a-pony? Anchor man stands with his back against the wall (or in our neighborhood in the Bronx, the garage door) as his teammates bend at the waist and hold on to him and one another in an ever-lengthening human saddle. The members of the opposing team take turns running up to the chain of backs and leaping onto them as far forward as possible in order to make room for the others to jump on. The jumpers win if the “pony” collapses and the “pony” wins if all the jumpers get on and the pony holds. I was always the first jumper since I had great elevation and distance. I was the only girl to hit to two sewers in punch ball. Still a tom-boy, I tend to be assertive (I prefer that to “aggressive”) at the net in tennis and still have great speed if not agility at the age of 57.
In Queens their was only 1 playground and that was at P.S. 26. Sure their was others, 73,188, Jewel Ave but only 26 could you play softball, basketball, stickball any kind of ball at night because we had the lights. Even if the parky locked up we had the key to the parky room and turned the lights on ourselves, it was play all nite, or maybe some card games in the empty sand box. Those were the days.
How about potatoe guns. This was a metal gun in which you stuck the end of the gun into a hard potatoe which loaded a little potatoe plug into the gun (About the size of a tic tac). Pull the trigger and pow. That thing really hurt when you got hit. I believe they finally outlawed that gun. Too dangerous for little kids.
In Queens in the 60’s, we played the five box version of boxball described above. Two players stood with five boxes between them; you would first bounce it once in the box closest to your opponent (your fifth box), and then once in each of your fourth and fifth boxes, and so on. I’m not quite sure if I remember the ping-pong style of two box that Connie describes above. We didn’t play hit the stick, but I do remember playing hit the penny. I think you scored one point if you hit the penny, and two if you flipped it. Players stood with two boxes between them, and put the penny or other coin on the crack between the two boxes. We didn’t like to use nickels because they were heavy and more difficult to flip. :^) This was a mostly a game for younger kids, whereas I remember still playing boxball into early adolescence, when we weren’t playing wiffle ball or stick ball or just hanging out. Another favorite game of childhood was ring-o-levio, which I played from early childhood right through high school. Those later HS games were neighborhood-wide.