Tag Archives: Pennsy Pinkie

We used to play a game in…

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We used to play a game in the i950’s in charleston s.c. and we called it half rubber or half ball. we didn’t know anything about pensie pinkey’s or spaldeen’s we would take any kind of solid rubber ball and cut it in half. Man, what a fun game, it was played on the order of baseball but no running to the bases. Has any one out ther ever played this game? If interested I can give you all the rules. blueridgeart [at] blueridg [dot] net

Hey I am 48yrs old and for…

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Hey I am 48yrs old and for some odd reason I was talking to my wife about some games I played up in Baltimore as a child. We would buy a penn pinky and play on the steps of the school house. If you were good enough you would slam the ball on the corner of the the steps which would make that ball fly, otherwise if you hit the ball on the flat surface of the step yuo would have a ground ball. We chalked in bases and played just like stickball. I beleived we called this game curb ball…Did other places play this way?

I grew up in Long Beach…

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I grew up in Long Beach on Long Island in the fifties, where we played the fast pitch version of stickball…a “strike zone” chalked on a wall and a long asphalt school yard to blast away at. We used the distance demarkation method for single-double-triple etc, and the same strikeout, caught grounder or caught fly for outs. There was no base running; stickball in Long Beach did little for aerobic fitness. We used broomsticks and two brands of pink rubber balls. Preferred was the Spaulding version, prenounced “Spauldeen.” Amazingly, “SPAULDING” was imprinted on the ball, we could all read, yet swore by that pronunciation. The other ball was the less desireable Pensy Pinky, which didn’t bounce as well, and also a had greater propensity to be disassembled by a solid top-spin whack. Two halves flew from the bat. Was that a single or a double? I was not a good hitter because I developed a tendency to flinch very early on. In my first game, as a fifth grader, I ducked a close pitch but stood up too quickly. The rebound off the wall whapped me right in the ear. Talk about sting! I can still feel it.

I grew up in the Fredrick…

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I grew up in the Fredrick Douglas Housing Projects on 104th St. between Columbus and Manhattan Avenues in NYC back in the late 50’s and through the sixties. I must have been really under privledged back then ’cause I’ve never even heard of a pensie pinky or anything thereabouts. Oh yeah I played StickBall, Stoopball, Punchball, hell, even Whiffleball. We even pitched and hit bottlecaps, but the only ball I ever knew was the “Spaulding” better known as the “Spauldeen” and that’s what we used, except for whiffleball of course. Anyway, there was one thing we did to old, beaten-up, dead, on their last leg spauldeen’s just before sending them to that big spauldeen factory in the sky… Does anybody out there remember “Roofin” a spauldeen!!! Oh yeah! If you had an arm and thought you could throw it up onto one of the taller 21 story project buildings you were not to be messed with!!!

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

Wow… I just stumbled across…

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Wow… I just stumbled across this page! What a trip- back in time.. Yep.. I, too, grew up in Fresh Meadows… right near the old Food Fair… there sure were 3 ice cream trucks… Vito drove the Bungalow Bar truck… (tastes like tar, the more you eat it, the sicker you are!).. We liked Vito, he gave out ice cream sticks, the Good Humor guy didn’t! But, he had the ‘premium’ ice cream bars with the chocololate ‘bar’ in the middle! There was also the Chow Chow Cup, Mister Softee, later on Hoodie (late comer ice-cream!)… and, the knife sharpener… the rides… (whip!) and.. Thursdays,Ciro the Fish man… who, I found ten years later, repainted his truck to sell hot dogs by Francis Lewis HS! (ice got to his hands!!!)…. What else- egg creams.. well, you can’t really make ’em right unless you have Fox’s U-bet!Ahhhhhhh.. the school yard at PS26! Anyone here got a Pensy Pinky?

This is a great discussion…

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This is a great discussion because both the Spalding and Pensy Pinky were great in their own ways. There was nothing better than holding a brand new ball of either brand. The Spalding was preferred but the Pensy Pinky was great also. I recently bought a new Spalding at Toys-R-Us. I got a little of that feeling back but then it immediately faded when I saw the large UPC label imprinted directly on the ball. Why did they do that? Why isn’t Pensy Pinky still making its ball? I think the first engineering project we did as kids was getting a ball out of the sewer after it rolled down there. I think the lifecycle of a ball ends with rolling down a sewer. I remember after a large rain, some of the sewers would overflow with water, bringing up a multitude of the lost balls. It was a rare occurance and a picture worth taking.

We always used Spaldeens…

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We always used Spaldeens in the Bronx– One day, Willie’s candy store had Pennyslvania Pinkies for sale — no spaldeens! We bought one to play SLUG with — it was horrible. Later we did the Spaldeen/PP test — droppping them both to the ground at the same time. Spaldeen won — it just had that extra zip to it!

In the southern part of…

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In the southern part of Brownsville,”spaldeens” were the choice over “pennsy Pinkies”. When we could not afford to buy a Spaldeen (at 25 cents), we’d settle for a Pennsy Pinky. There were days we’d lose 5-6 Spaldeens under moving vehicles or to the sewers of the city. There was no more comforting logo than Spalding’s on their light-pink colored ball. It had more consistency to the bounce than the Pennsy Pinkie. It was like comparing Fox’s U-Bet Chocolate syrup to Bosco in Brownsville, Brooklyn.