Marbles

Marble season was big. I don't know if any boy was not affected or infected. Perhaps it was the gambling bug as our mentors feared, who tried to keep us from "winning" each other's marbles because it was gambling, they said.

In the East yard, which was largely asphalt (although there was grass, sand, slides and tricky bars between the concrete adjacent to the front of the school and the asphalt that stretched to the fancy iron fence out front), near the fancy iron fence out front, circles for playing traditional games of marbles were painted yellow on the ground. But the ground was somewhat unsmooth so we never used them hardly. The joy of marbles was to collect the pretty things and the more you had in your marble bag, the happier you got. And the more of them that were big ("boulders," we called them), the happier you got. So here's how to build your marble dynasty: You take your little marble bag that came with 6 or 12 little marbles that your mom bought you, and you approach the front fence where the guys with boulders sat, back to fence, legs spread out, with their boulder set up near their crotch. You waited your turn and then from about 3 or 4 feet away, shot your marble (with a thumb flip) at the boulder. If you hit it, it became yours and you could set it up like they had done. But every marble you shot into his leg corral that did not hit the boulder became his and went straight into his big bag. That's how you got a lot of marbles and you had better have a big bag to hold them (with draw strings, of course) before you try setting up a boulder. If you were a fool, you could use a boulder to try to win a boulder, though it did make it easier to hit. You were really cooking when you had several boulders in your possession at one time, in addition to a big bag full of marbles. My friend Eddie was pretty successful; had a pretty big bag. I still love new, shiny marbles - especially aggies. And I still like to play traditional marbles - on a smooth floor. Skating on some you didn't see is pretty fun too.