Maintaining My Marbles
By STEVE SMITH
June 1, 2007
I can't stand it. There on the front page of the May 23 Living section was a picture of some kids playing marbles. Except they weren't playing real marbles; they were playing American marbles.
The picture was like most references to childhood marbles we see today. You know, the Norman Rockwell-American variety, where kids gather around a circle and try to knock the other marbles out. I never played marbles that way. Wouldn't know how to do it if you put the circle and marbles down right in front of me. I'm willing to bet most other Haligonians of my vintage will tell you the same thing.
The marbles we played were, for want of a better name, "pot" marbles. We never called it pot marbles; it was always just "marbles." But since we shot the marbles into a pot, that seems as good a name as any.
By pot, I don't mean your mother's cookware, but rather a hole in the dirt, dug usually with the heel of one's shoe. Many a pair of Sisman Scampers trudged into the school room with mud-caked heels, thanks to this annual ritual.
Playing marbles was one of the main spring rituals in Halifax when I was young. When the air finally smelled like spring, you knew it was too late for hockey, too early for swimming, but just right for marbles.
Marbles weren't a sometime thing like yo-yos, bolo bats, and hula hoops. Those things only came around every three or four years. Marbles were a spring constant, like water pistols and baseball cards.
Marbles were usually played in a schoolyard and usually played by boys. Our schoolyard was a segregated affair: girls on one side and boys on the other. The girls' side was full of chatter and skipping chants. The boys' side was more rough and tumble. We played tag, of course, but we especially enjoyed games that were physical, like red rover or British bulldog. The occasional knocks or skinned knees were expected and not fussed over like they are today.
The first requirement, other than marbles, of course, was a good-sized piece of grassless dirt, relatively flat and not too rocky. The schoolyard at Morris Street School (now St. Mary's) was a made-to-order location.
It was always considered bad form to have to buy marbles, an admission of weakness, perhaps. I don't remember how we got our original stash of marbles; they just seemed to magically appear. (I probably swiped mine from my older brothers.) We carried them in cloth bags or stuffed them into our pockets so that our pants drooped down around our waist like those of today's skateboarders.
The goal was to take your original stash and, by skill or skulduggery, build it into a marble monopoly. Winning marbles was the best and most accepted way. Trading was OK, too. Beating somebody up and taking theirs was frowned upon, but it probably happened.
If you lacked the necessary digital dexterity, there was another approach. The Lee boys from South Street - Robert, Albert and Herbert - figured that using skill was for suckers. They built themselves a marble board and set themselves up as marble entrepreneurs. Their board had several arches of various sizes cut into it. The customers would try to roll a marble through one of the arches. The smaller the arch, the more marbles the customer would win if successful. If the shooter missed, the Lees would collect the unsuccessful marble. Every year, they set up shop on the concrete doorstep of the parking lot at school and built themselves a fortune in marbles without having to dirty a digit.
Not possessing their business acumen, the rest of us would line up to hand them our marbles. We never shot for the big holes on either end of the Lees' board (which only paid one-for-one), but rather for the tiny slot in the middle that paid off five-to-one. We seldom made it.
There were three main kinds of marbles. First, there were the large ones (we called them doughboys; I don't know why). These usually were worth five of the regular size marbles in the trading sessions that sometimes took place. The most common marbles were the ones we called cats'-eyes. They were clear marbles with coloured designs in the middle. The third type was mainly white marbles with swirls of colour that we, rather indelicately, referred to as snot marbles.
A few years ago, the coming of spring inspired me to try to introduce marbles to my own kids.
My years of experience as a parent had taught me not to approach this goal directly. "Hey, kids, I'll show you how we used to play marbles when I was your age!" would have brought groans and rolling eyes similar to those I get when trying to talk them into watching a good John Wayne movie.
No, to have any chance of success, I needed the Tom Sawyer whitewashing-the-fence approach. I found some bare ground underneath the spruce tree in front of the house and set to work clearing away fallen needles and other assorted leaves and twigs. Carefully, I patted down the dirt and removed rocks. By the time I was digging the hole, my activity had brought numerous inquiries.
"Whatcha doin', Dad?"
"Nothing. Just a little work."
"What's the hole for?"
"You'll see."
I then grabbed the family supply of marbles and made some practice tosses. As I flipped a few marbles at the hole in the ground, rules, forgotten during the 40 years between then and now, came rolling back to me. Closest to the hole shoots first, and they shoot until they miss. Then the second closest takes over. The one who sinks the last marble wins the whole pot. After the initial throw, the marbles are pushed along by the index finger (not picked up or flicked).
The winner then gets to call the next game. Games being "onesies," "twosies," "threesies" and so on. (For some reason, the language of marbles always involves "sies.") The winner could also decide if the next game would be straight (players throw their marbles one at a time) or scramble (players throw their marbles all at once). There used to be a litany of "no's" that players would rhyme off at the start of each game, such as "No footsies! No tweensies! No bumpsies!" but I've forgotten most of them.
By then, my children were entranced. "That's easy," they said, so we divided up the family supply and began to play. Shooting against their cagey, old Dad, they quickly learned the strategy of not always trying to sink the long shots (and thereby leaving your opponent with an easy sinker). Soon, onesies and twosies were springing from their lips as if they had been born to play marbles.
Soon they were hard at work on extending the course and upgrading the original hole (the bricks along one side of the layout give the whole setup a nice miniature golf look). When they came in for their Saturday night baths, I didn't have to ask where they've been. The dirt imbedded on the index finger of their shooting hand gave them away.