Lakewood Lore

Marbles were Mario of yesterday's youth

Remember the games people played -- as kids, that is?

Marbles, kept over the winter in a cloth bag closed by a draw string, came out with the first smell of spring.

"All of us boys each had a bagful," recalls Richard A Baukema, 75, who grew up in Lakewood. "We called them 'brinnies,' and we knocked them out of chalked circles with our agates, which we knew as 'glossies' or 'shooters.'

"If you were really into it, you would cut off the fingers from an old glove and wear what remained to protect your knuckles from the ground."

Insofar as players got to keep the marbles they hit out of the ring, it was a serious game, thus spawning our common expression "knuckle down," or to do something in earnest.

Why, there was even a national marbles association that conducted a tournament sponsored locally by newspapers in cities throughout the country and ending each summer with a U. S. A. champion.

A second old-time favorite game was mumblety-peg in which a player flipped his picket knife from various positions -- wrist, elbow, shoulder, etc. Purpose was to make the knife stick into the ground each time. The boy who make the circuit without a miss was the winner.

"It was played mostly on lawns, but my gang liked to use the edge of a horseshoe pit in some vacant lot because knives stuck better in clay," said Henry R. Gerlach, 67, of Lakewood's Abbieshire Avenue.

Clinton H. (Jeff) Rundell, 71, a Lakewood native who had fun in Hayes Elementary School playground, remembers other now faded alternatives -- tops, Red Rover, and for the girls, hopscotch and jacks.

Kids often threw their best-spinning tops at spare ones placed in a ring. Here again, as in marbles, those tops that were knocked out became the property of the boy who performed the feat.

"Red Rover, Red Rover, will you come over" was the call that brought a runner charging to pierce a line of standing, hand-holding participants stretched out in front of him. Even Thomas Zigman, principal of Lakewood's Garfield Elementary School and by no means a senior citizen, remembers Red Rover.

"I once nearly got my arm pulled out of its socket playing it," he recollected, adding that it has been replaced by more organized games.

"Tag is still popular, but is now more of a capture and bring-back-to the-lair game," Zigman said.

"What was 'Cowboys and Indians' or 'Cops and Robbers' today might be commandos or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or some other movie or cartoon character currently the rage."

According to principal Zigman, boys love to trade things, especially baseball cards, but seldom fly homemade kites anymore, and few girls play jacks.

"Jumping rope, with its double dutch and other variations, is still popular although girls now, more readily than before, join the boys in touch football and other such sports.

"During free time, today's kids like to chalk playground black-top, which we let them do. Girls have forsaken hopscotch for more informal gymnastics, but they still like handclapping games," he added.

At playgrounds, sandboxes and swings remain but, because of the risk factor, teeter-totters are gone and high slides are gradually being phased out. Meanwhile, modern video games provide the younger generation with a plethora of indoor entertainment to replace the Erector sets of yore.

"We had to be more creative," Zigman observed.

This article appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post December 20, 1990. Reprinted with permission.

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