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Way Things Used To Be 1
Posted on: Mon, 03/03/2008 - 20:05
Way Things Used To Be 1
Way Things Used To Be 1
Marble Season
Part 1
Nobody set the day it started, but the Saturday after Halloween we dug last year’s cigar box-full out of the bottom of a closet or ran up to Woolworth’s and bought new ones at a nickel per red mesh bag of twenty plus a ‘boulder’, then raced over to 88th and West End for the opening of Marble Season.
We shot all morning, ran home, grabbed lunch and hustled back. It was during the war and gas rationing had cleared away the cars and turned the street into a field for stoop-ball, stick-ball, punch ball, roller hockey, association football, and starting the weekend after Halloween, Marble Season.
Late fall afternoons, with the sun dropping behind the Palisades, a quarter the length and all the width of 88th Street would be choked with boys sitting, bending, crouching, kneeling in the darkling shadows, saying Ha! Ha! to the evening chill and shooting marbles.
My father had taught me low-stakes, high-skill marble shooting. You curled your first finger to hold your oversized boulder, rested your first knuckle on the sidewalk and flicked your cocked thumb hard to knock a regular-sized marble out of a chalked circle. If you knocked it out, you won it; if you failed to knock it out, you forfeited one of your marbles into the center of the circle. But he’d grown up in Hell’s Kitchen during the days of gaslight, cobblestone streets, horse manure and one marble at a time. He’d taught me rules normal people no longer believed in and marble games normal kids no longer played. Since his day, marbles had evolved into a low skill high stakes game. When the season started, in order to fit in, I had to give up shooting marbles the way he’d taught me. And over the years, I had to give up obeying many of the rules he’d taught me too.
(Continues in Way Things Used To Be 2)
__________________
oldtimewriter.com
oldtimewriter.com
MARBLE SEASON
Part 2
All through Marble Season kids from 79th up to 96th and from Broadway to Riverside Drive flocked to 88th street. No one came from Amsterdam or Columbus. We called the kids from Amsterdam and Columbus the ‘tough kids;’ they called us the ‘rich kids.’ We all went to P.S. 166 and Joan of Arc together, but we didn’t play together.
My friend, Blue Book, who kept mental stats on major league baseball and on everything that happened in our neighborhood, claimed that kids who played marbles were divided into Shooters and Shopkeepers. The shopkeepers put their marble up against the curb for shooters to shoot at. The shooters shot.
The rules were standard. Hit a marble from a quarter way across 88th, you won five marbles, halfway across it was ten, all the way, it was twenty. Some kids put a penny against the curb for Hit the Penny Keep It. Others had cigar boxes with different-sized holes cut into them. Shoot your marble through the big hole you won five, the middle-sized hole, ten and twenty if you got it through the little hole, which I never saw anyone do.
According to Blue Book, shooters were more adventurous, but less serious and they had shorter attention spans. When shooters grew up, they turned into traveling salesmen whereas kids who put marbles up against the curb ended up owning drug stores, dress shops and liquor stores.
“What about the ones who cut holes in the cigar boxes?” I asked.
“Banking,” Blue Book said and nodded to himself. “Yup, banking!”
He had a tremendous sense of conviction and his forecasts always interested me, although later, when he started betting football games, I lost faith in their accuracy.
As spontaneously as it began, Marble Season ended the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Nobody set that day either but somehow we all knew when the season started, when it ended, and all the rules. They weren’t written down either but we all knew that rebounds didn’t count and that in Hit The Nickel Keep It you shot from all the way across 88th.
There’s not that sense of order anymore--the way the rate of exchange was twenty for a nickel at Woolworth’s, and the same when you bought four for a penny in a private transaction. The way twenty was the average number of shots it took to hit a marble from across 88th.
Back then the retail price of marbles, the width of the street and the average shooter’s marble-shooting skills all fit together in one perfectly balanced system–the invisible hand of Adam Smith extending down a hundred sixty years and across three thousand miles to 88th and West End Avenue.
(To be continued in ‘Way Things Used To Be 3′)
I'd appreciate any similar recollections you have or any comment you'd care to make.
oldtimewriter.com