Freedom to Play: We Made Our Own Fun

LEFTY WILSON AND THE NAKED LADY

LEFTY WILSON AND THE NAKED LADY Reprinted with permission from Hal C. Sisson and Dwayne W. Rowe, Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons: Things Were More Like They Used To Be Then Than They Are Now (Victoria: Orca Books, 1994). A good marble player requires a good eye, a good finger, a good shooter, a competitive spirit, and a bit of luck. Hal C. Sisson was, and still is, an ardent marble player. Lefty Grade eight is about the limit of your marble playing days. You played in spring. Almost before the first robin started hopping on the lawn, out came the marbles. Then, a few weeks later, almost as suddenly as they had appeared, the marbles were gone. Most everyone played, and most everyone gambled their marbles, but by grade eight, Lefty Wilson and I were the two players most feared on the school playground. We were never friends per se, always seeming to travel in the different little groups that keep forming and reforming in public school. Except at marble time—then we were friendly rivals who met often. I spoke of a lawn, of which we had very little at Christopher. What we did have was a level gravel pit with some very hardy weeds around the edges, surrounded by a caragana hedge and a line of bedraggled trees on the boulevard. On this surface the serious marble players would kick out all the rocks and stones, then scuff the dirt surface as smooth, flat and hard as possible, and draw a ring. Serious poker players won’t play outlandish card games with wild cards, like Midnight Baseball or Piss in the Ocean, only playing Draw or Stud. So we too no longer played what we considered dumb games like Chasies, Holy Bang, Funsies or Bung-hole. We would on occasion play Poison Ring, Black Snake or Killer, which were games for the best shooters. The most popular was the real national rules game called Ringer. You had to shoot with ease and deadly accuracy to do well in that game. Otherwise you lost all your marbles. Ringer was played in a ten-foot-diameter circle with each player placing an equal number of marbles in the centre of the ring in the form of a cross. Knock a marble out and it was yours. 112 Freedom to Play You set your own rules when you played for keeps, and usually you had to knuckle a certain number out while shooting from the edge of the ring, before you could dribble in amongst the remaining dibs. That position could be dangerous because if another player knocked out your shooter you were out of the game. Well, you probably all know the rules anyway. The players inspected the agates that were being wagered to be sure that they were playing for approximately equal value. Nobody wanted to put up a spotless lemon corkscrew against a chipped swirl. The kids had an unwritten code of marble values. The Marbles The names probably change with the years. Marbles aren’t played as much as they used to be, before TV and all the modern distractions. But often what kids called marbles made more sense than the names the makers gave them. Names such as snakes and 7 Up’s, bumble-bees, the cub scout, the black widow or wasp. There were blue moon and foggies, and a gassie that looked like a puddle of water with gasoline in it. Playing Is Playing Games 113 Boys playing marbles in a Vancouver schoolyard, 1950 (ArtRay Collection, Vancouver Public Library, Special Collections [81192]). The Gamble Good marbles is much like shooting good pool. How you hit the object dictates where your shooter is going to come to rest. Just as in snooker, “English” can be obtained; in marbles the thumbs act in the same manner as the cue tip—under the marble for backspin, toward the top for topspin. Strategy calls for not leaving your shooter in the ring if you fail to knock out one of the dibs. If you stun the target marble, it goes out and your shooter stays very near the point of impact, ready to take your next shot at another nearby marble. The closer you stay to the marbles left in the ring, the more you clean up. But at times you want to strike the object marble on the side in order to get your shooter...