it's been so long, I have no idea what i'm gonna write about. Probably something I already wrote , but who cares.
We used to play Skelly, or in the Bronx they called it Skully. I guess the both names make sense, since there were skulls or skeleton heads in the center of the chalk drawn court.
A big square was drawn on the Ground. I forget what you would call the ground, it wasn't a sidewalk. It was a wide path, paved with gravel. No cracks like sidewalks have. We would take chalk, everyone always had chalk available. Draw the big square and then 8 numbered boxes on the corners and sides.
in the middle was the 9 box , surrounded by 3 skeleton boxes. The idea was to shoot your checker into the 9 boxes in consecutive order. Then into all the skull boxes and then you shoot for killer onesy. Once you were a killer, you would try to hit the other players' checkers and they would be knocked out of the game.
You could always tell who was a skelly player , because they usually had holes in the knees of their jeans. Mothers kept busy sewing patches on jeans They even had iron on denim patches for lazy mothers who couldn't sew. My mom was a great sewer and had a Singer sewing machine.
Nowadays, they sell jeans with premade holes in the, we worked for our holy pants.
The checkers, they were soda bottle caps. They weren't like the new kind, they were like beer tops, the ones we use a bottle opener to get them off. However, you didn't want to use those caps because the opener would bend them. We would go to the coke machine where people would buy a bottle and open it right there. Those were called "smoothies". Some people had beer key openers and those made smoothies also. Now back in the day, bottle caps were lined with corks. An excellent checker was made by taking the cork out of one and doubling up another one , hence "double corker".
Triple corker was the most you could do. You would then stick thumb tacks in them , for color, design, weight and to hold the corks down. Do people still know what thumbtacks are?
My favorite checkers were crayon or wax checkers. We we would melt different color crayons into the caps. THey looked the coolest. Finally there were clay checkers. Clay was a household item back then, we took clay and filled the checker. It was heavy and could blast someone far. Or if someone was ready to blast you , you could switch checkers, put the clay side down, now you were pretty hard to move if hit.
It was a great game, and I fondly remember my ripped knee Wrangler jeans. Btw, wranglers were the best. they faded just right. Lee was popular but stayed dark blue, kinda sucked. Then there were no name brands, those weren't cool at all.
Oh yeah, we wore black leather belts, maybe 2/12 inches wide, with square brass buckles. They called them Garrison belts. Some of us used to try to sharpen the corners of the buckle, in case of a belt fight, you could do more harm. If you were "cool" you wore the buckle on the side, never right in front. Sometimes we would hang rabbits feet from the loops, or some kind of puzzle.
Motorcycle jackets were in fashion, and they had a lot of zippers to hang rabits feet from.
To get even more fashionable, we would go over to Carl's Motorcycle Shop and buy studs. We would put studs on our jackets and belts. Star shaped studs were common and round pointed ones.
We wore cuffs on our jeans back then too.
Depending on what age group, styles changed. Around age 11 we would hang at Lou's stable, We wore cowboy boots there, with our Wranglers. We would walk the horses to cool them off and get free riding time. We'd have to shovel horseshit also. My favorite horse then was Blackie, that horse would move without even kicking it. The horse I felt bad for was Rosie Buckin'. The horse was more like a pony, and she hated to run. But she would buck. Sometimes some mean older guys would ride her and hit her with sticks or pipes to make her run.. That sucked. Ayrab was another slow one but a big reddish horse. We would ride them out into the lots, the weeds the swamps. Down to the beach along Jamaica Bay. It was a lot of fun.
So , i'll end here, for now and hopefully get back into the swing of bloggin' again.
