Did you have marbles when you were a kid ?

[Further]

What did you do with them ?

 

 

When did you lose them ?

[Ralphie ★]

[sheep_herder ★]

Yes, but really did not know what to do with them.

[maddmaxx ★]

Surprise!!!

I collected cat's eyes.

[Chris...]

We played marbles

[team scooter]

My wife loved playing marbles and jacks as a kid. Her grandfather taught her how to play. And she bought them for and taught our kids and grandkids how to play. Also board games, and puzzles etc.

[Further]

So ya get this big bag of marbles, then what ?

I lost mine somewhere along the way.

[team scooter]

 

[Wilbur ★]

Yes, they were taken away when my brother swallowed one.  

[petitepedal ★]

We played them...I want to say mostly in the springtime...but different than what team scooter posted.... one would make  a hole or a pot in the ground..with your heel...and we would stand back and toss the marble into an area around the hole...and then shoot to get the marble in the hole..sometimes hitting another marble at the same time..sometimes we would put a couple of marbles in the pot before we started...winner take all...

[Prophet Zacharia]

We had them, but never played “marbles”.

[ChrisL]

Really, am I the only one who broke shit by shooting them from a sling shot????

[KrAzY]

1 hour ago, ChrisL said:

Really, am I the only one who broke shit by shooting them from a sling shot????

Nope.. I did that as well.. also the larger shooter ones fit into a 12 gauge nicely

[late]

Not sure when I lost my marbles, but I'm pretty sure they ain't coming back.

[Ralphie ★]

We never played "marbles".  Like most things, they just sort of laid around the house cluttering things up.

[tybeegb]

10 hours ago, team scooter said:

 

Not even close.

[tybeegb]

It's long, but here is what I wrote about my marble playing days, and where they ended up. True story.

The Marble Kid

 

  There are some things that stand out from our past; when we were young and didn't have a care in the world except how much play time we could work into every day.  What we played at, at that time, wasn't important.  What was important was that we got to play, and that we had the most fun from the games we played; and we all had our favorite game.  For me, when I was very young, it was playing marbles.  I was a pretty fair marble player.  In a brief career that lasted until I discovered there were other things in life besides marbles, 1959 to be exact, I don’t recall losing very many marbles; almost always coming home with more than I left with; the playing kind of course.  There were some kids who sometimes thought I had lost the other kind as well.

  It all started one winter day when we were roaming around an old dump close to where we lived.  There were some mounds of dirt that we were all crawling over.  Someone found a marble; then another; and another.  There were marbles buried all over this one mound.  We spent hours digging them out.  We knew what they were, but we really didn’t play marbles since none of us had any.  But, this was something new to do so we started playing.  I can’t remember my first game, but I can remember playing as far back as that winter, before I turned seven.  The year was 1957. 

   It didn’t take long before marbles took over most of my playtime.  I remember one time when I got to come home early from school.  At recess I had run into another kid head on, gashed my forehead open, lots of blood, and had to go to the hospital for stitches.  The first thing I did when I got home was to grab my marbles and head over to a friends house for a game, headache and all, and played until almost dark.  I can’t remember if I won or lost marbles that day but I didn’t care; it was a whole lot better than school.

  I never really bragged about how well I could shoot marbles; which could have brought on a lot more challengers, and possibly more wins, or more losses, depending on how good they were.  I just took it for granted that I could win and they would lose, and that was that; no crowing or gloating.  I would just take my marbles, and theirs a lot of the time, and go home.  It wasn’t that I was modest, I just never thought about being better than the other kids; I just thought they couldn’t play as well as I could.

  In anyone’s life there are events that stand out from others; some are good, some are bad.  Out of all the experiences I had shooting marbles (the official challenge was “let’s shoot some marbles”), two stand out from all the rest.  I can remember specific shots from some games that were picture perfect; when the shooter would hit the target marble absolutely dead center, send it literally flying out of the circle, and the shooter would occupy the same spot and spin down, boring a little indentation in the dirt.  Those were the shots that made the game worth playing; win or lose.  There were a lot of those shots made when I played, but two challenges stand out in my memory, like trophies that only I can enjoy.  They will always bring a smile to my face.

 

The First Challenge

   

  One hot summer day, a friend of mine from school, who lived in another neighborhood, brought a friend of his to our neighborhood to play.  He was a big kid, twice my size, with a bag of marbles, and a cigar box with a hole cut out in the center of the lid, barely larger than a marble.  My friend had been telling him I could play marbles pretty good, and he had come to see just how good I was.  We only played a few games before he quit, and again I had more marbles than when I started.  Then he said he had a proposition for me.  He put five marbles in the cigar box, closed it, and set it on the ground.  He said if I could drop a marble, from nose high, through the hole, I would get the marbles in the box.  But it couldn’t be just any marble; it had to be a shooter.  He had seen me play, so he knew which marble was my shooter.  If I missed, he got the shooter.  Now, losing a shooter was a big deal.  It took time to cull out the best marbles from the bunch.  We didn’t understand the laws of physics, like density and mass, but we knew when one marble, the same size as the rest, had what it took to be used as a shooter.  So, losing a shooter wasn’t to be taken lightly.  And the ones I had came from that pile of dirt in the dump, and they were the older marbles, much better than the new ones being made.  But, being ignorant, the thought of failing never even crossed my mind.  I said okay, stood over the box, dropped my shooter through the hole, and took his five marbles.  Did it two times in a row.  I was up ten more marbles, and he quit, again.  He muttered something about coming to his neighborhood and he could play better.  I did, he didn’t, and I had more marbles to add to my collection.  Several years later he and I joined the same scout troop and went camping together.  He would always fix the best pancakes, but he never mentioned playing marbles.  I don’t think he remembered me, and I didn’t remind him since he was cooking me pancakes.

 

The Last Challenge

 

  Before school was another time to play marbles.  I was in the third grade, and was the only one who went to that school from my neighborhood.  Only one person at this school really knew where I lived or what I did when I wasn’t at school; the friend I mentioned previously.  That year a new kid, older by a couple of grades, came to the school, and he just happened to like to play marbles.  There was a vacant lot with perfect dirt across the street from the school, and they would meet there early and play a few games before the nuns called us to line up for class.  Well this same friend mentioned to them that I could play pretty good, so the new kid said for me to bring a lot of marbles if I wanted to play.  The next day I loaded up some marbles in my book bag and set off to school. 

  I don’t know where this kid came from, and I can’t even remember his name or face, but he had come up with a game I had never seen.  He drew a larger circle than normal, close to four feet across, poured twenty marbles out of his bag and bunched them up in the middle of the circle as usual.  I added my twenty, and bunched them up with his in a neat circle.  Then he pulled out a shiny black peewee and put it in the center of the other marbles, on top.  Instead of shooting the marbles out of the circle one at a time until they were gone, the rules were a little different.  You could play the normal way, one marble at a time until you had a clear shot at the peewee, or you could zero in on the little black marble, shoot it out of the circle, and win all the marbles left in the pot.

  One thing I was terrible at was getting the first shot; I could not shoot to the line worth a crap.  This day was no different, so I had to settle for shooting second.  I was sure this kid was going to clean me out, since it was his game.  But, to my amazement, he went for the peewee, overshot, and busted some of the marbles out of the tightly packed circle.  The peewee was still sitting on the top of the rest of them, undisturbed.  In a normal game, I would immediately go for the marbles that had been spread out from the pack; pick them off one by one until they were all mine.  But this circle was bigger, and a lot more difficult to get a high probability shot.  Of course that’s not what I was thinking then since I had no clue about percentages or odds.  Back then I was thinking this kid was honing in on the peewee, so I might as well do the same as long as I had a clear shot at it.

  I got down on my knees and elbows, in the dirt, in my clean school uniform, and took my usual shooting stance.  Unlike the other kid, who was using a bomber, I was using one of the few shooters I really liked; one from the dump.  Anyway, I cradled my shooter in the crook of my right forefinger (most marble shooters used the index finger to hold the marble, but I always used my "birdie" finger), cocked my thumb behind it, took aim, and let it fly.  To this day I still can’t believe it.  I don’t recall ever trying to do it again, even just playing around.  It was like slow motion replay.  That shooter flew in a slight arc into the circle of marbles, and hit the peewee square on, launching it off the pile and out of the circle. My shooter skipped a few marbles over and spun down to a stop.  One shot, twenty more marbles; the other kid just stood there gaping.  I could not believe it.  Fortunately for me, as I was bagging my winnings, the nuns called for us to form up in line, so that was the only game played that day.  I can’t remember playing any more at school after that.

 

  Where are my marbles today?  Well, in one day of total dumbness, when the china berry tree had given us the last of its natural fruit and we were out of slingshot ammunition, I pulled out my marble collection and used them to shoot at targets; birds, bottles, model planes and boats, anything.  I shot every marble I had out into nowhere.  Never to be seen again.  But as I think about it now, that’s where a lot of them had come from, a dump, where someone else had tossed them aside.  Maybe it’s fitting that that’s how they ended up.  Maybe another young boy found some of them.  I only hope that if that did happen, he had as much fun with them as I did.                                   

 

 

[Chris...]

10 hours ago, petitepedal said:

We played them...I want to say mostly in the springtime...but different than what team scooter posted.... one would make  a hole or a pot in the ground..with your heel...and we would stand back and toss the marble into an area around the hole...and then shoot to get the marble in the hole..sometimes hitting another marble at the same time..sometimes we would put a couple of marbles in the pot before we started...winner take all...

That is how we played too. 

[Longjohn ★]

I played marbles with my brother and sister. They were family marbles and when we were done playing all the marbles went back in the bag just like we would do with all the other toys. One day I discovered the neighbor kids played for keeps. They wanted me to play but I couldn’t risk the family marbles. I told them I would get my own and then I’ll play until they were all gone. I spent my allowance on marbles and discovered the neighbor kids sucked at marbles. I won so many marbles I didn’t know what to do with them.

[bikeman564™]

yes, my friend & I played marbles...or tried to

[bikeman564™]

11 hours ago, ChrisL said:

Really, am I the only one who broke shit by shooting them from a sling shot????

nope

[Kzoo]

13 hours ago, Prophet Zacharia said:

We had them, but never played “marbles”.

This...  I never had friends that played marbles.  I guess we all had them but no one played.  We were more likely to be pitching pennies out back behind the school.

We used to fry our marbles.  Put them on a hot skillet and they would fracture inside.

[Page Turner]

15 hours ago, Chris... said:

We played marbles

...yeah.  All the kids in the neighborhood played marbles when I was a lad.  Everyone had a favorite "shooter".

[Page Turner]

5 hours ago, tybeegb said:

Not even close.

...watching that made me sad.  

[MickinMD ★]

There were a few kids on my block really into shooting marbles, but most of us didn't get into them much.  We all had cats-eye marbles and a bigger, shooter marble at one time or another and became somewhat proficient shooting the shooter marble out of our fist (index finger) with our thumb to knock as many marbles out of the ring as we could.

I did it so seldom I don't remember much of the rules. A quick google says, "If the first shooter hits a marble outside of the circle, he picks up the marble and keeps it, for one point. He can now shoot again from the spot where his shooter landed."  I guess that's what we did.

[12string]

We didn't have a slingshot but had these pump up air rifles that did a fair job of shooting marbles.  Hard enough to leave a mark.  Not hard enough to really break stuff.  And if they did, it was my brother, not me!