Santa Barbara, Spring, 1960

Each year, games seemed to sweep through the school in fads.  Spring was jump-rope season and all the girls seemed to find and bring long (12- to 14- foot ropes) to school.  Two girls would swing the rope and one person jump.  Beginners just jumped over the rope as it was swung back and forth, but anyone with skill jumped "overs." Some of the sixth-graders could jump with two ropes turning at the same time in opposite directions. The jumping girl got to pick a rhyme and jump until she tripped or missed:

Down by the ocean, down by the sea
Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.
I told Ma, Ma told Pa
Johnny got a lickin' so ha, ha, ha.
How many lickin's did Johnny get?
1, 2, 3  (etc. until the person lost it and had to go out)

Or if you were really good you could ask for:

Mabel, Mabel, set the table
And don't forget the
RED
HOT
PEPPERS!

and the turners turn the rope as fast as they possibly can until the jumper is out. Or the girl jumping could invite friends into jump with them:

I love coffee,
I love tea,
I want _____ to jump in with me.

While jump rope was just for girls, marbles were for everyone.  I had a bag of marbles that had been Uncle Lee's.   There were five kinds of marbles in order of goodness:

peeries	steelies	flatties	catseye	aggies

Marbles came in two sizes, ordinary ones and 'boulders' The most beautiful and valuable marble of all was a red peerie -- clear and glowing like a ruby.  In all of Washington Elementary School, there were only about 5 regular sized red peeries and exactly one red peerie boulder.  Steelies were actually metal ball bearings and flatties were made of glass and just a single, solid color.   Catseyes came from the Coronet five and dime store and were very common. The aggies I got from Uncle Lee were made of agate stone, not glass and no one, including me, liked them very much.  Coronet only carried the catseyes and I never did know where they came from unless everyone had an Uncle Lee like I did. 

To play marbles, you set up an array of what you had and the person you were playing against got to use their marbles to shoot at yours.  If they missed, you got to keep their marble, if they hit yours, it and the shooter became theirs.  The red peerie boulder was briefly and gloriously mine when I won it from Wendy Burbrink, but I foolishly put it up in a game and lost it to Jon Stumpf.  He was smart enough to keep it in his pocket, removing it only to gloat and never risked it in the ring.

Skates were fun, too.   They were made of metal and were clamped on to your shoes at the toes and held with red straps at the ankles.   The front and back were held together with a wing nut and could be adjusted to get longer as your feet grew.

When you put the skates on, you had to use a skate key to adjust the clamps for the toes.  The sidewalk was rough and the skates tended to loosen up in use, so it was a good idea to take it skating with you that when the skate loosened up and fell off you could fix it.  Most of the girls wore shoes that were covered with some sort of nylon 'Velvet' and by the end of the Spring, you could tell who the skaters were by the places where the velvet had been worn off on the edges of the toes.

On Saturdays, Pop went to the municipal courts to play tennis and Roy and I often got to come along.   They had a soda machine in the office where you could insert a dime and then slide the soda across the rack and out the little gate.  Pop would give us each a dime and we'd each get to buy a bottle of NEHI soda.  The mystery red flavor was the best, but it was almost always sold out.  Purple was next best and orange a distant third.  Being mechanically inclined, Roy and I quickly figured out a way to hold that little gate open and get two sodas for the price of one, which left us with an extra dime every week.

One of life's real pleasures was caps.  Caps came in sheets or as rolls of paper that had small amounts of black powder sandwiched between two layers of paper. When I'd first gotten my holsters and guns, I didn't realize that they were cap guns, but as I got older, I found that I could buy a roll of caps, feed it into the guns and instead of just going "click" when the hammer fell, the gun would make a very loud "bang."   Just detonating caps in the garage by putting them on the cement floor and whacking them with a hammer was fun too.  Soon, we figured out that putting more caps together made a much louder bang and that there were ways to use them to make small improvised explosive devices.  It is a wonder that no one lost their fingers or hearing!

The boys played touch football in the street as well as softball and we all played four-square.   There seems to have been some dispute about how it should be played because one of the issues of the neighborhood newspaper that we typed up and published has a list of rules:

Some of these games may yet be played in Southern California, but they are not common here in Texas -- with the exception of football which is played with a fervor that borders on the religious.

My kids loved to skate, but used inline skates.   Games involving running and jumping are much less popular in our hot Texas climate than swimming and playing water games like "Marco Polo."  I don't believe that either of them ever owned a marble and I don't think they'd know what to do with it if they did.