Stories from Bob's Life

Though I do recall flirting with 4-square when I was young, and I was pretty serious about baseball and little league, one of my earliest athletic passion was shooting marbles..

Marbles?  Is that in any way athletic?  Yes, surprisingly so.   When I was in the 4th and 5th grade living at Naval Air Station Lemoore and going to school at the on-base elementary school, marbles was a big deal – and as a competitive sport, it had the special advantage of tangible gains from being good at it.  When you win at marbles, you win the other guys’ marbles. Marbles were like money – they were a measurement of how well you did.  I would leave home with maybe 6-10 marbles in my pocket and come home with more – sometimes 20 or 30.  Recess was always spent playing marbles, with occasional breaks maybe for tether ball.

We’d play “pots” which was kind of like gambling – all the players would agree to how many marbles each player would put usually 2, 3, or 4 marbles in the center of the “pot”  which was a circle drawn in the dirt – usually w about 3 ft diameter.  Then the player’s goal as a shooter was to shoot his marble from outside the circle and try to knock a marble from inside the pot out of the pot.  If you knock a marble outside the pot, you get to keep that marble.  You lose your turn when after you shoot, your “shooter” marble ends up outside the pot. If you succeed, AND your shooter marble stayed in the pot, AND you knocked a marble out, you got to keep the marble you knocked out and you got another shot, from where your marble ended up..

If you really were good, your shooter marble would strike its target dead center, knock it out of the circle, and “stick” where the other marble had been, which gave you very short shots to knock  other marbles out of the pot, one after another, and keep your turn.   It sometimes happened that a good player would clean out the pot – his one shot would knock out a marble and his shooter would stay in and allow him to keep knocking other marbles out until he’d cleaned out the pot.

Often, a shot would not quite hit a marble out, and the target marble would stop inside the pot but near the edge, which would make it easy prey for the next shooter.

I don’t recall how we decided who got to shoot first, or how the order was determined. I also use the male pronoun because mostly only boys played this at my school.  I do remember occasionally a girl player.

I also recall that certain marbles had more value – “clearies,” certain types of “Cat’s eyes” but most valuable and rare of all were “aggies” – marbles made of agate stones – those had been common when my father had played marbles back in the ’30s. .

Marbles were such a big deal that when my school held a championship tournament, my father – then an carrier attack squadron commander – got off work to come watch me his son, play in the tournament.  One of my proudest early memories was when I won the school tournament.  A highlght of my young life!

When I left Lemoore, I had close to a thousand marbles, kept in a metal box, which I still have and have proudly hauled around with me ever since, all over the world. And I still have my 2 aggies!  My grandchildren will inherit that box, and probably throw it away!