We played marbles also. We also flipped baseball cards. Even the girls collected them, don't know why....to flip I guess. For those that might not know what I'm talking about, this is a basic description of the game. There are certain skills that you might spend scores of hours perfecting in childhood, which are totally meaningless when you grow up. Flipping cards was once on of the top of the list, a critical childhood skill that has no place in the world of adults. It is an activity that can be done by anyone, but to be done well requires finesse and a truly subtle touch. Rules are simple; from a standing position, the first player takes a card, holds it along his side and then, with a flip of the wrist, lets it drop to the floor. It lands, with the picture facing up (heads) or the stats facing up (tails). The second player then flips and tries to match the card. If they match (both heads or both tails), player #2 wins the cards, if they did not match, the cards goes to player #1.
My dad worked at a ship building company, so sometimes he'd bring home steel bearings, the size of that marbles we called boulders, and they were prized during marbles games. I guess I understood the economic principle of demand though, and didn't bring too many of them out at once.
Marbles are classic, and even my grandsons had them. They may be losing popularity with children born now because I don't see them as much with my younger grandsons as I did with the two older ones. It could also have to do with preferences but I think the move to game apps is taking over completely.
I generally liked games when I was a kid. I wasn't into toys that much, but two things I did play with quite a bit were my Kenner Give a Show Projector where you could have your own little slide projector, and kind of watch cartoons come to life, and my Woody Woodpecker Talking Puppet. Even today my sis and I could repeat the phrases that Woody said when you pulled his string.
I had to look up Meccano.......we had an erector set & Lincoln logs that we destroyed over time. Here is a Meccano VW, that @Holly Saunders would die for!
So did I. Loved those huge marbles we call bumbuchas. ( image from http://gothicbunnychan.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-marbles.html)
@Joe Riley - Joe ! I love that VW - its a marvellous sight to behold @Krissttina Isobe - the marbles are beautiful, wish I had some .........
As a very young boy, I do recall playing jacks with the girls and marbles with the boys and yes, it was a lot of fun until my dad caught me with more marbles than I started out with. Even at the age of 6 I liked to gamble a bit so he took my marbles away. Shortly after that I found a new toy to play with which gives me some very fond memories of how it aggravated everyone when I played with it. My favorite toy was my ding-a-ling. Yes, every day when I got home I would break out my ding-a-ling and play with it for hours it seems. We were pretty poor so I didn't really have many toys other than the marbles my dad took from me so I had to play with the only other thing that gave me a sense of warmth, well being and excitement as well. My ding-a-ling! My dad would get sooooo angry with me when I played with it so long and yell at me to put it away or he would take that too! Oh My Gosh! That too? Even the neighbor kid knew that I liked my ding-a-ling because it was his first. Yeah, his dad replaced it with a horn on his tricycle and so he gave it to me to play with and eventually keep. Good memories.
When I was a kid, we were not allowed toys, birthdays, or holidays. But kids will come up with whatever their imaginations can invent. We built forts and tree houses. We played in the barn around our chores, and spent hours out in the fields playing whatever came to mind. With a hammer, some old nails, pieces of canvas, bottle caps, old tires, and anything else we could drag home became our toys. It never dawned on me that we didn't have 'toys'.
Those were our toys too Ina. It wasn't because we weren't allowed toys, we just rarely had enough money to buy them. We had the lake and the woods.
I guess you don't miss what you never see as a kid. I do think I had more fun than what today's child finds. Outside with all the animals, trees, and wide open spaces, nothing better. Living on a working farm meant we all had chores, so play was often mixed with those chores. I never had a doll, but I got to make the garden scarecrows. And of course there was the old mule. I never knew we were poor until I started school.
That's so true. We didn't have farm animals either but most of the time we had dogs and they played in the woods with us. I use to spend alot of time fishing. I caught supper quite often. We didn't know we were poor.