Editor’s note: We have heard from so many readers who enjoyed reading Bill Boyd’s columns about growing up in Marysville during the 1930s and ‘40s that we are going to rerun columns 1 through 52 on Fridays for the next year.
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Watch out for Jimmy Dean
There’s a mailbox not far from our house, and I took a handful of letters there this morning. On the way, I passed an elementary school, and the kids were playing outdoors during recess. As I listened to them playing, it occurred to me that one or two kids yelling and screaming can be annoying at times. But when you have a hundred or more doing the same thing, it is a marvelous sound. There were boys yelling, girls screaming, and a lot of laughing. Put it all together, and it is one of the sweetest sounds on earth.
So I stood outside the fence that surrounds the playground and just listened for a few minutes. As I stood there, it occurred to me that these kids were doing the same things that I did at recess more than 70 years ago in Marysville. They were playing on the swings and sliding board. There were games of tag and dodgeball. They were turning cartwheels and some were just lying in the grass talking or singing. I guess some things haven’t changed very much over the years … except for one thing. During the 1930s one of the most popular recess activities among boys was a game of marbles. But you don’t often see that nowadays.
Just about all of my friends carried a marble bag to school, full of cat’s eyes, aggies and clearies. When they got to school they put the bag in their desk or in their locker, and they got it out as soon as the bell rang for recess. When I left for school each morning, I first checked to make sure I had three things – my books, my lunch, and my bag of marbles. I attended West Elementary School at the corner of S. Court and W. Seventh Streets. It sat a bit to the south behind the Marysville Public Library.
Between these two buildings, directly behind the library, there was an area where most of the marble games were held during recess. The heavy foot traffic had long ago killed all of the grass, and the flat bare soil made it ideal for marbles.
You could quickly draw a circle in the dirt and you were ready to play. The size of the circle depended upon how many kids were in the game. If only two players were involved, a small circle would be fine. If there were three or four, then a larger circle was needed. Each player dropped two or three marbles into the circle as his “ante.” Then the players took turns trying to knock marbles out of the circle with their own “shooter” marble. Whoever knocked a marble out of the ring got to keep it. And he got one more shot.
Some kids were better marble players than others. I was pretty average, winning a few marbles one day, only to lose a few the next day. So my marble supply stayed pretty constant.
There was a kid one year ahead of me in school named Jimmy Dean. He was small in size, probably the smallest kid in his class, but Jimmy was the Michael Jordan of marbles. In fact, I would say he made marbles an “art form.” To knock a marble out of the circle, most kids needed to have their shooter marble pretty close to the one they were shooting at. Not Jimmy. He could take aim at a marble maybe a foot or more away and hit it dead on, knocking it cleanly out of the ring. And when his shooter was closer to his target, he could put spin on it so that it not only knocked the target out of the ring, but also positioned itself for the best possible shot at the next marble. For this reason Jimmy would come to school each morning with only a few marbles and go home after school with a whole bag full.
My first contact with Jimmy Dean was a game with four of us. We each dropped two marbles into the ring for a total of eight marbles. Jimmy had the first shot and he completely ran the table, taking all eight marbles. The rest of us never got a shot.
After that experience, I decided that I would try to learn from Jimmy. I watched all the details of how he positioned his hand and how he cradled his shooter in his bent index finger. I watched the position of his thumb just prior to launching his shooter. Then I went home to practice those techniques. That night I made a ring out of string on the living room rug and tried to put what I had observed into practice. But no matter how hard I tried, I just didn’t have the hand of a world-class marbles player. Some of the kids said that Jimmy’s hand was double jointed, but I never put much stock in that. I think he was just “marbles gifted.”
It is odd, I suppose, that all of these memories were triggered by my experience at the school playground this morning. But it was nice revisiting those years at Marysville West Elementary School. They were good years, and I learned a lot in that school building. I learned how to read and write. I learned how to solve math problems. And on top of all that, I learned never to play marbles with Jimmy Dean.