Party games and not dances, closed door and corner kissing, musicals, cross questions and crooked answers

            In the hill country where I grew up there were not a lot of things that were acceptable to the mores of hill people. This was in pre-television days and there was not a lot that a boy and girl could do that would not be censored. The big no-no was dancing. This was a sin that the people looked down on, however it was ok to play games. One game I witnessed was one in which the boys and the girls would stand in a circle and when the music would begin the game would begin. I had never been to a dance of any kind so I did not know what a dance looked like. But since television I have witnessed square dancing so that was what they were doing but it was ok because after all it was just a game set to music.

            Another acceptable game we liked to play was for the girls to go into a room and line up behind the door. The boys would line up outside the door and knock on the door. The girl on the inside did not know who was knocking and the boy knocking did not know what girl was behind the door. The girl would open the door and the boy and girl would lock arms and go outside of the building and walk around the building kissing at every corner. This game was played at night preferable in the school house since it was the largest building in the area. I don’t know if every boy and girl kissed because you would sometimes get paired with someone you did not like. I never did get paired with anyone who did not kiss me. The value of this game is that it gave opportunity to shy girls or shy boys to get to kiss and begin to get to know someone of the opposite sex.

            The most boring thing for me was the musicals. The people who could play an instrument or sing could participate; that left those of us who did neither to just sit and listen. When I could choose I chose to stay home.

            A fun game we played was cross questions and crooked answers. You divided up with girls on one team and boys on the other. You then separated and someone would give the boys the questions and someone else would give the girls the answers. You came back together and stood in line facing each other and the boy would ask the question and the girl would answer. You had to ask and answer the question three times without laughing. An example would be: Boy’s question. Does your mother let you kiss boys? The girl’s answer. I get the hiccups when I laugh a lot. Since the person making up the questions and the person making up the answers do not know what the other person is doing you can get some pretty funny answers to the questions. Then you would switch off and let the girls ask the questions and the boys answer. 

Playing marbles

            As a kid marbles was one of the games I loved to play. In fact my knuckles were always rusty from having my sweaty hands in the dirt so much during the time when it was warm enough to play the game of marbles.

            There were two games that we played. One was to draw a round circle in the dirt and place a large marble in the center of the circle. Standard size marbles were placed at intervals around the circle line. The placement depended on the number of marbles one had to play with. If you had a lot of marbles they were placed closer together. If fewer marbles were available the marbles were not placed as close together. Each person had a “taw.” This taw is a marble that you used to shoot with. Everyone had their favorite taw. Some people would use a steel bearing that was the size of a standard marble. Others would not play with you using their marbles if you were using a steel marble because the steel would sometimes break or chip a glass marble.

                   To start the game you would draw a straight line in the dirt about six feet from the center of the circle. Each person playing stood behind the line and tossed their taw toward the center line. The person whose taw was closest to the center of the circle began to shoot first and the next closest shot and so on down the list of players. The first player then shot his taw from where it laid toward a marble on the circle line and tried to knock it out of the circle. If you succeeded you kept shooting until you failed to knock a marble out of the circle. When you failed, the next person began to shoot and so on. When all the marbles in the circle were knocked out of the circle you shot to knock the large center marble out of the circle. If you agreed before the game began that the one who knocked the large marble out of the circle was to be called the winner then that is how you won the game. If you did not make that the rule then you counted the number of marbles each person knocked out and the one with the most was the winner.

            There are two ways to shoot the taw. The standard way is to pick up the taw then place your hand on the ground where the taw was. Close your fist up like you are going to punch someone then you place the taw in the crook of the pointing finger with the thumb behind the taw and flip the taw with the thumb while your hand remains in contact with the ground. The hand must not move toward the target when you flip your taw. To move your hand toward the target marble is called fudging. Another way I have seen people shoot the taw is to balance the taw between the pointing finger and the third finger using the middle finger as the flipping finger and the thumb to hold the marble in place between the first and third finger. You must still not move your hand toward the target marble. You must still have some part of your hand in contact with the dirt. The favorite way most of these kinds of shots are taken is to put the small finger on the dirt and the rest of the hand is above the dirt. I have shot both ways but was much more accurate using my thumb as the finger to launch my taw.

            The other marble game is a gambling game. For this game you draw a cat’s eye in the dirt. It is about two feet from corner to corner of the cat’s eye. You put a line in the center about a foot long. You line the marbles up on the center evenly spaced. Each person puts the same amount of marbles from his own stash of marbles on the line. They agree as to how many marbles they want to bet. You proceed as in the other game except you keep the marbles you knock out of the cat’s eye. Thus you use marbles to gamble with. Some boys ended up with a lot of marbles playing for keeps. My folks would not let us play for keeps.

The day the Sheriff came to school

             Boys will be boys, they say, but that’s not an excuse. I never did get the full story. I don’t know how it got started or who started it. It must have been really popular because only 4 boys did not get called out the day the sheriff and his deputies came to our school.

            They took the boys outside and positioned them a good distance from each other. They were far enough apart that they could not hear what each was saying to the sheriff and his deputies. They would talk to one boy for a while then go to the next one It was around and around but not a merry-go-round. Someone broke and told the sheriff what he needed to know.

Eventually they all confessed. So they carted them all off to jail.

            Of the 4 boys who did not get called out, the sheriff and his men did not even question them. Up front they knew all who were involved because every boy who was called out went to jail. The sheriff was not on a fact finding tour. He knew up front who he was after; it was just a matter of getting confessions. Someone had been watching and knew who the guilty parties were and passed the information on to the sheriff. Who was this person? I never found out.

            They had been stealing gas from the High School supplies. I don’t know if stealing candy from the school’s candy store was a part of the equation or not. I do know that that was also happening because I was offered candy that had been stolen. The boy who offered it to me told me he had taken it from the store. He had broken into the store on the weekend and had taken boxes of candy, but since he told me it was stolen I refused it. I felt it was wrong to eat stolen candy; but I did not think I was obligated to turn him in. That is how we Christians sometimes get our ethics all mixed up.

            None of them went into a life of crime. They, as group, were basically good boys who thought they were being cool. My guess is that some of them did not want to steal but did not want to be seen by their peers as “not cool”’