Skelly, Skully, Whatever You Call It

Probably the top game to play in the playgrounds in Rochdale during its early days was skelly ...

Or was it skully?

I never found out the true name of the game, but I knew how to play it, and I played it so much that my middle finger cuticle on my right hand remains misshapen from it to this day.

You take a good bottlecap, fill it with crayons, leave it on the heater in your room, have the crayons melt, let it cool, take it outside, rub it so the bottom is flat, and you are ready to go!

The idea of the game is to move around the board to various numbered boxes until you get to the end.

In the meantime, you can knock your opponent's pieces out or move them to various spots on the board with a flick of your finger.

During the early days of Rochdale, this game, seemingly a variation of marbles, was all the rage.

I believe I read that it was actually created in the streets of Philadelphia, but the game kind of moved over here too, in different variations than the original.

My pockets were full of skully caps, and so many of the crayons my mother bought for us were melted down and used with these caps.

As we got older, the game started to wane in popularity, but back in 1964 to about 1969, just about every park in Rochdale had a skully board drawn into it using chalk.

The one in the building 9/12 playground was right at the entrance to the park from the back of building 9. You just walked into the park from that exit, turned left, and that is where it was.

Kids today would probably scoff at this game, but heck, it was better, and more socially involving, than playing video games all day.

Skully, skelly, whatever you want to call it, was just one of the now old-school park games we used to play in Rochdale, along with hopscotch, SPUD, and punchball.

We all have memories of those games, and I will bet those memories will come up pretty regularly among the conversations at the Reunion.

Time is moving fast, and you have just four days to get your payment in, so do it today!

And bring some skully caps; maybe an impromptu board can be drawn up, and we can get into that flick of the finger once again, for old times' sake.