THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, May 18, 1996 TAG: 9605180001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A13 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
When ``steelie'' popped up as one of the answers in a crossword the other day (the puzzle sought a seven-letter word for a type of shooter in games of marbles), flashbacks became the order of my day.
From school days and long-ago summers, I remembered steelies very well, mostly from seeing others my age knuckle down and fire off these deadly projectiles - large, shiny ball bearings really - at rows or clusters or scatterations of target marbles. I didn't play much myself (it was my brother, Bill, who had the double-handsful of marble winnings), but I watched a lot. And about steelies, I recall that some players would drop out if an opponent was using one of these as a shooter instead of the usual ``glassie,'' since a direct hit by one of the metal missiles might leave a target marble split or smashed to smithereens.
I found it surprising and nostalgically pleasant to be reminded of steelies. The only marble synonyms the puzzle constructors usually come up with are ``taws'' and ``agates'' and ``mibs.'' Rarely anything like steelies or glassies or - hey! - dinks, that last jumping out of the past, too, as my mind tripped back six decades or so.
``Dinks'' were the most numerous marbles of all in that youthful world I found myself re-examining. ``Dink'' was schoolboy lingo hereabouts for the common clay variety, and ``dinks'' was the name of one of the more popular contests among marble experts in those primitive days. This was a competition in which marbles were tossed rather than hit by shooters.
When a bunch of young fry got together to try to outscore (and win dinks from) one another in this particular game, the first step was to dig a hole a little larger around than a fist and somewhat deeper than that, forming a pocket that could hold a dozen or so marbles. The ideal piece of ground was a little hummock or a ditchbank, making the hole a pretty straight shot for the player in throwing position.
The marbles were tossed in batches, in gentle arcs, with a smooth underhanded swing, and the pitching was done from an agreed distance, perhaps several arms' lengths from the hole. Each participant, as I recall one variety of play, had the same number of dinks in the cluster he threw when his turn came. Sometimes his entire flying aggregation would go into the target hole with a satisfying kerclack; other times, some or all of the marbles would diverge from the flight path and skitter away on the flat surface around the hole. Rules might vary, but a player who plunked in the biggest batch was deemed to have ``covered'' (and thus became entitled to) the marbles thrown by his less-successful rivals.
Over the years, marble games in which shooters are used (even organized into regional and national contests) have had high visibility on occasion. But throwing dinks into a hole in the dirt? I haven't observed anything like this for years and years, right up through now.
And though I guess it's possible that I just don't get around to the right places, I suspect something else: that, for young people in the age of Super Mario, virtual reality and the Internet, almost any marble game (glass-shattering steelies or not), much less one played with little lumps of hard clay, is just too simple. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB