Its been several years since I played that game and I carry a pocket knife every day. Brings back some memories.
Lovingly that was taught to my brother and me by our uncle and aunts. Back then.....it....was....meant to be a ....game.
We used to play it a lot during recess, a very long time ago.
Back when boys were all boys.
Back in a past century we wharf rats played a game something like this. We started facing each other 8-10 feet apart with our feet spread apart shoulder width or so. Then one would toss his fish knife, which wasn't a pocket knife but rather a 10 inch Old Hickory or a 9 inch Dexter, and toss it to stick in the ground between the other's feet. The other guy would then draw one foot up to the knife and return the favor. Mostly we got so both parties' feet were together before one or the other quit. We played for a quarter or a dollar, depending how much we had made off the tourists on the head boats that day. I caught one right in the top of my right foot and before it registered that it was, indeed, in my foot, I reached down and pulled it up to make my own next toss when Robert yelled,"Okay, you win!" and held out a dollar. Only then did it occur to me that the thing had been standing up in my foot. It passed between the laces of my shoe and left only a wee slit in the tongue. There was a bit of blood on the underside of the tongue and only a trace on my foot. It never did actually hurt.
In grade school in the late 1950’s we played mumbley peg at recess. Most of the boys had a knife in their pocket at school.
I was just talking about mumbley-peg with some guys at work the other day, and they had no idea what I was talking about. Funny, because both of them carried pocket knives.
Mumbly peg isn’t mumbly peg until play it barefooted!
Thanks for the memories and a good link to the site!
Played the game as a kid and later went to “stretch’, where we started with feet together and straight bladed knives (ie. hunting knives) were thrown outside of the opponent’s feet, forcing them to stretch to that point, until one person could stretch no further or would fall down.
Playing with my kid sister, I made a bad throw and nailed her foot to the ground. Fortunately it was just in the fleshy part of the outside of her foot, but it scared the crap out of me ...and her. I took care of the wound and her, as I was 7 years older.
We played the game everyday at lunch when I was in the 8th grade at Jr High
for later....
Boys don’t carry pocketknives anymore. Now they carry hand sanitizer.
Two words; Tetanus!
But that was back in a time when Americans were free, before the federal government decided to pussify the country
and before liberals embarked on their crusade to turn boys into girls.
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
-- Leslie Poles Hartley
BB guns were the first guns boys received in days past. My boys didn’t shoot humans or animals with them but they did get into trouble for taking potshots at laundry hanging on the line and putting holes in their sisters’ underwear.