By Carl Nelson
Growing up in Daytona Beach during my pre-teen years the three most important things were baseball, marbles and belly surfing in the ocean. Tennis, golf and dance lessons were foreign. Baseball was a constant. NFL football had not had its start. None of my buddies were tall enough for basketball, but if Phil Rizzuto at five foot eight and Pee Reese at five nine made the big leagues, maybe we had a chance, too. Baseball was America’s game. The surf and sand at our beach was always a short bike ride away.
There we competed to see who got the best wave rides on our chests and bellies. Surf boards were just becoming popular, but unaffordable for any of us. One friend tried to use an ironing board without success. Burying each other up to the neck in the beach sand was fun but it took a lot of time. A policeman on beach patrol put a stop to it anyway. Jogging barefoot on the beach to the Main Street pier got us ready for baseball in the afternoons. This is the same beach that stock car racing got its start in the nineteen fifties.
Then there was marbles. Dad had smoothed out a great place between the sidewalk and the street and it became the marble center for the neighborhood. We played “Rabbit in the hole” and “chase the worm” but most often we just lagged into a finger drawn dirt circle of marbles each of us had anted up. Whoever landed closest to a ring marble shot first. That person shot until he failed to shoot a marble outside the ring. Each marble he shot out belonged to him. Marbles had to be won, not purchased. If a mom bought a bag of marbles and the rest of us found out it would be embarrassing.
Marbles had to be won to have group status and acceptance. Marbles were either “shooters”, “purées”, (the pretty see through kind,) “boomers” or just “plains”. There were rules, like the back of your hand had to touch the dirt when shooting and there was no fudging. There was a small group of us regulars—Richard, Bryan, Walter and I. My sister was not allowed in this boys’ game, although, she was a pretty good player. No one wanted to lose marbles to a girl. Playing about every day we all became good shooters. One day a teenager stopped his bike and asked to play thinking it would be an easy way to add to his cigar box collection. Those of us who played usually kept marbles in old socks tied to our handlebars or in our jeans.
His name was Bill. Bill left with about a third of his sock full, vowing to come back and win his marbles back. He tried a few times more but had the same luck. As an adult Bill France became the president of NASCAR and a hall of fame member. Richard became a Catholic priest, a Monsignor no less. Walter joined J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI. Harvey joined his dad in the oil business and I became an Episcopalian.