Recalling the children’s games of our youth
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/05/2018 (2711 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Two recent incidents got me thinking about the sports and games that kids used to play but which you seldom or never see today.
The first thing was when I spotted a hopscotch diagram chalked on the sidewalk as I walked down my street. My impulse was to start hopping but I came to my senses before I went head-first onto the concrete.
Earlier that day I had run into a man in a thrift store clutching a bag full of marbles. He was excited to find them as he hadn’t owned any for many years.

Spring always brought out the marbles on the block when I was young. A player might shout out “no pooning,” which meant no throwing your larger shooter at your opponent’s marbles and your knuckles had to touch the ground when trying to knock a marble out of a circle.
Inspired by having my memory jogged, I’ve been asking people from the sports community about the games they played as kids and the response has been so strong that it will take at minimum two columns to write about their memories.
Manitoba Sports Hall of Fame member Maureen Dowds and Canstar Community News managing editor John Kendle both remember playing Kick the Can when growing up, and former Thistle Business Girls curler Marie Primmett, who lives in Calgary, said she and her friends played almost every night after dinner on Kylemore Avenue in Lord Roberts.
To play, a tin can was placed in a circle and one player was selected to retrieve the can after another kicked it as far as possible. The first player had to fetch the can and put it back in the circle while the other players ran and hid. Once the retriever spied someone hiding, the two would race for the can and the first to arrive kicked it as far as possible and the losing racer became the hunter.
Canny-Can was another game played with cans. It was also called Tin-Can Cricket, as the cans were used as wickets and a tennis or rubber ball substituted for the much-harder cricket ball.My friends and I played in the back lanes in the Wolseley area.
Several people remembered Ante-I-Over, which involved throwing a ball over a building to a team on the other side. If the ball was caught, the catcher ran around to the other side and threw it at an opposition player, with a hit earning a point. Retired Gordon Bell teacher Joanne Pritchard said they used to play by throwing a ball over a barn in the Wilson River area near Dauphin, where she grew up. She said the kids in her two-room school also played a map game that they called Oyster Shells. They later learned the correct name was Hoist Your Sails.
Different bat-and-ball games were played in different areas of Winnipeg.
Pritchard’s husband Gibb, a baseball and hockey coach who grew up in Norwood, talked about playing Yankee Baseball, a game in which points were scored depending on where a batted ball hit the backstop.
Dennis Truss, who lives in Victoria, said he and lacrosse Hall-of-Famer Bruce Wisener played a similar game at Kelvin Community Club called Slaughter Ball.
In the North End, a lacrosse ball was used by former CFL referee Bud Ulrich and his friends to get an out in a game called Mutchka Ball.
“Great fun, dangerous and sometimes you got hurt, “ Bud said. “But fun!”
Memories of Sport appears every second week in the Canstar Community News weeklies. Kent Morgan can be contacted at 204-489-6641 or email: sportsmemories@canstarnews.com

T. Kent Morgan
Memories of Sport
Memories of Sport appears every second week in the Canstar Community News weeklies. Kent Morgan can be contacted at 204-489-6641 or email: sportsmemories@canstarnews.com
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