Dorbel -- the masses have spoken

[Jennifer L Smith]

(I know this is a little late...I'm behind on e-mail (again).)

Rolley-hole marbles reminds me of what I used to play when I was
in elementary school in northern Vermont.  We would stand on one heel 
and spin until we had dug a hole in the ground about the size of a
soup bowl.  Then we would walk away a few yards, draw a line in the 
dirt to stand behind, and throw our marbles toward the hole.  

The next stage of the game was to try to get the marbles in the hole.
We would propel a marble by placing one foot alongside it and 
kicking that foot with the other foot.  The person whose thrown marble 
had landed closest to the hole would go first, and play would continue 
in the order of increasing marble-to-hole distance, although any marble 
could be moved on any turn (not just one's own marble).  A turn 
consisted of one shot, but getting a marble in the hole was worth a 
free shot.  The winner was the one who got the last marble in the 
hole, regardless of how many marbles had been sent into the hole by 
other players.  And winner takes all.  (I lost a lot of marbles in my 
day, but fortunately sometimes we would play "funsies" instead of 
"keepsies.")

We even had an agreed-upon marble-value system.  A "crystal," made
of one color of transparent glass, was worth two regular marbles 
of the same size.  "Boulders," what people who play the other
kind of marbles call "shooters," were worth 10.  "Twenty-fivesies"
even appeared late in my marble career -- super-large shooters, I
suppose.  And, natch, any marbles caught in the open in a classroom
were immediately confiscated.

--Jen

[Fran wrote:]
> >dorbel (n) In rolley-hole marbles tournaments, a two-point bonus score
> >awarded when a player passes more than three holes on one turn
> 
> When I sent this definition in, Melissa asked me to explain rolley-hole 
> marbles to her sometime.  I don't know much about it.  I ran into it about 15 
> years ago on a family vacation in a state park in Tennessee, where they hold 
> the annual national rolley hole marbles tournament.  (They had a few 
> competitors from Kentucky, and maybe another state too, so they called it 
> "national.") The field is a flat, rectangular patch of dirt, maybe 6 feet 
> wide and 10 feet long (I could be completely mis-estimating this) with 
> several (3?) marble-sized holes dug in it, maybe 2 feet apart, in a straight 
> line.  The object of the game is to roll your marble into the holes somehow.  
> As I said, it's been about 15 years, and I've never run across it since.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Jennifer Smith

 jlsmith at linguist.umass.edu
 smith at ling.ucsc.edu
 http://ling.ucsc.edu/~smith

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~