A Farmington Story or How I Got (and Then Lost) My Marbles In the 50s I was a marble fiend, maybe the best marble fiend in town. I would walk to St. Thomas school every day with one or two marbles in my pocket and return home with 30, 40 or 50 marbles in my bulging pockets. We played for keeps at St. Thomas. So by the late 50s I had a huge cardboard box filled with marbles, maybe 3000 of them. I added to my collection around 1958. Here’s how. The Mesa Shopping Center opened around 1955 with Barbers supermarket the anchor at the north end. They had a contest and asked people to guess how many marbles were in a plastic “sausage” about 2 feet long and 9 inches in diameter. I’m sure I entered and probably guessed a half a million. I was 8 years old. Later, after the contest was over I asked someone at Barbers how many marbles there actually were and was told 445. Flash forward a few years and one summer day I was at Hubbards Grocery on the corner of Apache and Wall across from the tennis courts. They had a very similar contest. In fact, the sausage of marbles looked exactly like the one at Barbers, so I guessed 445. Then, as was our custom, the Tucker family drove to Thibodaux Louisiana for the summer to visit the grandparents. We’d come back with tales about “Whites Only” and “Negroes Only” water fountains and rest rooms and nobody at St. Thomas would believe us. I had forgotten about the contest until one day I was in Hubbards and remembered. I asked someone and sure enough, I had won and my marbles were waiting for me. Only 222 of them because I had tied with someone. My marble box grew heavier. But as all obsessions do, my marble fiendness came to an end around 1959 when Billy Putman and I got on a stickbatting kick. At McKinley baseball field, while Little League games were being played, Billy and I would go out beyond right field and bat around stones with stickbats made from fence rungs. We’d toss a rock in the air and see how far we could bat it. Simple, stupid and dangerous fun, just the kind we liked. But one day I realized I had a box full of perfect stones for batting so I dragged my 80-pound box o’ marbles out in the back yard and started batting them to the northeast. A few days later I batted my last marble and it was time for me to get interested in real baseball – which lasted about 2 years. If I hit a good one it would fly over Navajo Street into the back yard of the poor folks who lived on the northwest corner of Navajo and Buena Vista. They had a guest house or something in the back yard and an especially good hit would strike the guest house or go over it. I imagine some superswats made it all the way to the main house. So I’m thinking about paleo-historians of the far future. Will they wonder about the hundreds, if not thousands, of spherical globules of glass found in an area just outside the Jicarilla Radiation Zone? I dunno. But if you were to explore the area in the map below labeled “Marble Field” I bet you might just find a cats-eye or two, a souvenir from when I was one of the best marblefiends and stickbatters in town. You’re welcome.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 15:59:38 +0000
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