I was about ten the first time I played mumbley-peg . I had one opponent, my cousin Gene. He was four years older than me, so we never played when I turned twelve because he had his driver’s license by then and he moved on to bigger and better things. He still included me, but we did cooler things like drive to the soda fountain at the local drug store to buy cherry phosphates. Before that we had to ride bikes. He’d ride his and I’d ride my cousin Ruth Ann’s.
If you’ve never played mumbley-peg you should give it a go.
There are several variations of the game. They all involve two jack knives. Gene always carried one and I had my boy scout knife. If my mom knew I was playing mumbley-peg with Gene, mine would have been confiscated.
One version of the game had the two of us stand opposite from one another, feet shoulder-width apart. The first player took his pocketknife and threw it at the ground, so that it stuck into the ground as close as possible to his own foot. The second player took his knife and did the same. The player who stuck his knife closest to his own foot won. Gene won most of the time because he was most daring.
We played another as well. We’d try to stick our knife into the ground close to our opponent’s foot. Every time it stuck, we had to spread our feet further apart to touch the knife. Eventually we couldn’t reach out any further and we’d fall over. I was shorter than Gene and he could spread his legs further than me, so I did most of the falling.
My mumbley-peg experience flashed back to me earlier this summer when I visited the Grand Rapids Public Museum. They have a huge collection of autographed Detroit Tiger baseballs there. My grandson, Brady, has a collection. It’s nothing like the museum’s but it’s still special.
I used to collect baseball cards. My mom made me get rid of them when I went off to college because she didn’t want to store them. I kept a lot of things but not the cards. That was the biggest error in judgement my mom ever made.
Back in the day, my friends and I used to pitch our cards against the bottom step to one of our porches. The guy who pitched his card closest to the step got to keep them both. It was much like pitching pennies. The winner took all. That was my first experience with gambling. I never pitched Tiger cards because I didn’t want to take the chance that I might lose them.
There were a few cards in the Grand Rapids Museum. The one I was most interested in was Jim Small’s. I had a Jim Small card in my collection and now I play golf with him. We’ve played poker as well. Sometimes we play in his “man cave”. There’s a ton of Tiger stuff there including a poster size version of his card. I love seeing it all and hearing the stories from back in the day. He never tells unless I ask. It’s truly special stuff for me.
What he hasn’t said, but I knew, was he was thought to be the next Mickey Mantle. His skills were that good. He fell ill early in his career, and the illness cut into his playing time. While still playing, he sold real estate in the off season and that’s what he ended up doing as a career. That’s how we landed in the same community. If I hadn’t had that coveted card in my collection, I wouldn’t have known his story.
Mumbley-peg and baseball cards are a part of my youth that I’ll never forget. Today we all have too much too fast. That’s what’s wrong with the world. It’ll never slow down, but I wish it would. We need time to reflect on what’s truly important. It’s about the people in our lives and the time we spend together.