Remember when boys would go to school, their pockets bulging with marbles, and those same marbles would work wonders when spinning around their moms’ washing machines?
I doubt one can find a game of marbles anywhere anymore, its having gone out of style when gadgets like Rubik’s cubes and little tile games made the scene.
We’ll get back to marbles after a brief mention of toys boys and girls used to buy at Funk’s and Newberry’s in downtown Las Vegas. There is a gadget whose name I never knew, that consists of about 15 interlocking numbered tiles. One’s job was to place them in ascending order. There was a blank spot that allowed the user to jiggle the tiles around. Those who mastered the numbers, without taking the contraption apart, were considered gifted. And they all went to Immaculate Conception School.
On the I.C. playground we began a game of marbles anywhere we found a flat plot of ground. We often brought along a “steelie,” an abnormally large metal marble that knocked everything out of its path. Once, someone I was playing against brought a marble the size of a golf ball and cleaned up. After complaining about the size of his shooter and getting nowhere, I said, “Then it’s OK to bring any size marble to a game?”
They all agreed. I had an idea: At the bowling alley on Grand, just down the street from the school, there was a machine that shined bowling balls. The brushes rotated in such a way that the machine spun the ball and made it glisten. As a regular pinboy, I was allowed to operate the machine perhaps once a week, and the rule was always to cover the machine when we finished. The “cover” was a 10-oz. ball that looked just like all the others.
I took that to school one day but couldn’t find anyone to accept my challenge, and that was great, as my bluff would have forced me to produce a realistic-looking bowling ball about the weight of a beach ball.
For as experienced as many of us were with agates, cat’s eyes and steelies, I must have completely missed out on the terminology dyed-in-the-wood marblists employed. Is anybody familiar with the term “fuche”? A former Las Vegan, Fred Padilla, used that term in an email about words we used as kids. Fred, a West Las Vegas graduate who now lives in New Bern, N.C., wrote, “In our marbles games the initial shot was to be shot from outside the circle. If part of the shooting hand passed the line or border of the circle, one would call out ‘fuche,’ meaning the shot did not count or it was a form of cheating.”
How did I survive years of marbling without coming across “fuche”? It’s a stretch, but I wonder if the word is a variation of “fudge,” which relates to attempts at altering results.
Fred’s email was more a reaction to a recent column in which I dissected the word “carrilla,” which refers to good-natured teasing. Among other terms, Fred referred to a familiar greeting, “Q-vo,” which is pronounced the way it looks and is sometimes rendered “Que Hubo,” and, according to Julian Vigil, my former colleague at Highlands and Luna, means, variously, “What’s happening?” or “What’s the latest?”
Julian said the term packs more punch if we tack on “ese” at the end. Both Julian and Fred say that Q-vo and Que Hubo are much more common as a greeting than the stilted “Hola! Que tal?”
“Hola” is a term we use only if we’ve taken a course in Spanish. Virtually every Spanish text begins with the greeting. Excuse me, but that is not what we in the southwest use. And if Julian says that’s so, then who can argue with one who was among the first American Hispanics to earn a Ph.D. in English?
Some of the older readers of this column might remember my commenting at length about “sapo,” another term Fred Padilla mentioned. I love his description: “Sapo was called when one made the unbelievable shot or something that one could not do twice in a row, like making that basket from half-court.”
Having made a few sapos in my day, I must disclose here that the easiest column I ever wrote was inspired by the late Henry O. Sanchez, our former mayor and long-time coach. I was attending a lecture of mid-wifery on the Highlands campus, when Sanchez came in, sat next to me, and told me about having made a sapo minutes earlier in his back yard.
He described having scooped up the basketball to throw to another player. But the ball went straight into the hoop instead.
That was a sapo. As I sat through a lecture on “crowning,” “dilation,” “effacement” and “epidural,” I was really churning around ideas about sapos.
Strange, but when I took part in three-on-three backyard basketball games, every time I scored was a sapo. But every point scored by boys like Jimmy and Clyde Apodaca or Leroy or Tony Lucero “was skillful and carefully planned.”
• • •
Fred writes that his youth spent in Las Vegas acquainted him with interesting neighborhoods. “Chiveros” was a district west of New Mexico; the area now containing the Highlands tennis courts was known as La Lanera, Fred surmises because of the cottonwood trees next to the Gallinas.
And of course, few grew up town without becoming acquainted with Los Commerce Street Raiders. I’d like to write a column on that group and I’m hoping someone with ties to the Raiders can fill in some blanks.