Puries, junkers and peewees, among the life lessons at Burley Glenwood

This one is for the folks at the Givens Community Center in Port Orchard, who asked for more:  

I wanted to challenge Fred for his marble, a purie the color of a flawless ruby. He won it from John during recess. For one month a year, right after spring break, the Burley Glenwood Elementary School principal allowed us to hold marble tournaments on the playground.

Puries were made of clear glass. Fred’s purie was so rich in color that you could barely see through it when held up to the light. Everyone on the playground admired this marble, even the kids who didn’t participate.

To challenge him, I needed a marble of equal or greater value. Not many marbles compared to his red purie.

I carried an arsenal, all handpicked from my collection back home. I brought them in my drawstring bag, which hung in my backpack in the coat cupboard. Our fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Johnson, would confiscate them for the day if we brought them out during class.

“Marbles are only allowed during recess,” she would say. Classmate Anne learned the hard way. Anne hadn’t followed the rules, and a marble fell out of her desk while we practiced our cursive. She cried when Mrs. Johnson put them all in her desk drawer.

“You can have them back tomorrow,” she said. The whole class groaned in disbelief. But Mrs. Johnson was a nice teacher; Anne should have known better.

My arsenal was a collection of the usual fair, and a few treasures. Most of them were "cat's eyes," clear marbles with a ribbon of color in them. They usually came in little mesh bags that moms put in takeaway bags at a friend's birthday party.

The next step up on the marble hierarchy were candies, milk glass with colored bits mixed in that always made me hungry for nougat. On a lucky day, I would find a candie mixed in with the birthday bags of cat’s eyes. Fred’s ruby was worth more than a dozen candies.

The day when Mrs. Johnson let us out for recess, our 15 minutes of pure bliss, we grabbed our bags of marbles and hurried down the steep, zigzag path to the playground. In the 1980s Burley Glenwood’s playground was a massive field surrounded by woods for miles, bigger than the high school football stadium eight miles away. The swings and Big Toy were located on the south side. This left us with the rest of the field to play our style of marbles.

We didn’t play in the traditional circles they taught you in the Boy Scouts. The whole playground was our marble ring. Pitting just one marble against the other, the goal was to be the first one to hit the other marble with one’s own. The rules were a bit vague. Everyone seemed to follow them instinctually.

I reached the bottom of the path, some kids were already in the middle of a match.  Fred stood there watching two kids with competing steelies. Steelies were ball bearings that parents brought home from their blue-collar jobs. Kitsap County was a blue-collar county.

“I challenge your red purie,” I said.

Fred scrunched his face, hesitating. He loved that marble. “I’ll play for funsies but not keepsies.” He suggested.

“I’ll make it worth your while,” I opened my bag and poured some of my most treasured marbles into my hand. “I’ve got some nice junkers and greasers here.” Greasers were puries with an oily sheen, a new style introduced to the playground last year.

“Everyone has greasers now,” Fred complained. But I could tell he was eyeing my junkers, a new type of marble to Burley Glenwood. Junkers were solid black with multi-colored freckles covering most of the surface.

“Maybe if you had a junker boulder,” he suggested.

Burley Glenwood kids classified marbles into four sizes: peewees, normals, boulders and resins. Boulders were a bit bigger than normal-sized marbles. To the right person, a cat’s eye boulder could be more valuable than any normal-sized marble. Resins were jumbo-sized acrylic balls that kids salvaged from those tacky lamps sold in the sixties. Resins were the most valuable. I only had one. It was cracked with a large chunk of it missing. I kept it at home.

“What about your peewee? Throw in a junker and we have a deal.”

My precious, aquamarine purie peewee! It was smaller than a normal, which made it rare and valuable. I hesitated, but the temptation to have both puries was too much. “Ok, you got a deal,” I replied.

We played rock, paper, scissors to see who threw first. Fred won and tossed his ruby several yards into the short grass.  Fred had thrown it too far for me to high with my own, signaling victory.

Instead, I gave my aquamarine a weak toss to the left, close enough not to get called out by the spectators for cheating.

Fred had no choice but to aim for my aquamarine. He missed. His ruby rolled behind a clump of grass just a couple of feet away from mine.

I got too excited and threw too soon. My aquamarine bounced off the grass, landing a few inches away. I stood there shaking, biting my tongue, sure that Fred was about to win two of my treasures.

Fred smiled, took a deep breath, and missed again. My aquamarine’s small size gave me a defensive advantage.

We continued our game for several more throws. We reached the edge of the grass clumps. Then I made my biggest mistake. My last throw landed my aquamarine in a patch of soft sand just a few inches away from Fred's ruby.  The crowd had grown around us and they were all whispering about the end of the aquamarine.

Fred picked up his ruby, leaned in, and aimed just a few inches above my aquamarine. It was all over, everyone knew it. Fred took his shot.

We all gasped. Fred missed! His ruby landed with a thud a few millimeters from mine. Nobody heard the telltale click of glass on glass. The game wasn’t over.

I didn’t even have to pick up my marble and throw it. Instead, I reached down and carefully flicked the aquamarine with my index finger. Fred’s ruby red purie became mine!

I held it up for all to see. Everyone cheered except for Fred, who stood there quietly in defeat. I took the aquamarine and ruby home that day, never bringing them back to the playground.

The above story is all true, except for Anne. She represents something teachers deal with every day: kindly holding kids accountable for their actions.

I wish I could say that Fred walked away with the junker as a consolation prize, but that didn’t happen. Instead, we all learned to accept our losses and appreciate later victories during those precious weeks on Burley Glenwood’s playground.

Carl L. Bivens Jr. is a writer and teacher who has worked in Kitsap County and around the state. He grew up in Port Orchard, delivering the Kitsap Sun, and occasionally submits essays for the opinion page.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Lessons from the Burley Glenwood Elementary playground