(Modern Mom) Hi, Honey. What were you kids doing out in the yard?
(Modern Kid) Oh, we were playing Mumblety Peg.
(Modern Mom) That sounds like fun. How do you play it?
(Modern Kid) You get a pocketknife and balance it on the tip on your finger, then let it flip down so in one turn it sticks in the ground next to the other kid’s foot. The closest wins.
(Modern Mom) You are grounded until you are on Medicare!!!!
Well, we played Mumblety Peg, when we were kids, that is, and no one ever got grounded and as best I remember, no toes were lost to pocketknives. We all had pocketknives back then, mostly to whittle stuff, but being industrious, we often used our knives to play games. Sometimes we flipped the knives from our hands and sometimes we just threw the knives toward our opponent’s foot. If it didn’t stick straight up, you were out.
Freddie Arnold and I played Mumblety Peg a lot, but with more serious weapons. One Saturday after a Superman Serial at the Palace Theater in Beckley, we walked into Al Cohen’s Pawn Shop and saw genuine steel daggers for sale – and they were just a buck apiece. Freddie and I dug into our savings of nickels, dimes and quarters and somehow produced a dollar each, bought the daggers and took them home. It was game on with Mumblety Peg
Those daggers – I think they were made by Wham-O – were 8-inch pieces of solid steel with sharp blades and leather-wrapped handles. After sticking the daggers within centimeters of our sneakers, we upped the ante and began throwing them at Mrs. Meadow’s maple tree – like Tarzan. We actually got pretty good, sticking our knives in the tree from as far as 12 feet.
We also shot BB guns at each other in our makeshift baseball field – with our back turns of course. It barely hurt in the seat of the britches but stung a bit on the neck. The ultimate challenge came when we gathered a bunch of kids in a tight circle, and I launched an arrow from my long bow straight up in the air. Then we all hauled ass, not knowing exactly where the arrow would fall. That was exciting.
Mumblety Peg with pocketknives? Meh. It was pretty boring.
