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The Knobbles, or rather Uic absence of Knobbles Is why I am sure the game Is no longer played. When I say absent, I mean hanging from the telephone and power lines on every street leading to the school grounds, the accepted field of play. Knowing there would probably be a game on any school day after school was out, all the Kids would take their sticks and Knobbles to school and the temptation to try them out was just too great to resist - result, the wires were virtually festooned with errant Knobbles thrown skywards just a little too enthusiastically. Although the mind has trouble recalling many childhood experiences, some others, often trivial things, stand out very clearly and 1 remember the number of sets of Knobbies hanging from the wires in just one block close to the school grounds. There were 16 on the telephone wires, plus some half dozen on the higher power lines. The loss was hardly monumental, since replacement came easy. As to the game itself, today 1 suppose it would be called unstructured because it was haphazard at best. There were no rules as to the number of players except that everyone wishing to play was picked by one team or the other, and if in total there was an odd number of boys, well, one team ended up with extra and that was that. We played on the soccer pitch, using their goals for the same purpose. We had no specific person playing as goalie - it was up to the defenders to repel attacks on the goal by knocking the Knobby off the offensive player's stick, jostling him as he shot. There was no semblance of uniforms, no schedules, no league and basically nothing but just good fun. The basic object of the exercise was to twirl the Knobby on your stick and release it so as to pass it in the air to a member of your team closer to the enemy goal. You would have thought that the big kids would have had a definite advantage, but it didn't work out that way. The smaller boys tended to be faster and more dexterous, and could usually pass and shoot with greater accuracy. I remember that 1 envied the left handed kids who were harder to check. And one boy had what we called a "cockle" eye, which his parents no doubt lamented, but we thought he was lucky as you could never tell which way he was really looking. I can't remember anyone getting seriously hurt, although you always went home with skinned knuckles, the odd split finger, lots of bruises and a very occasional black eye, a real badge of honor, Something tndt puzzles me is why Knobbies ' just seemed to fade out. 1 can understand growing out of it myself, but it seemed as though when I stopped playing, probably sometime after completing grade 7, the game stopped being played by younger boys. I can't really believe that was true, but chat's my recollection. And 1 know that some 30 years later when I asked my son, then in grade 6 or so, "Don't you guys eve^' play Knobbies?" 1 was met with a blank look 1 wonder if it's played anywhere today - I doubt it, and it's a real shame. It was the ideal boys' game, rough and tumble but not dangerous, no adult involvement or participation. Perhaps as a father I felt it would be an infringement on a boy's world to teach him the loose rules. Maybe he was already too sophisticated, too much caught up in organized baseball, soccer, ice hockey? Well, I won't be so shy with my two grandsons - from my memories, no youngster worth his salt should be denied the pure fun of Knobbies just because he's never heard about it. PEC-C’Y HERE AND THERE CompLt(Ld by G. Holt It is interesting how one thing leads to another. Mr. Watt's article reminded me of a game I played as a child in Calgary to the point that I wrote an article to supplement Mr. Watt's. But before 1 started to type it, David Wilson happened in, and seeing Mr. Watt's article, commented that he knew "Peggy" - and Peggy turned out to be much the same game I had remembered, give or take local differences. West Vancouver's Peggy, as David remembers it, involved a short piece of wood or branch, a peg, a paddle, a small hole and all the boys available divided into two teams. My game left out the hole and the piece of branch but had a somewhat different peg. And if my game had a name, I don't remember it.