Remember When: Shooting marbles, flipping baseball cards

Have we lost our marbles?

Used to be that you couldn’t pass a schoolyard without seeing a gaggle of young guys hunched down on the ground firing little glass orbs at other little glass orbs while onlookers cheered (or maybe groaned).

So popular was this recess-time game in our area that there were local and regional marbles tournaments, culminating in the Wilkes-Barre Publishing Co. sending the local champ to Atlantic City for the nationals.

Now that I think of it, I haven’t seen kids shooting marbles since maybe the 1950s.

I also enjoyed watching my fellow students flip baseball cards during recess. I never quite understood what entitled one kid to scoop up all the cards on the ground triumphantly while everyone else cheered or moaned.

Anyway, you don’t see much of that activity toda