Farm Field Hunting In June?!?

K&T said:

Thanks for the real news update on the farmers and some nice finds too. God bless em.

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Thanks for looking K&T. Yep, the farmers have a real struggle this year. Not that it's easy any year, but this one's a whopper!

ToySoldier said:

Excellent write up.

The 1" marble is called a boulder. A month or so ago one of our old local parks had a bunch of old dirt scraped and put into a bunch of piles. They were making new walkways. I drove over on my lunch break to see if I could eyeball anything. I found a 1 inch clay marble sticking halfway out of a pile of dirt. The next day I returned and I eyeballed a smaller clay marble.

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Thanks TS! And good thinking eyeballing the scraped dirt at your park and turning up a couple nice keepers! I've suddenly gone on a little bit of a marble finding streak, and I've been enjoying the opportunity to learn a little bit about the game - I never really played it, although I had a bag of marbles as a kid. I guess growing up in the 70s, marbles as a game had already lost it's popularity, at least in my area. But I'm amazed to find out just how ubiquitous and popular the game was for at least the century prior! There probably wasn't a kid that didn't play around the turn of the century!

Anyways, thanks for the heads up on the shooter terminology - it looks there were quite a few different terms used for the shooter, maybe varying regionally like "soda" and "pop" for soft drinks. I've found the shooter being called by several names: taw, masher, bumbo, tom bowler, giant, dobber, godfather, and maybe my favorite..."toebreaker"! And now "boulder", as well! Amazing, the history you can discover with a single simple find!