Follow up to In Search of Jingles

A recent column about jump rope, jacks and the jingles we sang while playing these games brought in a couple of notes worth sharing. Here goes: “When I was a kid growing up in Rockland in the 1940s, every girl in my neighborhood would play “Donkey” up against the Madden kids’ house,” recalled Marilyn Shearer of Attleboro. “You bounced a big ball on the house while going through the alphabet, like ‘A, my name is Alice and I live in Alabama and I sell apples.’ Onward to ‘B, my name is Betty. I live in Baltimore and I sell buttons.’ You go through the alphabet, all the time bouncing the ball and putting your leg over the ball before you finish the letter you’re working on. “Also, Double Dutch was a big attraction; if you did it right, you could just alternate your feet being up, and go on until you trip. We used to hitch the rope around a pole if we didn’t have enough kids to turn both ends of the rope.
“Of course we also rollerskated when we weren’t eating or sleeping or playing ‘Donkey’ and my skate key was my most cherished possession and I wore it on a string around my neck. When I grew older (teen aged) I used to go to the Rockland Skating Rinks. I babysat every Saturday to have enough money to go skating. Life was good!”

And Doris Oster tells me “I had almost forgotten about all those wonderful games we played as children? Being female, I played most of those games you mentioned, as all of my siblings were girls. We jumped rope, played jacks, bounced balls etc. in our daily playtime. When we left for school each day, a jump rope and small bouncing balls were always enclosed in our book bags to be used at recess. We got plenty of exercise in those days, believe me.
“I do not remember a lot of the jingles, but as I read your column one just jumped into my mind. It was a ball bouncing jingle and I laughed as it popped into my head:
“One, two, three, a-lar-ee
My first name is Mary.
Wouldn’t I look cute.
In my father’s bathing suit.”

Meanwhile, Jackie Gow has offered to let me take a look through a book of jump rope rhymes, published in 1948, that she has. It may take a while for me to get to it, but I’ll bet some of the rhymes are keepers. We’ll see.