I know you'll be sorry you asked, but here's a write up I did a few years back after suffering a severe nostalgia attack:
In 1947, my family moved to from Oklahoma to a little town called Pierce City Missouri, where I started the 3rd grade. Some of you may remember, it was nearly totally destroyed by a tornado a couple of years ago. While the school was a city school, the atmosphere was still very rural and the families, for the most part, were not well off. There was no hot lunch program, so everyone had to brown bag it, except the fortunates that lived close enough to go home for lunch. The building was very old, and not air conditioned; I can still remember the first time I entered the old lunch room; 100 years of baloney and fried egg sandwiches, peanut butter, boiled eggs, apples, bananas and oranges had left a smell that I have not to this day forgotten. I also vividly recall the times after noon and recess when we would come in and just sit and sweat. When we could get away with it, we would open the top button of our overalls for that extra "Max Cool" effect.
Otherwise, this school was not much different than any other school; we played the usual games that kids do; softball, dodge ball and sometimes the boys would play football or wrestle...anything to work up a sweat. Just when I thought it wouldn't get any worse, we moved again to a house in the country, just across the road from a one-room school house.
This was my new school. We had 8 grades in the same room, and the same teacher for all 8 grades. You were bound to learn something just by osmosis!!! The playground was really undeveloped; it consisted of a bed of jagged flint rock with a thin layer of soil and some grass and weeds that were holding on for dear life. The amenities were even more austiere than before; we had a kerosene fired heating stove for those cold winter days, and two long rows of windows on the east and west side of the school for ventilation during the warm days of spring and fall. This was more or less effective, except for the occasional wasp that ventured in through the open windows; not to mention that running water at home was a premium for most of the kids, so being able to sit near a window, where I sat, was a plus. Since we had no water in the school house either, except for a hand pump in the yard, facilities were two neatly white washed one holers, which seemed to harbor most of the aforementioned wasps.
Recess and lunch hour was "freestyle", pretty much on our own. The teacher, more often than not, especially during the fall and early winter months when weather permitted, would sit outside and eat walnuts. These were native black walnuts, which grew wild within ten paces of the back door. She would gather up a dozen or so and sit on the back steps, cracking them with a flat rock. That might seem a bit odd today, but we never thought it was out of the ordinary, I had seen my mother do the same thing. She was fairly adept, at getting to meat out, too; I never could quite get the hang of it myself.
As it turns out, the lunch hour "games" turned out to be primarily the one thing that the rugged play ground could accommodate, and as I was to soon find out, they told me it was called "shinny". I had never heard of shinny, but at that time, I am not sure that I had ever heard of hockey or soccer either. I watched a couple of games from the school house steps and decided that I could do that too. The game consisted of two teams; one going north and one going south with a line of sorts down the middle and some makeshift goals. The equipment consisted of a long stick that could be likened to a hockey stick, and a tin can which served the equivalent of a puck. Two of the bigger guys would square off in the middle of the field and begin whacking at the tin can. The actions resembled a golfer more than a hockey player, but that didn't strike me as unusual. The objective, of course, was to get the can past the opposing goal line for one point.
That evening I went out in the grove of trees next to my house and selected what I thought was an appropriately shaped stick, and about my size and very light weight. I spent the rest of the evening carving and whittling it to my own specifications, anticipating my debut on the field the next day. I was ready.
The teams were quite a sight. There were so few students in the school, that to make up a team, they allowed anyone big enough to swing a stick to play; so a team might consist of six or eight boys ranging from 11 or 12 years of age up thorough 14 (at least). They let me join in with no problem. My first game was rather uneventful, I had trouble getting to the can because the bigger boys would root me out, so I decided to get more aggressive. Most of the time the game degenerated into a free for all with no objective except to flail the tar out of the tin can.
The next game was a bit more exciting. In maneuvering toward the can, I saw my chance. I took a big whack at the can and quite unexpectedly caught the ankle of one of the bigger boys on the opposing team. He grimaced, picked up his stick, and acted like he was going to whack me back, so I retreated a safe distance until I though it was safe to continue the game. Turns out the relatively light shinny stick didn't pack much of a wallop after all.
One of the other boys showed me his shinny stick; it was considerably bigger and heavier than mine, and had a bulbous growth on the "business end" of the stick. It seems that having your own special stick, was kind of like having your own baseball glove. That evening we went to a grove of hickory and he showed me how to select a young hickory sapling and cut it off with a hatchet, slightly beneath the surface of the ground where the bulbous growth was hiding. I spent the evening carving and shaping my new stick.
I was looking forward to the game the next day; my stick and I were ready. We started out with a brand new can, which, as the game wore on, was gradually reduced to something that resembled a small piece of crumpled aluminum foil more than it did a tin can. It didn't take me long to find out why they called it "Shinny". I took a few good whacks on the legs and shins; fortunately in close, no one could get much of a swing, so I survived with nothing more than a few minor bruises. From then on, it was shinny almost every day for me. I really enjoyed the game; everyone seemed to get along well together, and we had a lot of fun. How many games I played that year I have no clue, but I do recall wearing out a couple shinny sticks. Remarkably no one, that I recall, was ever seriously injured, although we got plenty of scrapes and bruises. Later on in the year I did get hit on the knee with a line drive. The can had by that time been reduced to a ballistic missle about the size of a ping pong ball; it was heavy, hard and sharp and ...it hurt like blazes...but I had earned my red badge of courage. I was 12 years old, in the 6th grade, and looking forward to coming back the next year...but it didn't happen.
We moved back to Oklahoma that summer and that was the last time I ever played a game of shinny, or saw one played for that matter. I doubt if my kids or grand kids have even heard of shinny, what with modern soccer fields and game stations, who needs it? I do wish, though, that I had just one of those games on film.
