Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Th
is Is Fred
This is Fred. He says “hi,”
This is Fred when the car goes by.
Each finger tip of right hand has a letter “T” “H” “I” “S”
All four fingers are up for “this”; just “I” and “S” for “is”‘just “H”
and “I” for “hi.” Fred is drawn on the back of right hand, so the hand is
turned so “Fred” can be seen. A car is drawn on the back of left hand.
Left hand slides over right “when the car goes by” (and runs Fred down).
Irene Chagall collected this finger game from an eight-year-old girl in Mill Val-
ley, California, in 2006. The game is quick and easy to play, but it requires care-
ful preparation of the player’s hand. Unlike routines of victimization, it puts no 
one on the spot and simply demonstrates a clever combination of fingers and 
letters.
Chalk Diagram Games
Skelly
We played on a sidewalk. Sidewalk squares were used as a board. We numbered the board 
with a piece of chalk. The numbers were placed around the board. There were only four 
corners. The numbers went from one to eight, beginning in the upper right-hand corner. 

---

Examples and Texts 71
A game of Skelly in New York City in the late 1970s. Photograph by Martha Cooper.
Boy looks through a Skelly cap he made from the top of a beer bottle in New York City in the 
late 1970s. Photograph by Martha Cooper.

---

72 Children’s 
Folklore
The number two lies in the corner diagonally across from one. Then three and four follow 
this pattern beginning in the upper left-hand corner. Five, six, seven, eight are placed on 
the sides. Five and six go from top to bottom and seven and eight go side by side starting 
from left to right.
The game may be played with checkers, but very often it was played with bottle caps. 
Bottle caps work better because they slide easily in the street, and because they are easier 
to come by. Bottle caps are basically free, and can be found in abundance.
The game is played so that you fl ick the bottle cap to number one fi rst. Then the next 
player tries to fl ick his bottle cap to number one. Often the fi rst player’s bottle cap is pushed 
out of the fi rst box. The object is to get your bottle cap through each number in order, and the 
series must be completed to win. If your bottle cap gets knocked out you must begin again.
Rachel, age 44, described this game’s rules in Freehold, New Jersey, in April 
1981. Rachel played Skelly in the streets of Brooklyn during the 1940s and early 
1950s. She had learned that in an earlier version of the game played in the 1920s, 
hitting the “dead man zone” in the center of the board meant the player had to 
go back to the beginning of the game. Amanda Dargan and Steven Zeitlin trace 
this game back to the beginning of the twentieth century and identify variant 
names, including Skully, Kilsies, Loadsies, and Dead Man (81). Other variants 
are described in Knapp and Knapp (141– 43) and Bronner (187–89).