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

Stoopball
You play against cement stairs with a Pensy Pinky. Anybody can play and everyone plays 
against everybody else. Throw the ball at the stairs and try to catch it after it bounces back. 
If the ball bounces more than twice you lose your turn and the next player is up. The scor-
ing goes: catch it on a fly, it’s ten points; catch it in one bounce, it’s five; and if the ball 
bounces off the edge of the stoop, ‘cause it’s hard to catch and comes off the stoop fast, it’s 
worth fifty points. Whoever gets five hundred points first wins.
Aaron, 11 years old, described Stoopball in Flushing, New York, in April 1979. 
This typical New York street game involves simple materials: an inexpensive pink 
rubber ball and a concrete stoop. Common from the 1940s to the 1980s, Stoopball 
is played less often now (Dargan and Zeitlin 50–54; Knapp and Knapp 141; Bron-
ner 187). Web surfers can find the game’s rules on http://www.streetplay.com.
Butt Ball
All the players line up in front of a wall and use smaller balls (usually tennis balls) that 
they throw against the wall. If they do not catch it after the first bounce they then have 
to run and touch the wall before being hit in the butt by a ball being thrown by another 
player. If they do not make it, they are out until the next round but if they do make it they 
get a chance to throw it and try to hit someone else until there are only 2–3 players left.
While student teaching at Wellsville Elementary School in Utah in April 
1998, Melissa Williams recorded her observation of this popular game. Williams 
noted that although Utah children had enjoyed playing Butt Ball since the 1980s, 
playground supervisors discouraged children from playing it. This is one of many 
variants of Wall Ball, including Suicide, discussed in chapter 4. 
Snowballs
A couple of my friends and I made up a game to play in the winter, when it snowed. We 
would build a snow fort down towards the end of the yard, that blocked us from the road. 
When a car would drive by, we would throw snowballs at the back of their car. Where 

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76 Children’s 
Folklore
the snowball hit would determine how many points you got. I don’t remember the exact 
points now, but the most was for hitting the back window, and you would get no points 
if you missed the car. The only problem was that occasionally people would stop their 
cars and yell at us.
Paul, an Anglo-American college student from Albany, New York, described 
this winter game in November 2000. Although Paul and his friends invented the 
game, they used the familiar pattern of giving points for hits, as in Stoopball and 
other neighborhood ball games. This game’s subversive quality makes it a child-
hood underground game, usually not divulged to parents or teachers.
Boy/Girl Games