Henrietta Hay's Column

On a recent Sunday I very nearly found myself on my knees in church, and not for religious reasons. Four little girls were engaged in a hot game of Pogs in the narthex, and I really wanted to join them. Only some remaining shreds of dignity and a bum knee, restrained me.

Like many adults, I live in a bubble, isolated from the real world where kids spend all their free time throwing slammers at piles of milk bottle caps. I have read a great deal about this new game, but had never actually seen it being played until that Sunday morning. What goes around comes around.

They say it is a "new" game. The name may be new, but the concept is at least as old as I am and who knows, maybe little kids in togas played it at the time of the Roman Empire. Wonder what they used for pogs. Maybe they scrounged around the chariot makers' workplace for scraps of metal.

A recent Sentinel story says that pogs originated in the fifties when "paperboard inserts sealed the tops of old fashioned milk bottles." They were using cardboard tops for milk bottles in my youth long before the fifties. The best time of year for those bottles and caps was winter. The milk would be delivered (we lived in town) early in the morning. By the time we brought it in for breakfast the cream has risen above the bottle in a frozen cylinder 3 or 4 inches high, with the cap sitting rakishly on top. We sliced the cap off very carefully and if I had been a good kid, my mother would let me dump the pure frozen cream directly onto my cereal. That may explain my cholesterol count. We used the caps for legal tender in whatever game we happened to be playing.

A bit later we graduated to metal pogs. Of course, we never called them that or tried to sell them. My dad's lumberyard was located at the tramway loop in Englewood, and the number 3 streetcars always stopped for 10 or 15 minutes. While they were parked there we lined the tracks with whatever bottle caps we had managed to collect, and when the streetcar rolled over them we had a collection of -- well, flattened bottle caps, or early day pogs or whatever.

Round disks have always fascinated children for reasons I don't understand. Tiddledewinks was the first disc game I took seriously. That was a wonderful game, which involved snapping one disk with another one and aiming for a little cup in the middle of the table. The disks were brightly colored plastic, or whatever material was available then. They are now as old fashioned as milk bottles.

I suspect that pogs are so popular for the same reason that marbles have always been popular. If you are good you win something tangible -- the old greed syndrome popping up at an early age.

I have been researching pogs, however, and my elementary school source says that you are not allowed to play for keeps in school. She added that sometimes kids hide out in the bathrooms to play, and I would suspect that all rules are off in there.

The Pog Auxiliary, meaning parents, seems generally to approve of the fad. It is a fairly quiet game, except for the repeated "clunks" and you know where your kid is. Compared to Nintendo or Game Boy it is fairly inexpensive, but major Collections could get into big bucks.