"... pot was a popular amusement, particularly in the spring. I can assure you that it had nothing to do with canabis which I feel 100 percent confident in stating that there was not one Newport boy in the era I am describing who would have had even the slightest idea what that item was. Our reality was pot as a game of marbles.

Once again the equipment needed by the boys to play (I can't recall a single instance when any girl was allowed to enter the game) was simple. A stick was torn off a nearby tree, a plot of soft earth was located, and a hole in that earth was dug to about the depth of three or four inches, and a circle was drawn around the hole, i.e., the "pot."

There were two versions of the game, but beyond that the rules have escaped my memory bank. In one version the boy stood over the pot with a marble in hand and tried to hit (or maybe it was not hit) a marble or marbles in the pot. In the other method of playing pot, the marbles were randomly dropped at some length from the circle and were pushed by fingers toward the pot.

Other than a lot of dirty hands and boys who cried because they lost their prized marbles in the game there were no other negatives. The winner collected all the marbles in the pot, and trundled off only to play another day if his buddies had been able in the meantime to collect a few replacements."

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