"Baseball cards" in Queens is "tickets" in Brooklyn

[Jonathan Lighter]

I agree with Larry. My experience with saluggi was in the later '50s on the East Side of Manhattan.  Nobody was likely to say, "Let's play saluggi!"  They just did it. The unforgettable cry of "Saluggi!" was the signal that somebody had grabbed some little guy's hat and was ready to toss it to a third party.

  I never saw or heard of girls saluggi-ing.

  "Tickets" sounds very weird to me.  In fact, I'm not certain whether they were even called "bubblegum cards" generically.There were "baseball cards," "football cards," "Davy Crockett cards," "Zorro cards," etc.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
  ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "Baseball cards" in Queens is "tickets" in Brooklyn
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>I'm adding "salugi" to my page. The "'baseball cards' in Queens is 'tickets'
>in Brooklyn" interested me. Does DARE have "tickets"? Anyone heard this
>before?

No, I know salug(g)i (from Washington Heights, early 1950s), but not
tickets. We called them baseball cards. Of the games listed below,
only salugi was actually cruel. I think of it as being a bit like
"keep-away", except that nobody could say "Let's play salugi--I'll be
it". Salugi only worked if the "it" was smaller and likely to start
crying after his possessum was tossed back and forth among the bigger
confederates while they shouted "salugi".

Larry

>...
>...
>...
>8 July 1977, New York Times, "Street Opens Avenues of Imagination for
>Games" by Fred Ferretti, pg. 54:
>John Tricoche is a street kid, and in a process as old as history, older, he
>had illustrated how a game -- one of those wonderfully inventive, highly
>structured, often cruel games of the street -- had come about. It
>was a game as
>valid to him and his friends as stoopball, kick the can, ring-a-lievio, red
>rover and salugi were to an earlier generation.

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