I dpn't remember playing that game as a kid. What we played in the mid-late '60s was just with marbles and a hole in the dirt that we made by rotating our heel into the ground and smoothing off the displaced dirt. There would be a line in the dirt about 15 feet away where we would pitch the marbles from. To move the marble closer to the hole you could either use your foot (tapped by the other foot) or your index finger bent like an "L" to hit the marble into the hole. But marbles are marbles, so they were still alive in the late 1980s. Many Chinese checkers games used marbles too.