Reply #4: Mid '50s - early '60s stuff

[marzipanni]

When we were about eight years old my friend traveled to see her relatives in Scotland, and she said kids chanted, "Skinna-ma-linky long-legs with um-ba-relli feet, You dirty little Americans think you're pretty neat!" I thought it was funny and asked her to repeat it so I could remember it.

"So what do you want, a Hoodsie®?" In the 'fifties my older brothers and their friends might say this if a kid was a little too full of himself after doing something well.

(A Hoodsie was, and still is, a little cup of ice-cream with a flat wooden 'spoon'- first made in 1947)


A kid would call out, "Hey dreamboat!" and if someone turned around to look, they'd say, "Not YOU, shipwreck!"


These were little dense cardboard tiles a bit larger than a deck of cards. You would push a little stick through a dot on the front and a little rolled up piece of paper would fall out of the hole it had been in. The paper told your fortune, or an answer to a question you had just asked .