52 Pickup

In elementary school (we called it grammar school in the day), the bad boys would always greet the newest arrival in class with the following invitation:  "Wanna play 52 pickup?"  The unsuspecting "new kid" in the class would be delighted, feeling that he had just been invited to "join the gang"!  Little did he know . . . On accepting the invitation, the "new kid" would be greeted with a hail of 52 cards strewn all over the highly polished wooden floor on the second level of the old Claflin Grammar School, and as he bent over to gather all of the cards up, he became the "butt" of many a joke by then yet to be identified jokesters!

Years later, Marash girl recognized a similar game, unannounced, played by untoward supervisors in the Boston Public School system, without the cards, of course . . . any of you out there recognize the game?

But 52 Pickup, that game that Marash Girl first came upon at Claflin School, was a regular form of exercise for one of the teachers in the Boston Public Schools, and a good one at that! Whenever the teachers in the department were waiting for a meeting to begin, she could be counted on to play the old game of 52 pickup, her daily form of exercise -- tossing a deck of cards to the floor, she would bend from the waist  --  52 times to the floor and back, picking up one card at a time -- without ever counting!