Rummoli queens playing out their piles of pennies
Six decades later, two generations of Hamilton women still in the game
One day, when Canada decides to reintroduce the humble penny as coin of the realm, the national mint will have to visit Rose Castellani’s Rummoli game in Hamilton.
There it will find piles and piles of pennies.
There are six in the game, two generations of Rummoli-playing women, and the original four have been playing continuously since ... well, they can’t remember exactly, but it’s been at least since Donna Castellani, Rose’s daughter, was a little girl.
Donna recalls her mom and her friends gathered around the board with their stacks of pennies and she wondered what all the fuss was about.
I’m not saying how old Donna is — in any case, she looks much younger than her years — but now she isn’t watching from the distance of her play toys.
She’s at the table, having replaced one of the two originals who’ve died since the game began ... more than 60 years ago. And now she knows what all the fuss is about. Rummoli is a terrific game.
More than six decades. They haven’t been sitting at the Rummoli table that whole time, of course. They’ve gotten up to, you know, answer the phone, have children, go to work.
But since at least the late 1950s, they’ve met once a month between April and November at each other’s places. In December, they have a Christmas party, this year at the Black Forest.
Aside from all that, of course, there’s the game itself. First marketed in 1940 by the Copp Clark Publishing Company, Rummoli is one of Canada’s gifts to the world. It combines elements of rummy, poker and board play.
Back to the pennies. You don’t see them so much anymore, but at the Rummoli games, they are the medium of exchange. It’s kind of comforting somehow. Seems like old times.
“Oh, it was a long time ago,” Rose says, trying to recall just when they started. “John (Theresa’s son) was just a baby.” Rose is 92 now. “We all had little kids around when we were playing.”
“We” are Maria Perrins, Theresa Travale (Rose’s sister) and Lena Anderson, who, with Rose, goes back to the very first games.
Donna started playing 24 years ago, and Vincie Travale, another second-generation player, joined them 22 years ago, also as a replacement.
The families all lived around St. Augustine School in Dundas as the children were growing up, and Rummoli was a way to socialize and break bread together, though it wasn’t bread.
It tended to be delicious Italian recipes; the women went all out and the food was a strong feature of the tradition, but now they start with a simple lunch at noon, followed by a dessert/ tea/coffee break at 2:30 p.m.
“It was getting a bit too elaborate (as they got older),” Theresa says. So they scaled back.
But the cheer and laughter of their four-hour afternoons, the stories, the conversation and sharing of life’s milestones, happy and sad, are as rich as ever — maybe more so for all the flavours that the years have aged into the custom.
And Rose’s jokes are as sharp as ever. She worked at Leonard’s Underwear factory in Dundas, and that theme factors into some of her humour.
Rose weaves pizza into her repertoire as well, telling about the not-so-smart person (could be from anywhere in Canada) who, when asked if he wanted the pizza cut into six or eight pieces, replied, “Oh, six. I couldn’t possibly eat eight.” Told with perfect comic timing. Yes, sharp as ever.
Rose, Theresa, Lena, Maria, Vincie and Donna, needless to say, love Rummoli. The card sense, the surprises and twists, the building pots and the bidding on the ghost hand.
Best of all is the most valuable kitty — the friendship, tradition and sharing they’ve been building all this time, the pot that, the more they draw out of it, the bigger it gets.
Play on, ladies, play on. And may your coming years be many and filled with more of the wonderful same.
“We all had little kids around when we were playing.” ROSE CASTELLANI RUMMOLI PLAYER