The writing prompt for this piece was “Fun and Games”-we had no time limit to write it.
These Games They are a Changin’
I grew up in the Bronx at a time when there were fewer restrictions on safety. We rode our bikes without helmets. We played in the streets. We could go out to play on our own throughout the neighborhood without supervision, and we didn’t have to have an adult organize an activity all the time.
Nowadays, it seems you can’t go out without someone else being there with you, if you are allowed to go outside at all. You must always have a location device or a mobile phone on hand so that you can contact anyone, whether it is necessary or not. Organized play is the norm if you want to play any kind of team or group sport/game.
Of course, there are a lot more dangers now than there were when I was a kid – Faster drivers with little care for anyone in the road, diseases that one can get by being in the same air space as someone else, bad people that are reported in the news that raise heightened parental awareness everywhere, safety issues (not all of which are followed) with regards to bike riding, driving cars, and distractions. Add to that laws that didn’t exist back in the day, that restrict activities and require many more pieces of safety equipment, licenses, and have age restrictions.
When I was young, for the most part, we were in charge of the fun and games we got to play.
Here are a few. Those of you old enough, see how many you remember.
Our main form of ball play involved a small pink ball called a spaldeen. It really was named Spalding after the company that produced it, but anyone who grew up in the city called them spaldeens. I still own one from when I taught street games as a mini-course. It doesn’t have that new spaldeen feel, but it still bounces pretty high.
Add a broomstick handle to your repertoire, and you are all set for stickball. A game similar to baseball, usually played somewhere where there was a concrete side of a building or garage (where I usually played, see the picture below) to act as your backstop.
If you didn’t have a stick available, then all you needed was the spaldeen and your fist. The game, Punchball, didn’t need a pitcher.
Given a concrete sidewalk and a wall, you could play King ball, which required multiple players, each standing just outside a defined box, to bounce the spaldeen once before it hit the wall and try to make it land in someone else’s box, where they had to do the same thing. If you missed a box, or the ball didn’t land in a box, or you hit the wall without a bounce, you then lost your position and had to move to the last box, and everyone moved up.
If you didn’t have a wall, then you just needed a popsicle stick in the middle between two players facing each other, two squares apart, and you each tried to hit the stick, which would start in the middle between the two players, with the spaldeen to get a point.
If you had no wall, but had a 2X2 square of sidewalk (you could also use chalk to make this), you could be playing box baseball. Four people play, each person is in charge of one square, you had to slap the ball into someone else’s square, and then they had to slap it into another square without it bouncing more than once. You weren’t allowed to step into your square either.
There were a lot more street games and outdoor activities we played as kids. We made the rules and didn’t need someone to supervise us.
Without boring you with any more details, here are a few more street games that I remember (not all of them involved any equipment):
Hounds and Hares (all you needed was chalk)
Stoop Ball
Red Rover (all you needed was wide flat surface, like a playing field, a park, or gym)
Errors
Those were the days. I wonder what today’s kids would be like if they didn’t have all that technology to look at all of the time. I guess we’ll never know.
I leave you with a poem I wrote in the Summer of 1991:
Ah…To Be Then Again
by Harvey Heilbrun
A large cement wall, 25 to 30 feet high.
A chalked square to play stickball,
punchball.
Hounds and Hare on warm summer nights.
A dusty old park by my house,
Sidewalks transformed into boxball courts,
Steps to Stoop Ball fields.
A sandbox becomes second base;
A tree first, a rock third.
What nature did not intend,
Our imaginations created.
I’ve gone back to where I grew up.
I can feel the places of my youth
But the scenes are not the same:
There’s a fence and a lock,
Another fence, a driveway, a blocked stoop,
A new park,
Benches,
Grass,
Pond,
Where old people sit and talk.
But there’s no sandbox, no rock –
The part we created is gone.
The imagination of it all.
No more bats of broom handles.
No more fun.
The beauty of the chalked square on the wall.
The vacant lot.
Those summer nights together with friends.
A memory
