If you grew up on McCoy Heights in the 70’s and 80’s you had to know the geographic markers for the hill. It’s funny, but when I sat down to start writing this, I had to pull up a map of the neighborhood. I knew the places I wanted to discuss, but damned if I knew any of the actual street names in my own neighborhood. We never needed them.
The center of all activity was “The Corner” which was the intersection of Jackson Street and Chestnut Street. “The Field” was a vacant lot at the end of Cherry Street. We had the “Front Street”, “Dog Alley” and other places that were nicknamed prior to my arrival on the hill, but for the purpose of this post, we’re concentrating on the Field and the Corner.
The Corner was where everything happened. It was the most centric common ground of the neighborhood and therefore the center of our universe. If you were playing tag, the telephone pole in corner of Helen Hickman’s yard was “base”. If you were playing Kick-the-Can, the can was positioned in the dead-center of the intersection. The Corner was an endzone for touch football games, the finish line for our homemade go-cart races and the point you tried to surpass when bringing an innertube down the hill in the snow.
We played games at the Corner, but the Field was our athletic complex. At the east end of the Field was a small dirt and gravel patch that had a backboard and rim attached to an old metal garage. I’ve still got scars from being boxed out into that rusty sheet metal. The southwest corner of the Field had a makeshift backstop that we built out of scrap lumber and a coffee can full of old bent nails. One goal line was where Williamson’s hedges started and the other was located at an imaginary mark that we all agreed on near the basketball court.
You’re all probably a little confused right now. I don’t know what went through your head when you read the title, but I’m sure a geography lesson on the neighborhood I grew up in wasn’t what you were expecting. I’ll get there….bear with me.
Of the many activities we conducted at the Corner, the most common was stickball or “whiffle” ball games. The four corners of the intersection were considered bases. The water department’s metal hand-hole cover in the middle of the intersection was the pitcher’s mound. The little hedge at the corner of Hinerman’s yard was a backstop of sorts. Maple trees lined the streets, Harry Meidel’s house was in center field, there was a huge pine tree behind third base and occasionally there was a car parked in left or right field, so there were no shortage of “interference” calls during a game.
Whiffle ball was played with a commercially produced bat and ball. The equipment was designed so even if you swung that bat with all your might you’d be lucky to hit the ball thirty feet. It was designed for lightweight entertainment of young children. Somewhere along the way one of us figured out that if we stole a roll of electric tape from our father’s tool box, we could wrap that ball up, covering the holes that slowed it down and adding enough weight to it that it would actually fly off the bat. It was common to come home with welts on your body from getting hit by a whiffle ball. Stickball….well, if you’ve never played, you’ve seen the game played in the streets in movies. A scene from one of the Rocky movies just jumped into my head. They’re usually using a cut-off broom stick and a rubber ball of some sort. We used what we had….which at times was a busted axe handle and a tennis ball that someone had found, or a “Rubber Pinky” ball we’d bought at Murphy’s for a quarter. A Rubber Pinky ball from the 70’s will fly a long way when belted with a hickory axe handle.
Baseball was the summertime sport of choice in the neighborhood and the field was our Yankee Stadium. Now….a little more geography….there were houses on three sides of the field. They were out of reach for most of us, but we did implement a “choke-up” rule for the older kids once they got enough power in their swing to launch a ball out of the field. On the fourth side was a wooded area. Down the third base line and all the way to the imaginary fence in left field stood trees and dense under-brush, along with brush piles that were dumped there when trees were timbered over time.
SO…If you were playing stickball at the Corner and put a ball on top of Meidel’s house, it was gone. You weren’t getting it back. If you chipped a foul ball into that monstrous pine tree behind third base, you had a 50/50 chance of it finding it’s way to the ground. The maple trees that lined the streets would devour whiffle balls, tennis balls and rubber pinky balls alike. If you popped a foul ball down the third base line in the Field, or if you over threw the third baseman trying to get the lead runner, the ball went sailing into the woods, more often than not landing in that brush pile that seemed bigger than most of the houses we lived in.
It wasn’t uncommon to show up at the field and see baseball gloves laying all over the place without a soul to be found…and then hear the voices from the woods as everyone was scouring the brush, searching for the baseball. I can remember hours spent tossing a stickball bat into a tree trying to knock the ball loose from the clutches of gnarled maple limb.
In most cases, once the ball was lost, the game was over. We all came from lower-middle class families and there wasn’t a lot of spare money laying around for things like baseballs. I remember a couple occasions when we pooled all our hard-earned nickels and dimes together and gathered up returnable soda bottles to take to town just so we could run to Western Auto and buy a ball in order to finish a tied game. I can remember being grounded and the whole neighborhood showing up at my door to ask if they could borrow my baseball to finish a game because the brush pile had taken another victim. If I’m not mistaken, the brush pile got my ball on the next swing of the bat that day.
Basketballs get eaten up when you play on dirt and gravel and bounce passes off jagged metal surfaces. Footballs don’t last long when you keep skipping passes off a brick street that’s covered with cinders from the winter road crews. Nerf footballs didn’t stand a chance. We tore up and lost a LOT of sports equipment when I was growing up. I got a lot of really great birthday and Christmas presents as a kid, but to unwrap a gift and find a ball of some sort inside the box was like winning the lottery.
SO….why am I telling you this?
I insulated the attic in my shop a couple months ago and came across a large duffle bag that was full of footballs, basketballs and soccer balls the boys had left behind. I set them aside to go into the next trash run. They sat there for a week. One day I pulled each of them out, pumped them full of air, checked them all for usability, deflated them and placed them back into the bag and then set the bag back up into the attic again. Yesterday I was in the barn and came across a bucket full of baseballs. I can count the times I’ve had someone to play catch with in the last 20 years on one hand. Even at that, to play catch you only need one ball and I’m holding onto a bucket full of them. I can’t make myself get rid of them.
Those balls are things that we could barely afford when I was growing up. Those balls were highly coveted pieces of equipment that we needed to test our abilities in the neighborhood where I grew up. I’m RICH! I’ve got a bucket full of what each and every one of the Hill Kids would have raked leaves and shoveled snow for 8 hours a day just to own one of. Each one of those balls, when sitting in my hand, stirs memories of the kids I grew up with and the magical place we were raised. Those balls…to me…are symbolic of a time and place…and a mindset…that no longer exists.
When we’re young, I think all of us have that plateau we hope to reach some day. It’s different for everyone and I think many of us lose sight of it once we’re working and making money on down the line. But…I just wanted to let it be said…Somewhere deep down inside, on some level I can’t even begin to understand, I’m a very lucky and very wealthy man…simply because I’ve got balls.