During the last week of school before summer vacation, when homework was a distant memory, a large chunk of our afternoons and evenings were devoted to preparation for the baseball season. Up until that point our weekends mostly consisted of alley handball. Our gang played baseball on the two nearby fields at Northwood Elementary School and, while school was in session, the teachers and administrators frowned on us using their fields. Even on weekends, they would leave a surly janitor behind to do their dirty work.

We could never understand their obsession with their ball fields. For one thing, the students never played on them. Their recreational time was spent in a fenced in asphalt area where dodgeball reigned supreme. For another thing, we never saw anyone play on those fields. The truth of the matter was that they weren’t well maintained. The infield was more stones and pebbles than dirt. In the outfield, grass had long since conceded the turf to weeds and other less recognizable vegetation.

The debris littering the ground gave our infielders a good lesson in heroism. Hard hit ground balls seemed to have a mind of their own as they bounced erratically across the rocky surface. Black eyes and split lips were a common sight for anyone brave enough to play shortstop or third base.

The outfield wasn’t much better. Many a good running catch was circumvented by a tangled mass of undergrowth that lived for the taste of tennis shoes.

Yet it was these run down killing fields that the school staff protected to a man. Thank goodness when the students left for the summer so did the teaching and administrative staff. I seem to recall some even sneaking out before the final bell rang. What was sacred ground a short week before was now a ‘do whatever you want, break a leg, we don’t care’ piece of property.

So, in that final week of school, we’d soak our gloves in buckets of oil, scrounge around for last year's hardballs (nobody played softball back then), and dig up unbroken bats.

The first few games of the summer were always cause for celebration. All the neighborhood kids would turn out. We frequently had such a huge gathering that many a mediocre player would be forced to sit the game out, unless he was willing to bribe the team captain with a healthy portion of his weekly allowance.  As the days passed and the injuries mounted, the enthusiasm waned. By mid-summer, ball games with as few as three guys on a side, and team captains begging for money, were not uncommon.

We played many games with just a pitcher, a first baseman, and an outfielder. The pitcher would cover home plate on well hit balls. The first baseman would run ahead of the batter on balls hit to the outfield, hoping for a tag out.

If you were on the hitting team and your fellow players were on base, you would have to retrieve the ball after every errant pitch. There were no calling balls and strikes in our games. You simply swung at decent pitches until you either hit the ball or struck out.

If there was but one outfielder, the batter would have to call the field where he thought he was hitting the ball. In this regard, I was hated for being a left-hander, because the outfielder would always have to move to the opposite field when I batted, then back again for the right-handers. Suffice to say, when we played baseball shorthanded, we all got a lot of exercise.

We still played handball during the summer on days we were too lazy to walk to the school. Handball could be played in the alley by our homes, and all you needed was a pinkie to play.

A pinkie resembled a tennis ball stripped of its canvas cover. They were popular for alley play because they rarely broke windows. There was always someone in our gang that had a pinkie on his person at all times. It was an unwritten law. Though the pinkie person was always popular on nice days, it was also somewhat embarrassing to be carrying one around. They tended to create a large bulge in tight cut-off jeans pockets.  Pinkies were multi-purpose balls that could also be used for wallball and stepball.   

Handball was played in much the same manner as baseball. Bases would be designated in the alley then the fielding team would spread out as much as possible in those narrow confines. The hitter would toss the ball in the air then swing at with his fist. Any ball hit into a yard was an automatic out. A caught ground ball or fly ball was also an out. If you hit a car or pedestrian you were also out.

Most of the neighbors were tolerant of pinkies landing in their yards. The majority of them had kids and understood. One of the neighbors, however, hated us to the extent that she would try to grab any round object that fell on her property. When a pinkie crossed that fence it was usually a mad scramble as to who would possess ownership, the fielder or the homeowner. Thank goodness she was a slow elderly lady. Most of the time the ball was back in our hands before she was halfway across her yard. But even with her poor success ratio, she would often prowl that backyard like a Willy Mays want to be, hoping for that perfect catch.

Stepball was a game that had to be played on weekday afternoons because the playing field was where there would normally be parked cars. The only thing one needed for stepball, besides the pinkie, was a few concrete steps on the front of a row home. Because the front of the house my brother Steve and I lived in was sloped and fit the criteria, it was usually used in our stepball games.

There were no teams in stepball. It was all individual effort. The person with the pinkie would stand in front the steps while the other players would line the street. The object was to throw the pinkie against the steps. Two caught grounders were an out, as was a caught fly ball. Most throws resulted in the ball hopping into the air for an easy out. If you were lucky enough to pitch the pinkie at such a precise angle where it hit the apex of the step, the ball would shoot off the concrete like a rocket, almost always resulting in a home run.

Since bases weren’t run in stepball, the only hazards were in the field where players were apt to run into parked, and sometimes moving, vehicles.

Football was reserved for the cooler autumn months. Once again we played at the school, but on the open field in front of the property where the ground was grassy and soft. Soft was important because we always played tackle without benefit of padding of any sort. In fact, in warmer weather, we often played barefoot.

The downside to that was we played at the school on weekends when the angry janitor sometimes worked. He would rarely muster up the energy to confront us. Instead he would think of other diabolical ways to force us off the grounds. One time, unbeknownst to us, he scattered the grass with thumbtacks. He must have seen us playing barefooted. I can still imagine him staring out a classroom window chuckling as we excitingly ran out on to the field.

The tacks, and the subsequent foot injuries, gave us reason to wear foot gear, but we still neglected padding. We never held anything back and the games were rather brutal affairs. No one ever got killed, but there were plenty of bloody noses and sprains, and every once in awhile a tack would need to be removed from a players butt.