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Growing up on Newark streets, you learned quickly to play in the street and remain alive to play another day. You never knew what type of conveyance was going to come down your street, so you adapted and kept one eye on your game or activity, and one eye on the traffic. If you lived on a one-way street it sort of simplified things, because traffic only came from one direction. Now all bets were off when a fire truck or police car needed to gain access to a building or a part of the street. We generally played on the one-way streets to avoid losing too many players in mid-game. Spectator friends and adoring young females would generally congregate to watch the games and served as lookouts for the traffic. Their job was to yell "CAR" as they saw one come into view. Sometimes obliging drivers would slow down and wait for a play to conclude before proceeding, sometimes offering a smile and some advice. There was much less traffic then and play was able to proceed rather nicely between passing cars. The best streets of course were dead-ends where you could play uninterrupted for quite some time. Our field of dreams was North 3rd Street, past Ting-a-Lings where the neighbors knew us all and always moved their cars so we could play. Very nice of them to do that and they often watched from their front porches. On hot days they let us drink from their outdoor hoses and cool ourselves off. Can you imagine that happening today? If today's young mother found out her little baby drank from an outdoor garden hose, that poor kid would be off for a battery of blood tests. Somehow we survived both the cars and the hose water.
Boxball and touch football were
the big street games in our neighborhood. Boxball is a somewhat sedate
version of baseball, played in a box shaped layout and not requiring an
inordinate amount of street space. It generally gave you enough time to
spot oncoming traffic and avoid it. Touch football can be a bit more
complex, requiring a mastery of visual and muscle coordination, that usually
resulted in a sprained ankle, cut knee, an "Hey Harry caught that pass" "Yeah but he dropped it when he hit the ground. It's not a complete pass." But that was after the truck hit him and dragged him over the goal line!" "No...you guys got it all wrong, first he slipped on that horse patty in the street, then the truck hit him." "All I know is he was still holding onto the ball when he was dragged across the goal line! That's a touchdown." Inevitably, natural street hazards could take a big toll on your game. The worst of course was having the ball go down the sewer. The grated sewers were one thing, but the old style rounded corner sewers were the worst. This usually meant the smallest guy was held by his feet down the hole to grab the ball back. Talk about having trust in your fellow friends. When a ball was headed down the street and it was obvious it was going down a sewer, everyone looked around to see who was the smallest kid there. When someone realized that he was the smallest, he took off and ran home because he knew what was coming! We never even considered hanging one of the girls down there. They just scream and cry too much. The boys would just moan and cry, but the girls sounded like cats getting their tails ripped out...and they always squealed to their daddies. Didn't need that. I developed a very neat device for getting balls out of grated sewers. In retrospect I probably should have patented it. It was a beer can with the top removed, with holes punched in the bottom, along with some rocks in the bottom for weights. It had a big wire loop over the open top and a string to lower it down into the sewer water. The idea was to lower it down, let the rocks sink it and the water rush in through the holes. At the can was just underwater, I would slide it across the water until the ball slipped inside the lip of the can; and while I pulled the whole assembly up, the water would drain from the can. I used to bring the can along whenever we played ball. Who said city kids are not inventive! Can you imagine kids playing around with the sewers today! Hey a high bouncer ball was big money in those days.....25 cents. You know how many soda bottles you needed to collect to reclaim enough money to buy one. That ball would have to last for days of play. You took care of your investments. Did you know you could open a fire hydrant with just a stick of wood and a coat hangar? That was another of our on the spot street inventions. They say it takes a pressing need for invention to occur, and in this case, it was a very hot humid summer. We opened the hydrant on the corner of 5th Street and Second Avenue so many times the police and firemen confiscated every wrench in the neighborhood. We had no alternative but to experiment. We wrapped the middle of an opened coat hanger around the top nut of the hydrant several times; and then wrapped the two remaining ends of the coat hangar around the opposite slotted ends of a sturdy stick. Then we simply began turning the stick horizontally around the nut, taking up the slack, until it got good and tight-- and then turning real hard until that wonderful cold water came gushing out. I'll never forget the look on the fireman's face when he and the responding police officer got a look at that coat hangar and stick invention. "What the *&%#$%*& is this!" he exclaimed. He got so mad he took an enormous wrench from the truck and tore the top nut clean off the hydrant. He looked at us smiling kids and glared.... "Try opening that!" Well that finished us off. The next day they repaired the hydrant and put a snub lock on it. We roasted for the rest of that summer. But it was sheer delight to know we could beat the grown-ups, even if it was a temporary victory. Life in the streets was a series of small victories, and you celebrated as best you could.
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