The Days When We Were Our Own X-Boxes

It is the holidays and there is no better way to celebrate the season than with lifelong friends and relatives, provided you like them a lot.

I grew up in Brooklyn and was born when New Yawkers were horribly reduced to only one professional baseball team. It was an era long before me or any of our family, relatives and friends ever decided to travel way out east and move to "Lone Guy Land," as my maternal grandfather called it.

My dad was a mechanic and a glazier growing up and held down two jobs. I have since matured to a place here in East Meadow, where when the holidays come and my old friends visit to reminisce about the “old neighborhood”, I break out my visual aids. No, not my pie charts of my favorite LI bars and my bar graphs of my favorite LI pies, but my handy, dandy 1969 Keds high top sneaker box, full of mementos from the days gone by...when all you needed was a couple of pals and a Spalding ball or less for hours upon hours of playful excitement.

Now that my son is of legal age to defend our country, smoke, drink, gamble and be tried as an adult in a court of law, I thought to include him in the gathering of old friends from “The Gang from Sheepshead Bay.” He is going to be an educator and coach when he graduates college this May and I thought to educate him about the history of New York Street Games.  

Growing up in Brooklyn, before most homes had even one color TV to him was like living in prehistoric times. But like the Neanderthal youths, we made our own fun in the simplest of times. Times without adult supervision, but with official "do overs." We even went so far as to demonstrate these games for him. He was as astounded as if he was watching someone use a telegraph, churn butter or unwrap an Egyptian mummy.

Many games required people and nothing else. There was Johnny on the Pony, Duck-Duck-Goose, Red Light-Green Light-1-2-3, Hide and Seek, Cops and Robbers, PF Flyers, Salugi and 22 different versions of Tag. Our favorite was Ringolevio, a game with two teams that mixes elements of Tag with Hide and Seek and could be played in the schoolyard or a four-block radius, so long as the boundaries were pre-determined.

As we got older, we would even play it on building rooftops of the projects and fire escapes. Luckily, no one ever slipped or fell and plummeted to their demise, because that was as dangerous as hell.

Other games could use chalk (sold cheap in any 5 and 10 store or pilfered from the leftovers in class on Friday) or a brick chip to write on the sidewalk. Hopscotch, London Calling, Potsy, Hangman and Sock, Tac, Toe which used a balled up old sock to land in the box that you wanted to mark, much like bean bag tick tack toe.

Our favorite was Skully, the "poor man's chalkboard golf", played with bottle caps and bottle tops. You would look for flat, unbent caps; score or rub them on the rough pavement for smoother sliding and then fill them with wax, melted crayons, clay or old Play Dough to give them some weight when you ran the course and got “Kinged” where you would knock them off the grid and make them start from scratch with a sarcastic “sorry” retort. I still have an Elmhurst milk bottle cap, filled with melted red, white and blue crayons and little pebbles and glass bottle chips called Marvel, that I used to put the gavoons and corner rats to shame, after it ricocheted off of the Johnny Pump (fire hydrant) and creamed their piece all the way to Staten Island. Also, there were many other games that involved “flipping baseball cards”, but that was more of a spring happening. And baseball cards were NOT what they are today.

You could really have a ball when you had a ball. Spaldeen (actually Spalding) was preferred over Pensey Pinky balls which were cheaper and spongy, instead of rubbery like a Spaldeen. You would even “Fish for a Sewer Ball” with a wire coat hanger, if it was a Spalding laying in the well, instead of using an old PP. There was Punchball, Boxball, Handball, Hindoo-Dutch, Chinese Handball (where if you played, an hour later you were hungry again.... ho, ho, he, he), Ace-King-Queen, Monkey in the Middle, Box Ball, Hit the Penny, Sidewalk Baseball and if you could get your hands on an old broomstick you'd play “Stickball”. Stickball could be played in the middle of the street using manhole covers and markers or on the schoolyard using other things as your markers (Chalk outlines, jackets, old grape Nehi bottles, etc.)

The truth is, we did not need controllers and game timers and cell phones. When Mrs. Pomo came down to the stoop in her apron and head schmata and hollered at the top of her lungs that it was “Suppertime,” it was like an air raid siren went off in the neighborhood and it was time to call it a day.

If my grandpa came by for a visit and fetched us from the schoolyard, on the chance we did not hear her, he would get in trouble, as he would treat for egg creams and wax lips at the corner luncheonette, putting the kibosh on our evening appetites.

However, we always knew that tomorrow would be another day full of play.