It was the first day of summer vacation, and the sun beat down on the blacktop, which made the freshly laid pavement shimmer like black gold and hot enough to melt the rubber on a new pair of Skips. It was summertime in New York City, and that was our time to let the games begin.
I remember we were all early risers during the school year, most by design, one or two by force. It was never a problem for me, especially on the first day of summer. That day, I was incentivized to get up early for two reasons. One reason was that my mother, one of the neighborhood’s finest cooks, was making pancakes. These weren’t your average everyday pancakes. She made these golden brown delights in a cast iron skillet the size of a dinner plate and served them like a short-order cook from a Jersey diner. Those pancakes with a cold, fresh glass of milk (they delivered milk back then, imagine that), butter, and real maple syrup (sorry but not sorry, Log Cabin). It was mana from the gods.
The second reason was that my boys and I had some gaming to do. No, we didn’t have PlayStation or Xbox; shoot, we didn’t even have Atari then. No gaming meant street games, city games, or New York City street games. Of which there were many. The only thing that was certain on that day and other days was that we would be outside playing them from sunup to sundown.
On a typical day, we started at 7:30 am on 113th St., otherwise known as the Playstreet. We lived in Jefferson Projects, which opened in December 1956, when I was born. I was only three months old when we moved in, and I was told that our living room sofa was a substitute for a Christmas tree. Jefferson Projects extended from 112th to 115th Streets (north-south) and First to Third Avenues (east-west). The Playstreet was unique because it had two cul de sacs, each extending about four blocks long, and Second Avenue intersected it.
Our game of choice in the early morning was called Scullys or Lodies. You wanted to play this game early in the morning before the sun became too strong. It was an outsized board game that could include as many as six players and last between 30 minutes or hours, depending on the number of players and their skill level. A photo of the playing board is below:
(Wikipedia)
The game’s object was for each player to “shoot” their cap, checker, or chip squarely into each box sequentially, one through 13. This part of the game reminds me of Shuffleboard. Each player would have a soda cap filled with a substance to give it some weight, a checker, or two poker chips held together by glue or Bazooka bubble gum. Having the poker chip version was akin to a pool shark pulling out his hand-crafted pool cue. It was considered pretty badass.
The game had to be played on your knees while “shooting” or projecting your cap, checker, or chip with a motion like how you shot marbles. The game ended when the first player completed the board and was crowned a “Killer Diller.” the rules of the game could vary from block to block and borough to borough, but Scullys was a New York City staple.
After several games of Scullys, we often felt a need for speed. Middle-class kids had their boxcar derbies, but we had our scooter races. They were drag races with homemade scooters. To make a scooter, you needed to find a milk carton or a wooden crate, a two-by-4 four, nails, and one metal retractable roller skate. The roller skates were the kind that needed a metal key to tighten them around your sneaker.
You would nail the milk carton to one end of the two by 4 with the bottom facing out. Next, you separate the front and back ends of one of the skates and nail the front half of the skate to the front bottom of the two by 4. Then, you nail the back part of the roller skate to the bottom end of the two by 4. The milk carton usually had a handle that you could use to steer your Scooter straight. We would take turns racing up and down the blacktop until one of the Scooters had to go in for a pit stop or one of us had a close encounter with the Second Avenue M15 bus.
(Bones Brigade)
For the majority of us, lunch was hardly a sit-down family meal. Most of us would run upstairs long enough to wolf down some leftovers from the previous night’s dinner or slap some cold cuts and cheese together for a sandwich with some Kool-Aid or Mission soda. After we made lunch disappear, we were out of the door and down the steps, faintly recognizing warnings and cautions from our mothers.
Another one of our favorite venues for the Summer Games was the playground. The playground was a fenced-in structure surrounded on three sides by apartment buildings. On one side was a set of wooden structures with an entrance. It was an urban courtyard that, in retrospect, some might say was a children’s torture chamber. We had metal monkey bars one and 1/2 stories high, hollow concrete barrels still standing 67 years later, and fencing that ensured our families had stocked hydrogen peroxide, mercurochrome, and many band-aids.
One of the best things about the playground was that we played a game called “barrel ball.” Barrel ball was an assimilation of baseball without all the costs. The one significant difference between baseball and barrel ball is that instead of a pitcher throwing the ball to the batter, the batter would slam the ball off the barrel and then run the bases. If you were able to hit the ball off the barrel with enough force and it cleared the fences, it was a home run. Sometimes, the ball would hit one of the trees lining the back fence, giving you the feeling you were playing in Wrigley Field with its iconic ivory.
The real star of this game and many of the games we played was a little, round, pink ball called the Spalding, but to many of us, it was pronounced Spauldeen. It cost about 15 to 25 cents during my childhood. A lot of the time, we funded our next Spauldeen by cashing in returnable glass soda bottles at grocery stores.
The Spauldeen was instrumental in many of our games. If we weren’t playing Barrel Ball with a Spauldeen, we were playing Stoop Ball, Handball, Punchball, Hit the Penny, Booties Up, The Alphabet Game, and the iconic game called Stickball. This list is just skimming the surface. This ball belongs in the Street Games Hall of Fame.
(Stock Photo)
Hot, sweaty, and out of breath, we needed a break. It was time to head for the water park! No, I’m pulling your leg. If there was such a thing as a water park, we couldn’t afford it. We had an open hydrant, also known as the Johnny Pump. First, we found someone with a heavy-duty wrench who could remove the hydrant cap and then turn on the hydrant by loosening the stem nut. Many times, it was a compassionate adult who would help us.
Open hydrants were happening all over the city during the summertime. I’m surprised we didn’t have severe water shortages. Older boys would scrape the top and bottom of tin cans to remove them and use them to direct the water flow. Sometimes, the force of the water was strong enough to knock you down. But serve the purpose of cooling you off. Of course, there was always the risk of cops like Bulldog and Bruce-O coming by and shutting down the hydrant, but we were persistent, and after a mad dash to avoid getting tickets, we’d be back out there as soon as they left. Most of the time, it was hot enough for us to dry out before being called to come upstairs for dinner.
Our favorite time of the day was after a hearty dinner. We met at the playground and chose sides to play a game called Ringolevio. The playground was perfect for Ringolevio because it was enclosed on three sides and inside had a bench that represented “home base” or “jail.”
The game’s object was for one team (Hunters) to capture each player on the other team (Prey) by grabbing a Prey team member and holding him long enough to chant Ringolevio 1-2-3 three times. After that happens, that individual must go to jail (park bench). The game proceeded until the hunter team caught every member of the prey team, and then the two teams switched the roles of Hunter and Prey. What made the game so much fun and lasted so long was that at any given time, a member of the Prey team could reach the jail and free all the people who had already been caught and jailed. Ringolevio could last for hours, depending on how athletic and evasive your team was.
Ringolevio was usually the last game of a very long and exhaustive day, but how long it lasted depended on whether parents were downstairs on the benches. One of my fondest memories is when my father, an avid baseball fan, used to bring his shortwave radio downstairs to listen to Major League Baseball games from as far away as California. If he was downstairs, I could play until 8:00. The little kids had a nickname for my father at the time. They used to call him Mr. Peanut because he always used to have treats for them while he was on the bench, most of the time peanuts.
As the evening wound down, I still had one more mission. How could I get to bed without taking my nightly bath? That always wound up a pipe dream because the bath monitor (my mother) would always stay up late enough to say, “You’ve got a bath waiting for you.” Despite my disappointment, I capped the night off, eager to embark on another day of fun and street games. What would it be like tomorrow: Touch Football, Spinning Tops, Flipping Cards, maybe Hot Peas and Butter? I couldn’t wait to find out.
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