Home Is a Sewer: Street Games We Played That Kids Don't Play Any More

By David Altschiller and Ron Barrett

Home is a Sewer is a book about growing up in New York City in the 40s and 50s and about the role street games played. The games open a window on the times, on the relationship between parents and children, on neighbors and neighborhoods, on bullying, on favoritism, on cheating, and petty sadisms, and on the democracy among children that de

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnard Bookworks
• Release date: Jul 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781947635098

David Altschiller

David Altschiller began his career as a copywriter in what they call "The Golden Age of Advertising." He spent his first decade rising to the top of one of great agencies of its time: Carl Ally Inc. He then left Ally to help found another, Altschiller Reitzfeld, and headed it for over 30 years. A winner of multiple advertising awards, and nominated for The Creative Hall of Fame, he was voted one of the ten best copywriters in the industry for a dozen straight years. He was a founder and President of the industry's preeminent creative organization, The One Club. David currently lives with his wife, Nina, in Savannah, Ga.

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Introduction

If you grew up in New York in the 30s, 40s, or 50s, you played some sort of street game. That’s simply what kids did. The games varied from neighborhood to neighborhood depending on the topography (did you have apartment houses or stoops? Did you have schoolyards with wells? Did you have lots of traffic in the street?)

And while New York’s 5 boroughs were Street Game Central, you could find variations of the games in urban areas all over America. They morphed from city to city, although the names changed. But on any given morning wherever there were gutters and curbs and stoops and walls and broomsticks and spaldeens, scores of children across every neighborhood could be found on the street playing them.

From morning til night you could see the kids in various acts of organized mayhem. In yards, between buildings, on the stoops in front of brownstones, in the courtyards of schools, dodging cars while playing in the gutter.

Back then, nobody played in the house.

No mother that I can recall ever asked you whether you wanted to invite Johnny over. The idea of play dates was not even on the horizon.

Get out from under my feet. Go play outside. For stay-at-home moms (which most moms were back then), home was their space not to be disturbed by screaming kids. Screaming was meant for the street. The only time you were inside was when you were sick, or playing sick. (Bellyaches were the universal undetectable illness.)

And once you were out, you stayed out until it was dark. If you got hungry, you wouldn’t ask to come back for lunch, your mother would throw a wax paper-wrapped sandwich from the 3rd floor window—with a nickel or a dime for something to drink from Joe, the candy store. Only when it was too dark to see the ball was it time to go home.

Sadly, that wonderful moment in our lives, and the games so emblematic of the times, have all but disappeared.

We can attribute their disappearance to a number of factors.

Lets begin with television. Early TV in the form of cartoons like Rocky and His Friends, and Fractured Fairytales, and Farmer Grey, and Bugs Bunny, Tweetie and Sylvester, and Porky Pig; comedies like Our Gang, and Laurel and Hardy, the Bowery Boys, all vied for a portion of the day.

Shows like Howdy Doody, and the Magic Clown, serials like Flash Gordon (the dreadful Ming the Merciless), and Don Winslow of the Navy, kept kids increasingly glued to the tv. The rise of Atari and an endless stream of subsequent electronic games contributed big time to the demise. And later, a growing concern about sexual assault of children, had mothers keeping their children off the street. Finally, the rise of round the clock organized school sports and other after school activities made street games a memory.

I have no doubt, at some point in your life, if you played street games, you have tried to explain these long lost totems of your childhood to your children. Chances you’ve forgotten many, or you’ve struggled with details of how they were played. You probably remember the emotions attached to them. Emotional memory seems to always die last.

I wrote this book to help you retrieve those memories, to rekindle the joy of playing those wonderful games. Perhaps an errant stickball game will be played as a result. Maybe you’ll teach your kids, or grandkids, 3-box baseball.

I also wrote it so that your children might get a better sense of who you were back then. They need to know.

Mostly, I wrote it so that a window into this joyful, innocent time might not be closed to memory.

The Spaldeen

The beginning of any discussion of street games must begin with the spaldeen. It was the only official, authentic, for-real ball that street games allowed.

The spaldeen was a relatively soft pink rubber ball made by the Spalding Corporation. Clearly marked on the ball was the legend Spalding Hi-Bounce. No one ever referred to the spaldeen as a pink ball, or softball, or rubber ball, or even, heaven forbid, Spalding, it was a spaldeen. With the emphasis on the deen. Granted the word spaldeen is a corruption of the name Spalding, but who knew from corruptions?

Now there were all grades of spaldeens. They varied in hardness and in how high they bounced.

In some games like stickball, the harder the ball was the better. (The spaldeen had a seam in the middle of it. It was actually two half-balls glued or somehow welded together. A few good shots with a stick on a soft spaldeen and you’d end up with two spaldeens.)

In some games like 3-box Baseball or Triangle where you’d have to dig your fingers into the ball to pitch, the softer the ball was the better.

But ultimately the criterion for judging a spaldeen was how high it bounced. There was a simple test for this.

You’d go into the candy store and pick maybe half a dozen balls. Then drop them two at a time from eye-level and let them bounce. You’d keep the highest bouncer of each of the contests. Then drop each of the winners. At the end of this elimination tournament, you’d have the best spaldeen. But before you could possibly consider buying it you’d have to inspect the seam. There could be no ragged edges, both halves had to line up exactly. And as a last test, you’d squeeze the ball making sure that the seam didn’t separate under pressure.

Now that you had the perfect spaldeen, there was one last step. You’d have your friend, Heshie, create a disturbance at the front of the candy store. While Jake, the owner, was throwing Heshie out, you’d pocket the ball. But you would not leave like some ordinary thief. After all, this was Jake you were stealing from. Jake’s sole purpose in life was to be stolen from. If he didn’t like it, why did he run a candy store? So before you’d leave, you’d tell Jake that his latest shipment of spaldeens were inferior and defective and you were taking your business to Joe, the candy store around the corner who made better egg creams anyway.

Of course, there were times not even a major disturbance could get Jake’s eyes off you, so you had to buy the ball. But this was okay, because while Jake’s eyes were on you, Heshie walked out of the store with enough wax false teeth for the next 5 Halloweens.

How to Retrieve a Lost Spaldeen

The world was filled with ways and places to lose spaldeens: fire escapes, roofs, drainage sewers, gratings over cellar windows, and assorted rotten people. It was a wonder that any game played with a spaldeen could last its official 7 or 9 innings. As a matter of fact, many didn’t. Once a ball was officially lost, the game was officially over. You see, there was usually only one ball on any block in game condition at any time and even if someone had one, he wasn’t about to volunteer it after seeing what had just happened to the last ball.

Because no one wanted the game to end, a number of truly ingenious methods were devised to retrieve the spaldeen you had just lost.

From the Drainage Sewer

The most popular place to lose a spaldeen was in the drainage sewer. (You don’t recall that name? The drainage sewer was the sewer at the curb on the corner of the block. Not the round one in the middle of the street used as a base, but the square one with the gaping square holes.) If a spaldeen was hit anywhere near the corner, it wound up in the drainage sewer. You see, the drainage sewer was specifically engineered to have water flow down the street into it. Therefore, it was always lower than the rest of the street. If a ball were hit past the fielders and rolled anywhere near the curb, it almost immediately, like water, began to roll towards the drainage sewer. On occasion the wheel of a parked car would stop its fated course. But not often enough. If you began to look for a ball under a parked car and you didn’t see it almost immediately, you knew where to look next.

Retrieving a spaldeen from a drainage sewer was no easy feat. The sewers were very deep. At least 5 or 6 feet, often more. To compound the problem, at the bottom of the sewer, was an assortment of putrefied garbage floating on putrefied water. And in the midst of that, between the cast-off prophylactics, grapefruit halves, and 10 million popsticks, bobbed your spaldeen. To retrieve your ball from this mess, you needed something to lift it out. Shovels wouldn’t fit in the sewer, the holes in the grate were maybe 4 or 5 inches square. A spoon would do. But no one ever had a spoon around with a six-foot handle.

Something had to be invented. And of course something was. If you were playing stickball, you obviously had a broomstick. If you weren’t playing stickball, you could always find one in somebody’s yard. And while you were finding that, you also had to find a wire coat hanger.

I don’t know why, but metal coat hangers always seemed to be around the street. In the last 10 years I’ve probably seen 1 metal coat hanger on the street. But when I was growing up, they were always tied in bunches beside garbage pails.

Well, you took this coat hanger and you straightened it out as best you could and then you bent one end into a circle a little smaller than the diameter of a spaldeen. Then you bent the circle so it was at right angles with the rest of the coat-hanger, sort of a ladle. Lastly, you got some string or tape and fastened the straight end of the coat hanger to the end of the stickball bat.

You’d then lower this whole contraption into the sewer. With a little patience you