Greenfield Rules – A Boomer Looks Back, Looks Forward

For Baby Boomer boys in the early 60′s America’s Pastime was still the game of choice.  Oh true, football would someday replace it, but back then it was still baseball.

Little League was around, in fact our town had several leagues and many of the kids in our neighborhood signed up for organized baseball.  But the thing I remember most about the early days on Greenfield Road was our pick-up baseball games at West Ridge school yard.

The interesting thing was although West Ridge had a small ball field already, we didn’t use that.  Instead we built our own.   We built two over the years.  The first one was right at the end of Greenfield Road where it dead-ended at the school yard, and we used the school yard perimeter fence as our backstop.  That lasted for just a couple years until we outgrew it and cut a new set of base paths with home plate at the base of The Hill.

So every day in weather good and even so-so, neighborhood boys flooded The Hill for a chance to play pick-up baseball.  We would first select two captains — boys who were both known as relatively good players.  One would throw a bat the other and they would alternate putting gripping the bat on top of the other guy’s hand until the first one got to the knob of the bat.  That guy had first choice and so the teams were selected for the day.  If you didn’t get there on time,  well you had to wait until someone had to leave, or you just didn’t play.  In the heyday of the Boomers there were that many kids!

It was an amazing thing to see, I suppose, for older people who must have marveled at the daily swarm, and I bet gave them some gladness to see it.  Those people who could remember, or maybe even fought in or had loved ones die in WWII or Korea — maybe they took pause to think “this is what we fought for — youth able to play without worry.”  The little country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam was a place most hadn’t yet heard of.

You just didn’t leave your house without you mitt over your handlebars and your bat on one shoulder.  I suspect that if you looked today at that field at the base of The Hill, those base paths — once so worn by the sneakers of Boomers hoping to be the next Mickey Mantle — would be grown over.   For those of us who were there every day in the summer, those paths are forever etched in our hearts and minds.

Any story about my Greenfield Days and Baby Boomer friends must begin (and ultimately end — about that later) with The Hill — a hallowed place in my life and not unlike similar places I’m sure, in the lives of my fellow Boomers.  This is an introduction.  The Hill will make many return appearances in this blog, but it was important for you to get to know this place.

The Hill located in the school yard of West Ridge Elementary was a gathering point for all the kids who lived on the streets that radiated out from the school.  Greenfield Road was one of those streets.  The school yard and The Hill that rose up just 30 yards beyond the entrance were but a few-minute’s walk from our house.

The school yard in which The Hill sat was roughly 400 yards on each of its sides forming a square (at least that’s how I remember it), and was carved out of a corn field and farm land that was common in the area in the 1950′s.  The suburbs hadn’t yet completed their sprawl.  The Hill sat in the southwest quadrant of the school yard.   It was formed during the construction of West Ridge — it was the earth removed to form the school’s foundation.

Our family in 1963 was like so many others that were moving from the city to the suburbs.  After moving in my brother and I soon ventured down to the school yard to find it teeming with activity every day — mostly involving kids our age, which for me was six and for my brother seven (soon to be eight).

Activity on and around The Hill through the years in many ways would become a metaphor for the lives of Baby Boomers and the society we affected.   A spike of kids and activities for a number of years.  The baseball and football games that involved so many kids that if you arrived late to the “choosing up” you’d be out of luck for playing until someone had to go home.  This was followed by an eerie silence of activity once the Boomers grew and moved on.  West Ridge even closed for a while.

The Hill will always be hallowed ground for me.  It was that place around which my brother and I first played with our new friends, the place I kissed a girl for the first time, where we sledded in the winter (and eventually where I would take my children to do the same), where we teed off on our own “golf course,” played so many games of baseball and football, where the hippies of the late sixties camped out that one summer until our toughest guy beat their toughest guy (a story of its own), and finally a place where part of my ashes will be spread.

The Hill.  I know every Boomer has a similar place in their memory — the tribal gathering place of our young lives.  Please share what was yours.