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 schoolyard.
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 schoolyard, and we used the schoolyard perimeter fence as our backstop. That lasted for just a couple of 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 to 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 your 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.