The games we played: spaldeens and sewers

The sewer was a hugely important factor in our street play of the 1940s and 50s.

It must be explained that there were two kinds of sewers. One was a unit of measurement, the other a menace. First the benign kind, used for measurement:

This sewer (or manhole cover) was located in the middle of the street. It was home plate in stickball. If you could hit a ball on the fly to the next sewer, you were a one-sewer man. I was a good contact hitter, even after switching from left- to right-handed hitting. That was important because one swing-and-a-miss and you were out. But for distance, I maxed out at a little more than one sewer. The massively rotund Jackie Magnussen was the only legitimate two-sewer man who lived on the block. His swing seemed slow and effortless, but it had all that avoirdupois behind it and his drives were awesome. I can still see Jackie standing at home plate chuckling as some poor sap went chasing one of his Ruthian clouts beyond the apartment house on Colonial Road.

I've heard unconfirmed reports from other Brooklyn precincts with claims of three-sewer shots. I'm skeptical. On 71st Street that would not be possible, even with a brand-new atomic-powered spaldeen. On this subject one correspondent has written:

I don't believe that a "sewer" was ever a standardized measurement. It's like the dark ages, when measurements were different from town to town, or like early music, before A was standardized at 440 and had different values in every city in Europe, causing major tuning problems. I'm going to guess that an East 9th Street sewer was about 100 ft.

If sewers are spaced differently in different neighborhoods, then there's no basis for comparison when it comes to hitting for distance, and statistical chaos reigns. Until proven otherwise, I'm going to file these three-sewer claims, along with the story that Abner Doubleday invented baseball, under M for myth. But that won't be the end of it. Only an exhaustive analysis of street diagrams buried in the archives of New York City's sewage and water supply departments, or a fact-finding mission to the actual sites, will put this controversy to rest.

Now to the evil kind of sewer, the open sewer by the curb:

Most of us were familiar with the Songs of Safety, lyrics by Irving Caesar (lyricist of Tea for Two, Swanee, Crazy Rhythm, Sometimes I'm Happy and other pop hits), music by Gerald Marks (composer of All of Me, Is It True What They Say About Dixie? etc.). Songs of Safety were intended for use in classrooms. The most famous of them, the song we all learned in school, was Let the Ball Roll. You can listen to it here.

The only problem with letting the ball roll was that sometimes it rolled into one of those dreaded open sewers. Unless a replacement ball was immediately available, this meant instant death to any game. A spaldeen rolling into an open sewer in the middle of a good game was like the sudden, unanticipated rainstorm that washes out a major-league game. Whenever we saw our precious pink ball rolling its way to sewer-oblivion, I -- the make-believe play-by-play announcer -- would say, "Here comes the rain!" It was a bad, sinking feeling.

Then along came "Sewer Boy." Little did we know it when Angelo and family moved into their house down the block, but the reign of open-sewer terror was about to end. Angelo was a wonder. He earned his sobriquet by cleverly fashioning from wire coat hangers a long contraption with a loop at the end, perfectly sized to cradle a lost ball in the depths of the sewer. Somehow, with a long reach and a surgeon's delicacy of touch, he managed to raise and rescue many a spaldeen, thus saving many a game. After a brief intermission for a power-washing in Angelo's father's garage, the no-longer-pristine-pink ball looked like it had been to hell and back, but, mirabile dictu, it was stickball-worthy again. No longer would the open sewer be a sword of Damocles hanging over our games.

This was about the time Nat "King" Cole's Nature Boy was becoming a big hit, so whenever we saw "Sewer Boy" coming we'd all start singing in tribute: "There was a boy, a strange, enchanted sewer boy..." Granted, "Sewer Boy" wasn't as neat a nickname as "Slats" or "Sparky," but the nickname and our song-parody were the sincerest forms of admiration and gratitude we could muster.

The games we played on 71st Street

No, that's not 71st Street -- it's Breugel's 1560 painting, Kinderspiele, of children at play in dozens of different games, listed here alphabetically from ball games to whirligig. (Thanks to Atlanta Guy for bringing the painting and list to my attention.) My learned friend Dr. M. also reminds me that Rabelais' writing (same century) contains hundreds of references to games, real and imagined, including games of chance. I don't have any Rabelais handy, but according to The Rabelais Encyclopedia, "the most elaborate mention of games is found in the list of 217 games Gargantua plays."

A Kinderspiele updated to 1940s-50s 71st Street in Bay Ridge would look just as busy as the original. When I remember the details of my boyhood, I'm amazed how much of our after-school and weekend time was spent in the street. How we managed to cram so many different games into our limited street time is beyond me. I lived it, yet thinking about it now, I don't see how it was possible.

Admittedly my list is incomplete, as I cannot write with authority about the games girls played. I had no sisters, and frankly, for reasons beyond the scope of this report, girls made me a bit nervous in those days. Except for games of Hide and Seek, our playtime was strictly segregated along gender lines. Rachel Marie, who lived across the street, was the only girl who preferred our boys' games. She could hold her own in any of them. (Rachel Marie eventually became a nun.) I do remember other girls playing hopscotch, jacks, and various ball-bouncing and rope-jumping games, accompanied by a chant that went, "A my name is Anna, my husband's name is Albert, we live in Alabama, and we raise apricots. B my name is Betty, my husband's name is Bill, we live in Boston, and we raise bananas..." and so forth. For us boys, future spouses and the raising of produce were not yet on our radar screens. Competition was all.

I'll confine my list to street and alley games, leaving aside the nightly ping-pong games in the basement with Dad, and such sedentary indoor/outdoor pursuits as dice baseball, flipping bubblegum cards, board games, word games, and card games. Including all of them would bloat this post to Rabelaisian proportions.

The non-baseball-related street games:

Hide and Seek

I Declare War

Three Steps to Germany (it retained its name even after World War Two)
Red Light, Green Light

Ringaleevio
Red Rover

Kick the Can

Hit the Penny (or Hit the Popsicle Stick, depending on availability)

Handball

Chinese Handball

King's, a variant of Chinese handball

Boxball, the handball variety (another game also called Boxball falls in the baseball-related category)

Touchtackle, as opposed to Roughtackle (i.e. football)
Roller Hockey, played with those awful clamp-on roller skates

Two street games I scrupulously avoided:

1. Poison Ball, an especially vicious game played by the older, rougher kids. If you relished getting drilled in the head or some more sensitive area with a hard rubber ball thrown with maximum force by a sneering opponent, this was the game for you.

2. Buck-Buck, in which (it seemed to me) one boy hunched over while another boy jumped violently onto his back. I'm not sure what the object of Buck-Buck was, except to cause maximum mayhem and provide a good, steady living for a future generation of back specialists.

Then there were "the fads." That's what we called them: fads. A fad would appear mysteriously out of nowhere and soon everyone, including me, was doing it obsessively. One year it was yo-yo's; the next year marbles; the next year cap pistols; the next year those small wooden paddles, each with a rubber ball attached by a rubber band; the next year it would be tops that you unleashed with a string and sent spinning and careening out into the street. Joe Triniello's top, "The Traveler," was a legendary performer until it got flattened by a passing car. The local candy store (Brooklynese for soda shop/variety store) was where you bought all your fad paraphernalia. Maybe the fads weren't spontaneous after all. Maybe they were artificially concocted by an insidious, all-powerful, borough-wide consortium of candy-store owners.

Now to the meat of this report, the baseball-related games, to which most of our street time was devoted. Parks -- nice ones -- were nearby, and we used them for weekend games of real baseball on real grass, or for an occasional challenge game against another neighborhood; but as a rule, the street, the sidewalks, the alley, and our front stoops were our playing-fields of choice for:

Punchball

Stoopball

Running Bases (two basemen and a runner in a "pickle")

Slapball; only we never called it that. Played with four bases, it was called Boxball. If personnel was limited because some kid's mother made him go to the grocery store, it was played with three bases and called Triangle.

Until the summer of 1950, 71st Street was pale blue cobblestones, which for a ballplayer meant lots of frustrating bad hops. The Great Paving of 1950 ushered in the golden age of stickball on 71st Street. A one-way street with little traffic, 71st became stickball Mecca, drawing many "ringers" from surrounding streets. As is well known, the game was best played with a spaldeen, i.e. a Spalding Hi-Bounce pink rubber ball (25c at better candy stores everywhere). When new, a spaldeen was incredibly lively. Any stickball player who has ever connected solidly with a brand-new spaldeen and sent it a mile knows that sweet sensation: it made you feel like Babe Ruth. If a spaldeen was unavailable -- or if the game spaldeen had rolled into a sewer and no one had a quarter to spring for a new one -- a tennis ball could also be used. Hitting a tennis ball wasn't nearly as satisfying. Hitting a wet tennis ball made it feel like you were playing in the deadball era, c. 1908.

Stickball came in three varieties:

1. Straight "stick" in which the batter threw the ball in the air, let it bounce once,  and swatted it.

2. Pitching-in-on-a-bounce. (Couldn't we have come up with a more imaginative name?) The main problem with p.i.o.a.b. was too many delays: if the ball got past the catcher, someone had to run all the way down to Narrows Avenue to fetch it, a chore no one wanted.

3. Catch-a-fly-yer-up; derived, I believe, from the ancient game of One-O'Cat.

The most magical time of year for all street players, accompanied by surging feelings of exhilaration and liberation, was the onset of Daylight Savings Time, meaning we could go out and play after supper. Which brings us to one final street game, for which we had no name. It's what we played when it was too late and too dark to play anything else. Competitors would gather under a streetlight; then Joe Triniello, who had a gun of an arm, would throw the ball straight up as high as he could -- a cosmic pop-up disappearing in the nighttime sky. On the ball's return from the blackness, it would suddenly become visible as it re-entered the glow of the streetlight, which was approximately one-millionth of a second before you had to catch it. I managed to catch two during my career.

A 71st Street Breugel of the 1940s and 50s would devote little or no space in his painting to parents. Grown-ups were mere bit players in our street-game dramas, appearing only to call us in for supper. During the pre-television 1940s, they didn't even have to do that. We were pre-teenagers then and 5:00 p.m. meant you went home to listen to "the stories." These were the 15- or 30-minute radio programs between 5:00 and 6:00 while Mom was cooking. If you were a WOR loyalist, as I was, this meant Sky King, Superman (sponsored by Kellogg's Pep), Captain Midnight (Ovaltine), and Tom Mix. If you were a WJZ man, your pre-dinner program consisted of Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy (Wheaties) and Dick Tracy. By the 1950s when stickball had become serious business, our parents really did have to call us in, or else we'd never have eaten. One father down the block used to call his son by emitting a loud, piercing whistle. I always thought that strange because he would call his dog by name.

No 71st Street version of Kinderspiele would be complete without three additional, and crucial, visual elements: sewers, ice cream trucks, and "crabs." These will be the subjects of future posts -- far too important for any self-respecting chronicler to omit.

Me 'n' Pops: the photo I can't find

Two amazing, wonderful things happened during my senior year of high school, 1955-56, two things which had never happened before and will never happen again: the Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series, and I shook hands and chatted with Louis Armstrong.

It was my classmate Richie Schlesinger's idea. We didn't yet have our draft cards, but as long as we were forthright about it and thus willing to eschew alcohol, we could still go on a double-date and be admitted to see Armstrong and the all-stars (Edmond Hall, Trummy Young, Billy Kyle, Arvell Shaw, Barrett Deems) then appearing at Basin Street East.

I had already seen Armstrong in concert, from the balcony of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but as I was to discover when the four of us arrived early at the club, this was different: they'd given us a front-row table, this far from the musicians. The evening was pure heaven.

Between sets, a lady with a camera came around offering patrons the opportunity to get their picture taken with Pops, at $5 a pop. Many a time in my life have I failed to speak up in a timely way and seize an opportunity. Fortunately this wasn't one of those coulda-woulda-shoulda moments; I sprang for the five bucks (huge money to a teenager in those days; enough for four general-admission tickets at Ebbets Field). I was ushered to the great man's side. What to say? At the time the sum total of my knowledge of jazz history was a book by Belgian critic Robert Goffin, borrowed from the school library, and A History of Jazz in America by Barry Ulanov. I had the Satch Plays Fats LP and, I think, the first of Columbia's Hot Five reissues. I mumbled something adulatory and managed to formulate some sort of question about King Oliver, to which he replied with much tenderness:

"He was like a daddy to me."

The camera-lady aimed and Pops and I shook hands as the flash went off. His skin felt like well-worn leather. During the second set the photo, in a Basin Street East commemorative frame of heavy glossy stock, was delivered to our table. Somewhere there is, or once was, a photograph of an awkward, awestruck, acne'd adolescent shaking hands and chatting with Louis Armstrong, but I can't find it. I haven't seen it in years. I'll continue searching the family archives, but prospects are dim.

Memory is a ruthless and somewhat capricious editor, highlighting some facts to crystalline clarity while obliterating others entirely. Brooklyn Girl once asked me who the girls were on the double date with me and Richie. I had no answer because I had no memory. Still don't. I've googled my brain many times over the years ("Armstrong photo Basin Street East dates") and I come up with nothing. Zero.

My apologies go to the uncredited girls who get no billing in this vignette. I've lost their names and I've lost the photo, but I do have the memory of Armstrong's handshake and the seven words he spoke to me. That's sufficient.

Encore, Emilio!

In response to this post, Emilio Caceres' son has written to explain why his father didn't follow brother Ernie's path as a touring jazz musician. Emilio "did not enjoy the road at all. Although he spent time in the Michigan and Ohio area, and in New York that culminated with appearances on the Benny Goodman Camel Hour, he preferred to be home... He had numerous offers, from Abe Lyman in the early forties to Pete Fountain in the sixties. But dad refused to leave his home in San Antonio."


Emilio's daughter-in-law has also responded, commenting on "beautiful music from a beautiful man."


Such a great, underappreciated swing violinist deserves an encore. Instead of wondering what might have been, let's enjoy what is. Here's Emilio, together with brother Ernie on clarinet, in a dynamite I Got Rhythm from 1937. (Is that cousin Johnny Gomez on guitar?)


In a world starved for joy and beauty, who could ask for anything more?

Kelsey's Nuts

The controversy continues.

The question on everyone's lips is: Where does the expression "deader than Kelsey’s nuts" come from, and what does it mean? According to British etymologist Michael Quinion:


I’m told it’s an expression that former US President Richard Nixon was rather fond of using. Like other Americans before and since, he meant by it that something was unquestionably and permanently defunct. You might hear somebody say “The battery’s deader than Kelsey’s nuts”, or “His chances of surviving the election are deader than Kelsey’s nuts”. ...[W]ho or what was Kelsey and what was so special about those nuts? He turns out to have been a real person, John Kelsey, one of the pioneers of car manufacture in the USA. With the encouragement of Henry Ford, he set up the Kelsey Wheel Company in 1910. By 1913 this was based in Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit... The saying refers to the proverbially secure attachment provided by the nuts and bolts on the wheels that Kelsey’s company made. In the view of the public, nothing could be fixed more tightly. And the obvious anatomical innuendoes in those nuts made the saying just a little naughty. 

Though some examples are recorded from the 1930s, the phrase began to become more widely known in the 1950s. Early on, it appeared as “tighter than Kelsey’s nuts” to mean a person who was stingy or mean, and is also recorded in the form “as safe as Kelsey’s nuts”, meaning very safe. By the early 1960s, it had evolved away from these fairly obvious formations to the imaginative and metaphorical phrase still used today.


Taking issue with eminent contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary is not my thing. However, an important bit of audio evidence has come to my attention which knocks all previous theories into the proverbial cocked hat. This 1933 recording by the Williams Washboard Band with Ted Tinsley singing, sheds new light on the controversy. No wonder all my etymologist friends are in such a tizzy. Back to you, Mr. Quinion.

To Little Jazz and Spanky: Wow!

Roy Eldridge's 1937 recording of Heckler's Hop is, as every jazz fan knows, dazzling. This broadcast version captures Little Jazz & Co. at the Arcadia Ballroom in August, 1939. Zutty Singleton had been the drummer on the studio recording; by 1939 Eldridge's drummer was Panama Francis, who makes his presence vividly felt in this hard-charging air-check. It's an incomplete performance, starting in mid-bridge, but it's just long enough to capture one of my favorite spontaneous moments in live jazz recording. As Eldridge completes his stratospheric coda, the radio announcer reacts as if he'd just witnessed the repeal of the law of gravity. He totally loses both his cool and, apparently, his power of speech; all he can utter is "Wow!" Listen to the break in the voice: at this moment he's no longer the glib hepcat announcer but just another goggle-eyed fan, like the rest of us.



Thinking about Roy Eldridge, and Panama Francis, conjures more recent memories, of trumpeter and dear friend Spanky Davis. Spanky was Eldridge's protege and chosen successor as leader of the house band at Jimmy Ryan's in the early 1980s. Spanky has preserved the spirit of Roy Eldridge without imitating him, playing with his own quartet, and with Panama Francis' Savoy Sultans (in the Sultans' 1980s reincarnation), Benny Goodman, Buck Clayton, and Frank Sinatra, among many others.

Brooklyn Girl and I first met Spanky in the bygone days -- not that long ago -- when this allegedly world-class city (not New York) still featured live jazz worth going out to hear. Spanky would usually play in a downtown hotel with colleagues of the calibre of Buddy Tate, Plas Johnson, Gus Johnson, and Milt Hinton, thus providing us with a lifetime's worth of "Wow!" moments. Just as indelible are the extracurricular memories of Spanky: the friendship, the jokes and the anecdotes, his hilarious impressions of Benny Goodman and Pee Wee Marquette, the emotion in his voice as he talked about Eldridge shortly after Roy's death in 1989, and those unforgettable three-and-a-half-hour meals together at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Brooklyn Girl captured the essence of Spanky in this oil painting, which now hangs in its rightful place: Spanky-and-Rosie's house.

In this YouTube clip of I Remember Clifford, Spanky pays eloquent tribute to the memory of trumpeter Clifford Brown. But today we're remembering Little Jazz and Spanky.

Our statue

When Mom was growing up on 71st Street in Bay Ridge -- and years later when I was growing up in the same house -- the Statue of Liberty was an unchanging part of the backdrop of our everyday lives.

Our house was located just to the left of the "W" on the compass of this map:

From the shore, a block and a half from our house, if it wasn't too smoggy, you could see the statue in the distant northwest. Knowing it was there made it a constant presence: when we watched the big ships coming and going through the Narrows during World War Two, and later in the 1940s when we'd hop the black wrought-iron fence and play ball in the park bordering the Belt Parkway and the Narrows. And on steaming-hot summer days or evenings, we could walk over to 69th (Bay Ridge Avenue) and take the ferry to Staten Island, just for the breezes. (Fare: one nickel.) Then we'd get a good view of the statue, smog or no smog.

If the two family photos below had been taken using super-extra-wide-angle lenses (a magnifying glass would also come in handy) you'd see the statue way out there in the harbor.

Here's Mom in 1933 at the 69th Street ferry pier:

And here I am in 1947, in the long, narrow park along the shore:

We kids took pride in our proximity to the Statue of Liberty; it was one of the niftier features of the neighborhood -- a bragging-point. Of course our ability to see the statue, however faintly, from the shore (on a smog-free day) didn't make it our statue, any more than Sarah Palin's ability to see Russia from her house makes her an expert on foreign policy. In our defense, though, we were eight years old at the time, and not one of us was a candidate for Vice-President of the United States.

The special relationship we felt we had with the statue didn't depend on proximity alone; it was based on what we were taught in school. Unlike my Democratic parents, the teachers at P.S. 102 were Republicans to the core (not surprising in Republican Bay Ridge) and they made no secret of it. But when it came to the statue, politics didn't matter; we were all of one mind. My fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hannigan, used to remind us how lucky we were to live within sight of this welcoming American icon. She used to recite, in reverent, hushed tones, the Emma Lazarus sonnet engraved on a tablet within the pedestal.

I remember Miss H telling us that we're all immigrants in this country, that immigration is a source of strength for America, and that the statue represents hope for a better life.

I've been to Liberty Island twice, once just after the war (we couldn't go all the way to the top of the statue; the upraised arm was closed for repairs) and again, memorably, almost twenty years ago, a combined visit to the statue and the newly renovated Ellis Island Immigration Museum.

So naturally I thought I knew something about Miss Liberty and what she stands for -- that is, until recently when Sarah Palin blew in from Alaska, and Glenn Beck arrived from whatever planet he calls home, to set me straight.

Beck has had a lot to say about the statue lately. In his alternate universe, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi's creation isn't about welcoming immigrants at all. (How can it be, given Beck's views on immigration?) The statue, he informs us, is actually an angry statement of defiance. "We have so misunderstood the Statue of Liberty," he says. "You think that it's a protection of those 'poor, tired [sic], huddled masses'? Let me tell you the truth about the Statue of Liberty... The French were actually using us... It was actually a slap in the face to the old world..." (Those perfidious French; even when they give us a gift, they're using us!)

Beck also has unorthodox views on the sonnet by Emma Lazarus. He says it must never be recited in hushed tones; that's because it's so angry. He proceeds to justify his novel interpretation by reciting it very loudly and very angrily. The whole performance is readily available on YouTube for viewing by anyone willing to take the punishment. Back in P.S. 102, the staunchly Republican Miss Hannigan would not have been pleased with eight-year-old Glenn or his bilious reading of the poem.

Then Sarah Palin arrived on the scene, in the course of her bus tour of national landmarks. Summoning all the eloquence at her command, the ex-half-term governor said: “This Statue of Liberty was gifted to us by foreign leaders, really as a warning to us, it was a warning to us to stay unique and to stay exceptional from other countries. Certainly not to go down the path of other countries that adopted socialist policies... It’s also a “warning” of sorts, as France encouraged us to keep democracy alive as the recipient of this gift… basically telling us not to blow it!"

In Palinland, the mother of exiles with mild eyes is no welcoming figure; she's actually a massive policewoman. That upraised torch? Not a beacon of hope but an enforcer's flashlight, strip-searching all newcomers for alien ideas.

And what of all those pictures of excited immigrants of yesteryear seeing the statue for the first time? What are they looking so happy about? They should be cowering in fear. The Great Warning looms ahead in the harbor, flashlight in hand, admonishing them with silent lips: Don't blow it.

As I re-listen to Palin's exegesis on the statue, my thoughts wander back again to fourth grade. I can hear the staunchly Republican Miss Hannigan saying, "Sarah, stand up and tell the class what the Statue of Liberty means to you." I guarantee, if Miss H had gotten a response remotely similar to Palin's, she'd have interrupted with great annoyance and said, "Sit down, Sarah. Doris, can you do any better?"