Summer In The City - 1961

Was there ever a more familiar and more frustrating sound than the noise of children at play late on a summer evening — while you were in bed?

My memory of summer evenings as a little kid are a bit hazy but I distinctly remember listening to my brother and the neighborhood kids playing tag outside the house. My mother had pulled me away from the game for a bath and a bowl of cereal. It was especially unfair because Monica Foley got to stay outside and she was in the same grade. She had three older brothers and any parental rules in the Foley household had been watered down by the time Monica arrived.

Unlike Texas, summer evenings in Jersey City, N.J., could be pleasantly cool. Most kids ran out after dinner for whatever activity or mischief they could get themselves into before dark.What made the evening activities different was that the older and younger kids usually played together. Parents weren’t concerned about what we did but everyone had to stay on the block after dinner so groups of all ages naturally formed.

Hide and Seek and Capture The Flag were some of our favorites as little kids because we got to run around in other people’s yards. There were no 6-foot privacy fences, just chain link fences that could be scaled in seconds. The games were especially exciting when older kids helped us hide in places we knew we didn’t belong — like behind the Borowski’s garage or in the church basement stairwells.The fun could be measured in the number of mosquito bites you took home. If you were really having fun, you hardly noticed you were getting eaten alive as the sun went down. Another popular game on or street was Running Bases. Two skilled baseball players would play catch between two bases which were usually manhole covers. The little kids would run like fools between the two bases trying not to get tagged out. If one of the big kids dropped the ball, every little kid would shriek and run down Dwight Street towards the other base. The whole game would come to a halt every time a car pulled down the street and we’d stand aside. The neighborhood kids would taunt the drivers to hurry up unless it was a teenager. They might just stop their car and chase a few kids if they were in a bad mood. It wasn’t worth the risk. I would pay money n big money n for a video of us playing that simple game.

Stickball was more of a spectator sport for us little kids. The big kids, who were about 13 years old at the time, would use car fins as first and third base with a manhole cover filling in for second. There was little room for error when the ball field was as wide as a narrow city street. The game promptly ended when the ball fell down a sewer drain or dropped onto the flat roof of a three-story home.I never got to play stickball. When I was 7 we moved to the suburbs with parks where kids played real baseball and cars no longer had fins.

I don’t think about Dwight Street often but this evening, as I began writing this column, I heard kids outside playing. Now I have this uncontrollable urge to take a bath and enjoy a bowl of cereal. Go figure.