THAT HALLOWED GROUND

THAT HALLOWED GROUND
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Today, when a boy from the forties drives around
Reid, Thornton, Edwards....by Todd's House up
on Fourteenth.... by the old lake bed (now a Park!)
at the end of Fourteenth Street....by  the site of
Pleasant Inn, across from the hospital---drives
around that neighborhood...he feels a deep 
feeling of time-passed, precious childhood times,
long gone.

Who ever thought---we'd get this old?

Rolling balls of all kinds were just part--a big part---
of our fun, during each grand, eternal summer.
I doubt there's a foot of ground around there
that balls didn't roll on.

We built a baseball backstop at the corner of Reid
and Tenth. We built it---AND THEY CAME, from all
over town...a backstop! Bruce and Cecil came..
and Cameron McTavish (CHS 50), with that awful,
scary curve ball of his...

Art and Bob had a croquet set for their front lawn---
only croquet I ever played.

Bob had a nice wooden basketball goal on the
back alley, near Eleventh Street. It was murder
on a basketball, with the dry, dusty, dirty, rock
and nail-filled soil...socks got dirty--quick.

We rolled tennis balls over our roof tops
and made a game of it.

We played catch and "grounders" on our lawns.

Most of us boys had a valuable (to us) little
box with six or seven black friction-tape-
covered-baseballs which had seen their best
years...at some previous time.

Who amongst us in those wonderful, frugal times,
could afford $1.25 for a real Major League
WHITE STITCHES-SHOWING BASEBALL?!

Our generation of boys remembers that our
marvelous childhoods were bought and paid
for by men who went off to fight WWII for us...
dying at Pearl Harbor, The Death March, 
Tarawa, Guadalxanal, on the USS Quincy,  
Pointe du Hoc, D-Day, Battle of the Bulge, 
Bastogne, over Germany in B-17's, the 
Doolittle Raiders, and yes, even The Flying 
Tigers.

The same old SUN that was shining down on
us boys seventy years ago, is still shining down,
bright as ever it seems, as I parked my car 
recently, facing west there on Eleventh, right
by Art's house.

I could see our old beloved home, on the corner
of Reid and Eleventh...where we grew up, 
measles, mumps, chicken pox...there we  listened
to Fibber and Molly...and Bob Hope...and Red
Skelton...

...And played all these ball games and countless 
other great and glorious activities, which
only little American boys could dream up!

*******BY MIL*******
01-30-15