Do

The Way Things Used to Be - Stoop Ball, Nothing Could Stop the Game

The sound of a pink spaldeen smacking against the cornice on the outer wall of 575 was not a pleasing sound to the people living in the apartments on the other side of that wall. From time to time they'd grab the bars of their ground floor windows and tell us to "stop hitting that ball against that wall!" Sometimes they would raise their voices. Sometimes they would even scream or threaten to do us damage.

We had nothing against such people. We just didn't think of them. If they kicked enough, we'd move west ten feet and start hitting "that ball" against the next section of wall and the game would go on. Nothing could stop the game.

Sometimes they'd try to stop us by parking in front of the section of wall against which we Delaware Lemon Laws hitting the ball. We would ask them to please move their car. If they refused, we'd wait till they left, release their handbrake, put their car into neutral, push it back five feet and the game went on. There could be pauses in the game, but nothing could stop the game. (The cars back then were still pre-War cars and didn't have automatic transmissions or gears that locked when the engine was off. Today they'd call such cars 'stoop-ball-friendly,' but people didn't speak like that back then.)

One guy we called "Und Furdermore" would threaten us from between his window-bars and intentionally park his car where we were playing. He was a foreigner and bald, and swooped the hair from the side of his head over the top and pasted it down with the stuff Goosegrease Gus used in the Wildroot ads and we did not take him seriously.

"I vill tell your parents," he would cry. "Und furdermore I vill call the police."

We never put ourselves in his place or thought what it must be like to hear kids pound a ball against your wall a thousand times an afternoon. Nor did it occur to us that his wife might have migraines, or that he had an accent because he'd been 'displaced' during the War and had possibly suffered something worse than meatless Tuesdays and a couple of years without pink spaldeens and Dubble Bubble. We were teen-aged kids trying play stoop ball and Und Furdermore kept getting in our way.

One day, after he intentionally parked where we were playing, Blue Book, Matt and I released his handbrake, put his car into neutral, pushed it to the corner, steered it around onto West End, up to 89th and parked it neatly on the other side of the avenue. We resumed our game and Und Furdermore came to his window, grabbed the bars and started scolding us. Suddenly, he noticed his car was gone and came running out in his undershirt.

"Vere's my car?" he cried, boney arms, boney shoulders, hair in total disarray.

"Vat car?" we said. "Ve don't zee no car."

He called the police who, from what we heard, searched every stolen car haven from Hell's Kitchen up to 207th before they found it ten days later, parked on 89th and West End.

"Just like in The Purloined Letter, by Edgar Allan Poe," Blue Book would say every time he told the story. As we laughed and congratulated ourselves over our cleverness, we had no idea that the Soviets were training Kim il-Sung's North Korean army, which now included infantry and armored divisions and a militarized border constabulary all armed with captured Japanese weapons.

Name: Herb Lobsenz
Website: oldtimewriter.com

I'm trying to prevent the disappearance of interesting people, places and deeds I've run into by preserving their memory in writing. So far my oldtimewriter blog covers Manhattan in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, marble shooting, stoop ball, punch ball, the milkman, the organ grinder, the streetsweeper, the iceman, Frankie the Fixer, Abner the Stooper, Lockup Bill, The Penguin, Cedric the Singles Hitter. Future recollections will include Joe Louis, the Polo Grounds, the baseball Giants, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the Korean War.

People with memories they'd like to contribute are welcome. Post them on my blog page. Comments are welcome too - favorable or unfavorable.

Excerpts from my novels and short stories are on the website too.

You may order copies of my latest novel, SUCCESSION, at a 20% discount.

posted by besnda @ 1:19 PM