Hi, I am writing a magazine article about traditional games, and I would like to include some stories of parents and grandparents who are trying to keep them alive by teaching them to their kids and grandkids. If anyone out there would like to talk or email with me about this, I would be most grateful! Juliette
Any one remember voting for Miss Rheingold? There were voting boxes in neighborhood grocery stores with pictures of beautiful girls. You could vote for your favorite. My friends and I would vote millions of times for a girl we wanted to win. I think I was about 10 at the time. It’s amazing how much freedom young city kids had in those days. My friends and I wandered all over (probably a 5 or 6 block radius.It was a poor neighborhood but we never knew we were poor because everyone was pretty much in the same boat. Much of what I know today I learned on those very streets.
My girlfriends and I would bring a pail of water (we’d load it up with table salt), a blanket, soda, and tan ourselves on tar beach. At night we’d bring pizza and sodas to the roof and hang out under the stars. The roof was a part of every city kid’s life. What great fun we had there.
Back in the mid 60’s I started high school. I went to a certain prep school for about the first half of the 9th grade,being a tad rebelous I wasn’t making the kind of grades the adults thought I should. I was taken out of private school and sent to Englewood to live with relatives and attend the local high school (Dwight Morrow H.S.). There I stayed until 11th grade.In my class was one Joey Travolta, his brother John was one grade behind. It doesn’t end there, I went back to Brooklyn to finish the 11th and 12th grades. The school I attended was Sheepshead Bay H.S., two or three grades behind me was a girl named Donna Pescow. For those of you too young to remember a movie called “SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER”, they were the two stars of the movie.
How I remember “calling out”! This was on Frank St. in North Olmsted, Ohio in the 50s. We had lots of kids on the street and everyone did this in a singsong manner. We were always outdoors, going back & forth to each other’s houses, playing on the street and in yards. Sometimes we’d just lie on the grass and look at clouds, or try to find 4-leaf clovers.
God i love this forum……brings back so many memories of growing up in the 70’s……i’m from jersey city, nj…..loved stickball to death……still got a stick in my closet…..i miss hanging out on my friend tyrone’s stoop…..just watching all the neighbors…talking about them behind their backs etc….i remember one night i was hanging out on the stoop way past curfew and my mom came over and cracked me on the head in front of the guys…..boy did i hear about that one for a long time
How ironic to see these posts…I was born in 1940 and grew up in Conn. As a kid I remember being called from the back porch for dinner or whatever. After getting married and living in Va in the early 70’s we lived on a cul-de-sac and remember calling my kids for dinner…knowing they were within ear shot of my calls and being summertime, the kids were always outside playing…not like kids today who stay inside too much during summer….Thanks for the wonderful posts as it brought back fond memories of my childhood and growing up.
We used to fish the lost spauldeens out of the sewers in astoria projects where I grew up by fashioning a metal coat hanger with a little loop at the bottom enough to lift the ball out of the muck. Someone called “chips” on the ball, 15 cents was couple days of bottle hunting…Yuk…here’s your ball kid.
Sneaking on the train Did anyone ever sneak on the train growing up in east new york brooklyn we would sneak on the train jumping the turnstyle climbing up the outside of the elevated lines. dangerous” crossing the tracks to get to the other side one day my brother fell through and just grabbed on before he fell to the street below, crazy