PENNY PINSKEY. This or something close to this was the brand name of the substitute ball of choice when the candy store was out of Spaldings. It wasn’t as firm or live as a Spalding, but it beat nothing–and heaven forbid we’d use a tennis ball, so heavy and dead compared to a pink ball.
Out on LI, just off Hempstead Turnpike in W. Hempstead, there was a long red brick supermarket wall, and concrete paving all the way to the street. This became known as “The Office.” Games of ‘Chinese’ Handball went on all day long in the late 50s and early 60s. Chinese handball was played in a ‘court’ usually two pavers square and was distinguished by one rule: You had to bounce the ball once before it hit the wall. “The Office” was well equipped: Across the street was “Three Finger Jack” McGinn’s candy store, and there was a staircase next to the handball wall where you could climb down and have more ‘private’ conversation, or hide if your mom came looking for you and your cigarette-smoking hooligan friends.
I grew up in New York on the upper West Side, and we played stickball against the Firemen’s Monument at 100th Street and Riverside Drive. We drew a strike box on the side of the monument with chalk, a pitcher’s mound about 50 feet up the street, and a batter’s box on the street. We used a broom handle (usually wrapped with electrical tape on the handle) and pink rubber balls made by the Spaulding Company (which were universally known as Spaldeens). A single was a ball hit past the pitcher’s rubber on the fly, which hit before the doorway of a building about 75 feet up the street; a double had to be hit on the fly between the marker for a single and another building about 150 feet up the street; a triple had to be hit between the end of the marker for a double and the top of the hill; and a home run was a ball hit over the top of the hill on 100th Street. When I went to buy Spaldeens at the candy store, I looked for ones that had a little extra rubber at the seam from the molding process, because I was one of the few guys who could throw a curve ball with a Spaldeen. There was this one guy I played against, who every time I threw curve balls to him and he swung and missed, who would scream at me, “You cheated! You threw a curve ball!” He could never hit a curve ball, and he was a patsy every time he came up to bat against me. I would set him up with pitches low and inside just over the corner of the plate, then strike him out any time I wanted to with a curve ball that started outside, and broke in at his hands. And you could guarantee that he would be yelling that I cheated, because I threw the curve ball he couldn’t hit. The funny thing is that 45 years later I am now a senior scientist at a major corporation, and he is a big-shot Wall Street lawyer pulling in megabucks, and every time I see him (about twice a year), I can still piss him off by reminding him that he could never hit a curve ball. And you can guarantee he will still be complaining that I won because I cheated, throwing him curve balls.