The Vanishing World of My Chicago Childhood

Chapter II

Outdoor Games and Activities

Sixteen-Inch Softball: A Chicago Tradition

Although I was just a little past my infancy when we first moved into the house on Rhodes Avenue, within a few years, I was playing the wide variety of sports that occupied so much of my time and my brother’s. With the exception of Little League baseball, these were all sports that we organized and played ourselves.

The baseball game we played most often employed a sixteen-inch softball. According to the Encyclopedia of Chicago, softball was invented in Chicago on November 24, 1887, by George Hancock, who used a boxing glove to craft the original sphere and a broom handle as a bat. The exact dimensions of the first ball remain unknown. We do know that a fourteen-inch ball was used in 1933 when 70,000 people viewed the game at the first major tournament held at the Century of Progress Exposition, the Second World’s Fair

Eventually, the twelve-inch fast-pitch ball became the national standard, but Chicagoans embraced the softer slow-pitch sixteen-inch ball. The fact that the sixteen-inch ball is somewhat softer than its twelve-inch cousin allows the sixteen-inch game to be played barehanded. This means it’s less expensive to play because you do not have to fork out a lot of money for a glove. This fact undoubtedly helped spread the popularity of the game among lower-income Chicagoans.

The downside of playing barehanded is that the sixteen-inch softball isn’t that soft when it comes out of the box. In fact, it is quite hard. I always joked that you could tell when a man was from Chicago because he would have one or more bent fingers on his hands—me included. You can go online and watch entertaining videos about the sport today—including interviews with surgeons whose job it is to repair badly mangled fingers. A line drive with a new ball when you were playing third base wasn’t any fun. My brother often played third and remembered with horror the shots hit his way with rock-hard balls fresh out of the box. Sixteen-inch softball remains an incredibly popular sport in Chicagoland today with numerous leagues and even a Hall of Fame that opened in 2014.

The sixteen-inch Clincher softballs we purchased back in the 1950s cost around three or four dollars. Today, you can buy them online for as little as fifteen dollars. But if you wish to purchase Wilson’s Windy City model made of genuine leather, it will set you back about one hundred and sixty bucks. I still remember taking a new Clincher out of its box at the softball field the kids had constructed in the big vacant lot on Vernon Avenue with a mixture of excitement and dread: excitement because we were going to play with a brand-new ball and dread because I knew how hard the ball would be for the first few innings until it got softened up by some hard line drives or long home runs to left field.

Today, several houses occupy that vacant lot, which was actually two or three lots, bordered on the east by Vernon Avenue and on the south by 86th Street. To hit a home run to left field, you had to hit a monstrous drive over the fielder’s head into the alley. By the time the outfielder retrieved the ball, you had already circled the bases. The distance to 86th Street in right field was shorter, but since most of us were right handed, home runs were more often hit to left field.

We chose up sides in the traditional manner of kids playing baseball: the best players got selected early and the weaker players later. Of course, on most occasions, we did not have the full complement of eighteen players required for a full-scale baseball game, so some positions went unoccupied. The pitcher in sixteen-inch softball tosses the ball underhanded to the batter. It’s slow pitch, so very few batters struck out. But a clever pitcher could make it harder for a batter to hit the ball squarely by pitching inside or outside or up or down. You could also vary the speed of the pitch to some degree. Sometimes one kid served as the umpire. It’s been more than sixty years since I played my last game of sixteen-inch softball on our makeshift baseball field, so I have forgotten some of the details of the games. What I do remember is that they were tremendous fun.

The Basketball Court on Rhodes Avenue

As previously mentioned, sometime after we moved into our house, the kids in the neighborhood with the help of parents built a basketball pole across and slightly down the street from our house. For the entire time we lived on Rhodes Avenue, there was a vacant lot right behind the pole. This meant that we were not playing hoops in someone’s front yard. We played pretty much year round, though the long and cold Chicago winters curtailed play pretty much from sometime in November through early March. Much like in our softball games, we chose sides. The first team to score a certain number of points won the game. Of course, we also played endless games of “horse.” My brother, who grew to be six feet three inches tall, became a superb basketball player, honing his skills on our homemade court. As a senior at Hirsch High School, he would become one of the top scorers in the city of Chicago. I was a darned good basketball player, too, as a youngster, but as I grew older, my athletic prowess tapered off (sigh). You might ask, “But what about the traffic on Rhodes Avenue?” Well, of course, there was some: perhaps a car every two or three minutes. I don’t remember that it interfered with our games much. When one of us did spot a vehicle coming our way, he would holler, “Car coming,” and the game would be suspended for a minute or two. The drivers did not seem to mind. It was a pretty kid-friendly community.

Football on Our Other Vacant Lots

Most of our football games were played on the other big vacant lot in the neighborhood—the one to the south of our house and across the street. Most of the time, we played tag football. Three or four kids on each team were all we needed. The team on offense would have a huddle where the quarterback would lay out the play. My brother might say, “Charlie, you go down five yards and cut to the left; Dean, you go long; Calvin, you go down ten yards and cut back to me.” One of us would center the ball to the QB, who would drop back to pass. Of course, he also had the option of faking a pass and taking off for a run. The boy on defense whose job it was to cover the QB had to count to five—“One, one thousand; two, one thousand; three, one thousand; four, one thousand; five, one thousand”—before he could rush the QB.

We liked to run trick plays. Our favorite was the Statue of Liberty. According to Wikipedia, the most common variation of this play involves the QB taking the snap from the center, dropping back, and gripping the ball with two hands as if getting ready to pass. He then places the ball behind his back with his non-throwing hand while pretending to toss the ball down the field. Meanwhile, during the fake pass, a wide receiver has circled around behind him to whom the QB hands off the ball. With the defense totally tricked out of position, the wide receiver runs for a big gain. When done correctly, the QB’s pose resembles that of the Statue of Liberty. God knows how many times we ran that one over the years. You would have thought the defensive team would have seen it coming after so many attempts, but it often worked. Wikipedia documents a number of occasions on which this play (or variants of it) have been successfully employed in both college and professional games. We also played tackle football. I know I had shoulder pads and a helmet, but to the best of my memory, we played relatively few games. Maybe this was because Pop Warner football was not officially incorporated until 1959.

Golfing in the Fields and Beyond

Unlike kids nowadays, who often begin taking golf lessons from pros at the tender age of seven or eight, we learned how to play golf by whacking golf balls around in our vacant lots. I am sure there were kids on the South Side of Chicago who took golf lessons. Perhaps their parents belonged to the famous Midlothian Country Club far to the south of Chatham. But, at the time, the idea that my brother, Joe, or I would take a golf lesson from a pro seemed as unlikely as taking a lesson from an alien on how to pilot a flying saucer. Though my dad liked to play golf, he did not play that often. He did own a set of clubs that must have been twenty or thirty years old at the time. Brother Joe and I used them to practice hitting golf balls that had been hacked around a lot. Most of them had big cuts in their covers.

I am not certain how I learned to swing a golf club. Golf was becoming extremely popular in the 1950s. Ben Hogan and Slammin’ Sammy Snead had both become big celebrities. Possibly, my brother and I watched some early golf contests on our black-and-white TV. The first Masters Tournament to be televised was in 1956. Jack Burke Jr., won and took home the first prize money of $6,000.

Eventually, of course, we ventured out onto one of Chicago’s many public courses. I don’t remember for sure, but the first course I ever played may have been Jackson Park, about five miles from where we lived. It’s situated on land that once held the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; the golf course opened six years later in 1899. Much of my golfing experience while growing up, though, happened after we moved from the South Side to Lincolnwood. I remember going with my father to pick out a set of brand-new clubs and a bag for my sixteenth birthday. I selected a set of Sam Sneed signature Wilson clubs. Woods were still made of wood back then instead of metal. The heads of my driver and fairway clubs were constructed out of beautiful persimmon. Even though we had moved to the North Side, my brother and I still often played golf with one or more of the M brothers from the old neighborhood. We played on Cook County Forest Preserve courses—most often the eighteen-hole Edgebrook layout, but also at the nine-hole Caldwell course. In those days, there was no pre-selection of tee times on these courses. It was first come, first served.

I have a bone to pick with people who think that golf is a game only for the rich. Golfers from all different social and economic classes arose early in the mornings on the weekend to tee off at the Forest Preserve courses. I remember arriving at Edgebrook with my brother by seven a.m. on a Saturday only to find twenty or thirty golfers ahead of us. We teed off from rubber mats. Both Edgebrook and Caldwell were (and probably still are) like shooting galleries, with fairways for many holes not separated by trees or anything else. Balls flew all over the place. You were lucky to finish a round without getting clocked by an errant shot. The fairways and greens hardly looked like Augusta National. Still, it was great fun.

Our golfing experiences were not limited to playing regulation golf courses. My brother and I played on some of the miniature golf courses that were springing up around Chicago, but my fondest recollections are of playing on the miniature golf courses we built ourselves in the neighborhood’s vacant lots. I wish I had a diagram or a photograph of one those courses, but I don’t. We had all sorts of tough trick holes—some with ramps we constructed out of wood.

Playing with Marbles: A Nearly Extinct Sport

Many of our sports activities could be played either outdoors or indoors. In the 1950s, we spent many happy hours playing with marbles. When the weather was nice, we played marbles outside, but during much of the year, we played inside. You might argue that playing marbles does not exactly qualify as a sporting activity, but it has all the elements of a sports event—except perhaps physical activity. Here’s how to play marbles in case you do not know. If you’re outside, you can draw a circle in the dirt, perhaps five feet in diameter; if you are inside, you can make a circle with a string. Inside the circle, the players set up thirteen marbles diagonally. Players take turns with their “shooters” (larger marbles), trying to knock one or more of the smaller ones (also called mibs) out of the ring. The shooter’s hands and feet must remain outside the circle at all times, or a foul will be declared. But the shooter can shoot from any position outside the ring. If you knock a mib out of the ring, you get to take another turn; you lose your turn when you fail to knock a mib out of the ring. The game ends when all the mibs have been knocked out of the ring. The player with the most marbles is declared the winner.

The game can be played for “funsies,” meaning the marbles are returned to the original owners at the end of the game, or for “keepsies,” meaning each player retains the ones they knocked out of the circle. Sometimes players used “steelies”—steel ball bearings—as their shooters, but all the players had to agree to this. In my day, games that were played for keepsies were often quite intense. I remember many a marble player going home heartbroken because they had lost some of their most prized marbles. On occasion, that player was me (sob, sob). The players were heartbroken because the most prized marbles were quite beautiful. Though originally made out of clay and stone in ancient times, most of the marbles we played with were made out of glass. Machine-made glass marbles began to be manufactured in Ohio early in the twentieth century and dominated the world market by the 1920s. Some of our marbles were also made out of agate. Today, there’s a lively market for the most beautiful and rare marbles—some have sold for over $10,000 at auction.

What happened to marbles? Today, although there’s still a national marbles tournament for youngsters, the game has become nearly extinct. An article by Matthew Wills entitled “Losing Our Marbles” published in JSTOR Daily (June 25, 2018) discusses the decline of the game. Wills cites a publication by retired geography professor Malcolm Comeaux bemoaning the decline of marbles (“‘Caniques’: Marbles and Marble Games as Played in South Louisiana at Mid-Twentieth Century,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 52, No 3, Summer 2011). Comeaux, who was born in 1938, played marbles until 1952. The last time he saw kids playing was in 1960. His son, born in 1971, never played the game.

My wife and I had a similar experience. Our twin sons, Noah and Sasha, were born in 1976. When they were children, we bought them a bag of beautiful marbles and taught them how to play. They hardly ever touched them. Guess who has the bag of marbles today? Wills notes that marbles were a form of spontaneous and unsupervised play policed by the players themselves. The disappearance of marbles from the games that children play today is symbolic of what happened to the childhood I experienced on the South Side of Chicago. Most of the games we played we organized and supervised ourselves. Today, the availability of endless plastic toys; organized sports like the Little League, Pop Warner football, soccer, and so on; the near addiction of children to electronic games; the virtual end of walking to and from school; the rarity of empty fields in suburbia; and the advent of “helicopter” parents have all contributed to a society that has lost its marbles.

Playing with Yo-Yos: “Walking the Dog” and More

Yo-yos is another popular game from my childhood that has gone into a tailspin. Children still play with yo-yos but not nearly as much as we did. You probably have seen a yo-yo, but in case you have not, it is a toy consisting of an axle connected to two disks and a string looped around the axle, similar to a spool. According to Wikipedia, it’s an ancient toy, with proof of its existence documented as far back as 500 BCE. In the seventeenth century, it was called a bandalore. In 1928, Pedro Flores, an immigrant to the United States from the Philippines, was producing yo-yos in Santa Barbara, California. A year later, the entrepreneur David F. Duncan saw Flores captivating a crowd with a few yo-yo tricks. Realizing the potential of the toy, Duncan purchased the whole shebang from Flores. The game increased exponentially in popularity in the following years, owing to Duncan’s ability to market the game.

Yo-yo is played by holding the free end of the string, then inserting one finger into a slipknot. The player then uses force to cause the string to unwind, moving the yo-yo down toward the ground rapidly. The force created by the spinning yo-yo then causes it to move rapidly back upward into the player’s hand. Of course, rather than trying to figure out how this actually works from my description, it’s much better to watch a demonstration online.

If this were all there were to playing with a yo-yo, it would not be much of a game. But the fact is that a champion yo-yo player can do dozens of tricks—some of them incredibly complicated. Here’s a list of ten of the most common yo-yo tricks:

(1) The Sleeper

(2) Walk the Dog

(3) Breakaway

(4) Over the Falls

(5) Around the World

(6) Around the Corner

(7) Rock the Baby

(8) Loop the Loop

(9) Flying Saucer

(10) Fast Wind Up

How many of these could I do in my childhood? I think I could do all of them except for Breakaway and Flying Saucer. Of course, it was not just the tricks we learned to do with a yo-yo that attracted us to the game—it was the yo-yos themselves. Our Duncan yo-yos were prized possessions. We lusted after the fancier models—like the ones that had four rhinestones embedded in each side. Did I ever enter a yo-yo contest? No, I was not nearly good enough. But I remember watching a yo-yo contest that was held in our neighborhood. The boy who won the championship did tricks with an ease that was nothing short of amazing.

If you ask most people over sixty-five if they played with a yo-yo as a child, they will almost certainly tell you yes. And chances are they could—like me—do many of the tricks I listed above. Ask a child under twelve today if they have ever played with a yo-yo, and the answer is more than likely going to be no. It’s another childhood game that, in the United States, has given way in a world where technology-based games rule. I am happy to report, though, that the game is still popular in other nations. The four-time world champion hails from South Korea. It’s worth watching the championship on YouTube. The tricks performed by the best players today are astounding.

Chasing Butterflies

The South Side of Chicago might seem like an unlikely place for a child to chase butterflies, but the fact is they flourished in the numerous vacant fields within a short distance from our house. I am not sure at what age I acquired a butterfly net. I am guessing I must have been around eleven or twelve years old. Several of the kids in the neighborhood also had butterfly nets.

Early on, I would simply admire the beautiful creatures after netting them and then let them go. But somewhere along the way, my interest in butterflies became more serious. I began a butterfly collection. This meant I had to euthanize the unfortunate critters by putting them in a glass jar (also called a killing jar) and then adding a chemical to it. If memory serves, I used chloroform. At some point, my parents purchased a display case for me so I could exhibit the butterflies I had collected. Like so many things from my childhood, all I have left of my butterfly collection are memories—and vague ones at that. How many butterflies did I display? I am guessing a couple of dozen.

I am pretty sure the following butterflies would have been in my collection: monarch, viceroy, black swallowtail, tiger swallowtail, red admiral, cabbage white, orange sulphur, clouded sulphur, morning cloak, and common buckeye. Of course, the member of the order Lepidoptera that my fellow butterfly collectors and I prized the most was not a butterfly at all but the exquisite luna moth—a giant creature with a lime-green wings and a white body. We rarely saw luna moths because they mainly appear at night. And I don’t believe that any one of us had a luna moth in our collection. Do I regret now that I killed butterflies in order to put together my collection? The answer, of course, is yes.

A wonderful article by Peter Marren published in the Independent (August 11, 2015) entitled “Wings of Desire: Why the Hobby of Butterfly Collecting Is Over—It’s All About Conservation Now” describes the fascination that previous generations had with collecting butterflies and why the hobby declined. According to Marren, butterfly collecting reached its peak in the years before WWI, when even future prime ministers Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill were avid collectors. Rare specimens sold for large amounts of money at Sotheby’s and other auction houses. Marren adds that its popularity can also be measured by the number of long-extinct specialist journals, as well as books, that tended to feature “a bearded gentleman in heavy tweeds, lunging toward a fine specimen, net raised in anticipation.”2

When Marren was a boy growing up in Southern England in the early sixties, butterfly collecting was still popular. He writes that:

[Y]ou could still jump on your bike with a satchel and net strapped to your back and ride off into butterfly country without a care in the world. Nearly all my earliest memories of butterflies are caught up in those net-waving expeditions in the French and English countryside with my father and younger brother. My rows of wonkily pinned specimens in their cork-lined store-box were, for a few years, my pride and joy. And long after I had given it all up and moved on, butterflies retained their magic. They were the bright, aerial catalysts that turned me into a naturalist and then a conservationist. To be honest, a buddleia bush covered in tortoiseshells and peacocks still makes me go all dewy-eyed.3

 So, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, Marren and I had basically the same experience as children collecting butterflies. And we both experienced the decline of butterfly collecting for much the same reasons. When Marren and I were children, butterflies were abundant—even in an urban area like the South Side of Chicago. But by the 1970s, that had begun to change. In fact, for a variety of reasons, including pesticides, the destruction of habitats, and global warming, the butterfly population in the United States is in total free fall today. According to an article published in Science News (March 4, 2021), “Dramatic Decline in Western Butterfly Populations Linked to Fall Warming,” the number of Western butterflies is declining at a rate of 1.6 percent per year. The report looks at more than 450 butterfly species. Perhaps most disheartening is the collapse of the magnificent monarch butterfly population.

My wife and I have personal experience with this tragedy. In 1988, we moved to Austin, Texas. For many years after that, we experienced the wondrous spectacle of thousands of monarchs fluttering through Austin on their way from their winter home in the Mexican highlands to their summer home in Canada—a journey of well over two thousand miles. But then sometime in the 1990s, we noticed we did not see as many as in years before. And by 2020, if we saw a few, it was a cause for celebration. No, they were not taking a different migration path—they were just gone. According to the article in Science News, the latest population count for the Western monarch shows a 99.9 percent decline since the 1980s.

The downside of children no longer collecting butterflies, Marren observes, is that they have lost a connection to nature that our generation had. He grew up to be a famous naturalist who has published a whole host of books. I did not grow up to be a naturalist. But I retained my love of nature in part because of my experiences chasing butterflies through the prairies on the South Side of Chicago. And, of course, I still marvel at their beauty when I see one today.