The Iceman Cometh

 

Persistence of Memory

H

ow did I see through the fence? When the trolley stopped, I could see nothing through the high, closely spaced vertical gray boards that lined the street—that separated the world inside from that outside.

Dad explained “persistence of memory,” and described how movies work. Movies, he said, are a projection of individual still pictures, flashed on the screen one after another, each scene following the next so quickly that the mind retains the prior scene and creates a “moving picture” out of the succession of scenes. So too, each crack in the fence, each slim vertical space between adjacent boards, gives a narrow glimpse of the scene beyond. One glimpse follows the next as you move in the trolley along the length of the fence, and the brain remembers the previous view and attaches the next one to it. These individual images are stitched together in the mind to create a continuous tapestry of the scene on the other side.

So each time we rode the Number 32 trolley down this fenced-in portion of Liberty Heights Avenue I watched the movie of life on the other side. There were trees and lawns. A tennis court. A huge house, three stories tall, surrounded by a porch. I asked Dad once if it was an apartment building. He laughed. “No,” he said. “One family lives in the house. They’re rich.”

He didn’t say it with any resentment. It was just a fact, like we were poor and some people are rich.

“How do you get rich?” I asked on one of our trips downtown.

“Well,” he smiled, “you can inherit wealth from your father.”

I must have had a blank look. I was old enough to know that there was no wealth in our family. So he quickly followed that with, “Or you can go to college and get a good education. Then a good job. Then you can get rich.”

But nobody in our family had ever gone to college. So that’s how we left it. I was only twelve years old. I had time to get rich.

My first real business opportunity was not until a few years after. I went into the snowball business with my friend Sheldon.

We called them “snowballs,” but today, sixty years later, you probably know them as “shaved ice,” or even “Hawaiian ice.” I can’t imagine why it’s called “Hawaiian.” The only thing we knew about Hawaii in the 1940s was that it was the home of the Hawaiian yo-yo champions who stood on the corners outside of schools in the spring and demonstrated tricks with the yo-yos that they sold to us. The yo-yos were encrusted with diamonds, which were as real as the Hawaiian origins of the yo-yo champs.

In order to go into the snowball business, you needed a lot of stuff. The snowballs were made by scraping ice from the surface of a big rectangular ice block, using a hand scraper. So first of all, you needed a block of ice and a scraper. Then you needed syrups, which you could buy in quart bottles in flavors such as lemon, strawberry, cherry and lime. Lime tasted awful, but it was bright green and apparently an attractive color. Add some chocolate syrup and you had enough of a selection to appeal to your clients. Our deluxe offering was the chocolate snowball with two squirts of marshmallow as a topping. But it cost 10¢, a prohibitive cost for much of our clientele.

A block of ice, some syrups, 

and you’re in

the snowball business!

Blocks of ice were easy to come by in those days. While nearly everyone had an electric refrigerator at home, some people still had iceboxes. An icebox looked like a refrigerator, except in the top compartment you placed a large block of ice. If the icebox was well insulated, and if we minded our parents and didn’t “go into the icebox” every fifteen minutes for a snack, the ice lasted for a full day. The next morning, the iceman came along the street in his wagon, and carried a fresh block of ice into your kitchen and placed it in your icebox.

This is an icebox. The compartment

in the upper left corner is where you

placed a block or two of ice.

For the most part, blocks of ice were available for commercial uses. Lots of food stores displayed their perishables, such as fish and meat and cheese, on top of trays of chipped or crushed ice in glass-fronted cases. So there were two ways to get a block of ice for making snowballs. If you had a real icebox in your house, you could talk your mother into ordering an extra block. Most of us did not have iceboxes at that point in time. We had electric refrigerators. So, to get a block of ice, we had to go to the icehouse.

We were lucky. There was an icehouse in our neighborhood, just a half-mile or so up Garrison Boulevard, next to the train crossing. Sheldon had a wagon, which we pulled along behind us to the icehouse. There, we could buy a fifty-pound block of ice for about a quarter. We managed to load it onto the wagon, and we covered it with an old bath towel, to reduce the rate of melting. If it was a hot enough day to sell snowballs, it was also hot enough for a lot of melting to occur before we got the ice back to our snowball stand.

The Health Department played no role in insuring the safety of our customers. The block of ice sat on the rusty bed of the wagon. The towel had stains on it of questionable origins. We did not wash our hands. We did not know it at the time, but we were doing our part toward building up immunity to germs among the kids in our neighborhood.

Our place of business was in the alley behind Sheldon’s house on Cold Spring Lane. An old card table held the syrups and the paper “boats” that the snowball was served in. A paper cup held the wooden spoons that we provided. When a customer approached, one of us started shaving the ice block. The shaver was designed in such a way that the newly shaved ice filled up a rectangular section of the shaver, and when that was full, the ice was transferred directly into the rectangular paper boat. This was passed on to the “pourer” who sprinkled the shaved ice with the chosen syrup. After a brief argument with the customer (“More syrup.” “That’s all you get for a nickel!”) the goods were handed over in exchange for the advertised cost: “Snowballs, 5¢. Chocolate syrup, 2¢ extra. Chocolate and marshmallow, 10¢.”

On a hot day we sold most of the ice block that had not melted away. On Thursday evenings, we had our “game business.” A bunch of churches in our neighborhood had banded together to create a softball league, Each church had a team, and they played against one another on Thursday evenings throughout the summer. On the playground at PS 69 there was room for three games. That meant six teams, about sixty players and a lot of people cheering for them: and a big market for our tasty frozen offerings. So, right after an early dinner we rushed to the icehouse, bought a fresh block, and hurried to the ball fields.

Since we were not at our stand, we had to transport all of our supplies to the field. We loaded a big cardboard box with syrups, paper trays and spoons. The box sat atop the ice block, and one of us held the box in place while the other pulled the loaded wagon across the bumpy ground. We found a place to the side of the infield and began advertising.

“Snowballs, just a nickel,” Sheldon would call. He was not as shy as I was, so he had the “caller’s” job. Soon a crowd would gather. We would scrape and pour, scrape and pour, until the crowd dwindled and their attention returned to the game. At that point we would load the wagon and move quickly across the school grounds to the next game. After we had made our sales at the third game, we went back to the first one where we could catch latecomers.

When the games were over and the last of the possible customers had left the field, we loaded up for the trip back to Sheldon’s garage, where we kept our supplies. Our pockets were heavy with change. We emptied the evening’s “take” onto the ground and divided it up. If one of us had purchased syrups or paper trays that day, half his expenses were paid from the profits of the other. That night, before I got into bed, I added the day’s proceeds to a big jar on my bureau. I could see the jar fill from one day to the next, and I felt very satisfied that I could earn money in this way.

There are no photographs of me and Sheldon operating our snowball business. No permanent record of us scraping, dragging ice blocks, stuffing our pockets with pennies and nickels and dimes. But I remember the things we did, and I can put the memories together and make my own movie. It’s a little like watching something taking place on the other side of a fence, glimpsing the events through the narrow cracks between boards.

Persistence of memory.

In memorium: Sheldon Mechanick

November 5, 1936— November 9, 2005.

NATURE BOY

Nature Boy

I

 was always interested in nature. One of my earliest memories—I doubt if I was more than two years old—is the discovery of the “rolly polly”—the armadillo bug. It was the small gray bug that protected itself by rolling up into a ball if you touched it with a finger or a twig. It was called “rolly polly” because you could roll it around on the ground like a bead. As long as you kept nudging it, it stayed curled up. It made no attempt to unwind itself and run away.

                                                 

I did not understand it at that time, of course, but this was my introduction to “protective mimicry,” the methods that insects use to hide themselves from their enemies—their predators.

By the time I was seven or eight, I had trained myself to see through these disguises in the many forms that they took. Some caterpillars made cocoons that looked just like a bunch of dead leaves hanging from a twig on a tree or bush. There was the “stick insect” that looked just like its name. There were moths whose wings were colored in a pattern of grays and browns that matched the bark of the trees that they rested on.

I developed those observational powers at that early age because of a book of photographs, entitled Look at Life, that Aunt Sara gave me when I was seven and a half years old. I’ve treasured the book for more than seventy years. Aunt Sara inscribed the book with the date, and my name and hers, on the first page as you open the cover.

               

The pictures are all in black and white, taken with a close-up lens that revealed to me a world I was not so familiar with. It was from my study of that book that I learned to look at life. And until I read the Introduction to the book, while preparing to write this piece, I did not realize that this book had helped me to select my career as a scientist and an engineer. In the Editor’s Introduction I found these words:

“…it is certain that in every boy who opens his eyes to the light there are the beginnings of a scientist.”

What this means is that observations lead to questions, then to answers, and then later to learning the methods by which we answer questions—the Scientific Method.

I did not realize that my childhood fascination with insects and their behavior was leading me to become a Questioner. I did recognize that I was The Observer, and I spent a lot of time at it. In the spring and summer I spent hours in the grass and dirt, or hovering over bushes, or at the edge of a pond or stream finding and watching insects going about their business.

Their main business was survival. In fact, it probably was their only business. I monitored various insects as they ate, hunted and hid. Once in a while I was there when they transformed—when a Monarch butterfly crawled out of its chrysalis, for example. I wanted to know how something so large could emerge from such a small container.

 

A monarch butterfly emerges

from its chrysalis.

My timing was not usually so good that I was present when an insect transformed from one stage to another. More usually, all I found was the empty shell from which a beautiful dragonfly had emerged after its ugly nymph crawled out of the pond.

Dragonfly nymph. The shell splits and the dragonfly emerges

                          

                               After its wings dry, the dragonfly is ready

                                                to fly off in search of food and a mate.

Sometimes I would find the remains of the outer skin of the cicada (we called them “locusts”) that had burrowed its way up from beneath the ground, to find its freedom—after 17 years underground!—as a flying insect.

       The cicada squeezes itself out of the shell that has been its home for 17 years.

         It crawls to a resting place where its wings expand and dry.

One time, when I was about ten years old, I was around for a transition, but the consequences were not what I expected. It was Winter, and I found a mantis egg case in a bush in front of our apartment.

It was not easy to find praying mantises. Because of their body shape and color, they blend in very well with the bushes that they live and hunt in. They are a good example of protective mimicry.

The praying mantis

In the Fall, after the mantises had died and the leaves had fallen from the bushes, I spotted an egg case.

A mantis egg case

I carefully cut away the stem that it was attached to, and brought it inside to study. There wasn’t much about it to study. It was about the size and color of a walnut. The surface felt like styrofoam. The female mantis manufactures the case by whipping up a foam from a liquid that comes out of its tail end. It’s just like making meringue by beating air into egg white. While the foam is still liquid the female fills it with hundreds of eggs. When the foam hardens it is an insulation against the cold of the Winter ahead, and the surface is hard enough to keep other insects out.

I knew that the eggs would not hatch until Spring, when the weather turned warm in Baltimore. So I put the egg case in a safe place. At least, it seemed safe to me. I placed it inside of one of my father’s hats—one he did not wear often—which was kept on an upper shelf in a closet in our dining room.

Our dining room was hot through most of the Winter, so Spring came early, at least in that room. The eggs hatched into tiny mantises who began to crawl through narrow slits in the egg case to the outside surface. Then they filled up my father’s hat. Lucky for them—unlucky for me!—my mother went into the closet to get something. She found hundreds of baby mantises crawling over the brim of the hat. I don’t exactly remember the noise that she made upon this discovery, but I knew exactly what it meant. I quickly grabbed the hat and took it outside, where I shook off the

                                               Baby mantises after hatching

babies into a bush. I doubt if any of them survived the Winter—they were not supposed to hatch until Spring. That night, my father (who was usually gentle with me about these kinds of things) suggested that next time, instead of his hat, I use a large jar as an incubator.

One of the things I’ve learned about insects, from my observations, is how much we are like them. I’m thinking especially of protective mimicry, which is really nothing more than learning to blend in with the surroundings. We learn to do this as young children. We look around, and we see how our playmates behave. We often see that the one that stands out from the others because of what he wears, or how he talks, becomes the object of attention of the others. Often, that attention is not the kind that we want. Instead, we are sometimes singled out for ridicule, for abuse, or for exclusion. So we learn to behave like the others—to fit in.

But if we are wise enough, we can learn to become individuals in ways that let us stand out, that let us grow to be the person we want to be, without appearing to be a threat to the crowd—without becoming the object of their negative attention. Sometimes it takes a wise teacher, at home or at school, to help us make this transformation.

When I see this red dragonfly at the edge of my pond, poised on the end of a stalk, looking nothing like anything around it, I admire its fearlessness—its ability to stand apart from everything around it. It will permit me to approach within inches of it, so close that my finger is nearly touching its head. But any closer, and it darts away so fast that I’m not even sure which direction it has flown. It has the skill to protect itself. It has the skill to stand out and be what Nature has intended.

                                                                                         

PIN MONEY

Pin Money

Small things seem so much larger in the hands of a small boy. And sometimes, small things leave big memories. Take pins, for example. My mother was always mending clothing. Often she was “letting out” the cuffs of my shirts and pants as I grew taller. The cuffs had to be adjusted and pinned in place before she would begin to sew. So, it was not unusual for me to find pins on the floor, sometimes on the rugs and often in the cracks between the wooden floorboards. At other times, a pin or two would end up on the sofa bed in the sun parlor where I flopped to read comics. If I was lucky, I found the pin before it found me as I came down on it.

It was not so easy to pick up a pin. There was a science to it. First, you had to press a finger down on the head of the pin. This would lift the point away from the floor. You could then grab the shaft of the pin. At least, that’s the theory. The reality was that the finger holding down the head was not so steady. And because the head was so small, the slightest movement of that finger caused the point of the pin to move about erratically as you reached for the shaft. The result was that the finger reaching for the shaft invariably ran into the point.

There wasn’t much blood. How big a hole could a small pin make in your finger? And actually, while the pin was stuck in your finger you could lift your hand, with the pin impaled and dangling from the finger, and easily grab the shaft of the pin and return it to its proper place.

Then I discovered a better way to rescue wayward pins. I had a small horseshoe magnet.

It was only about an inch or two in length, and it just sucked pins up like a vacuum cleaner. One Sunday, I demonstrated it for my Aunt Sara. Thus began my first paid employment, as a pin rescuer/recycler.

Aunt Sara was my mother’s older sister. She had never married. The family rumor, passed on to me by my romantic girl cousins, was that she had been engaged to a young man who was killed in the First World War. Of course, we never asked our parents about this. We were satisfied with the rumor. No reality could surpass a family rumor.

 Aunt Sara made women’s hats for a living. And not just any hats. She made fancy hats for rich women to wear to their parties and dances, and especially—for her non-Jewish clients—festive hats to march under in the Easter Parade each Spring.

Annually, on Easter Sunday morning, a procession of pedestrians, clowns, and antique automobiles advanced slowly along North Charles Street in Baltimore. The women were dressed in their finest outfits, and this included their fancy Easter hats, many of which were made by my Aunt Sara. As far as I can recall, I only saw one Easter Parade. It must have been around 1940 or ’41. We only went there because my older brother was one of the clowns. I think he came over to us as we stood along the sidewalk watching the passing parade. I was very excited to see my brother marching in the Easter Parade. I thought that he must be a celebrity.

At some point I learned that someone who designs and makes hats was called a milliner. Milliner is not a word you come across much, these days. I checked on it, and the source of the word is believed to come from the town of Milan, Italy, where fancy-clothing artisans worked. Hence, a milliner was someone from Milan who made fine clothing for wealthy people.

Aunt Sara was from Latvia.

In modern terms, Aunt Sara was a highly successful small businesswoman. (She was also a small woman—barely five feet tall.) Her “hat shop” was downtown, on Mulberry Street. On some Saturday mornings my mother and I would take the streetcar to Aunt Sara’s place. Mom would then go off to do some shopping in the department stores, and I would stay and keep Aunt Sara company.

Her shop was tiny—a front room where she met customers and displayed her work, and an even smaller back room in which she designed and made their hats. Her workroom was special for me, because it contained all of her beautiful materials: ribbons, felts in a wide range of colors, and exotic feathers with which she decorated her hats. And the best part of her workroom was the floor, which was littered with small fragments of brightly colored fabrics, snippets of satin ribbons, stray shiny sequins, and small pieces of feathers.

These textures and colors were not a part of my everyday life. I felt that my life was mostly brown and gray. I fooled around in the dirt a lot, digging up ant nests or building miniature roads through forests of weeds. My friends and I played ball on dirt fields. And a lot of our activities were carried out on concrete pavements. For card games we sat on cement steps. Walking into the back room of Aunt Sara’s shop was like the Wizard of Oz movie shifting from black and white to color!

The floor of her workshop was like an art studio. I would pick up the scraps and then glue them to a piece of cardboard to make a colorful collage. Sometimes I would use scissors to cut the larger pieces into small squares, and then arrange them into a kind of mosaic. I transformed the waste material on Aunt Sara’s floor into exotic birds and fish. It was much more fun than drawing with crayons, or painting with watercolors. Unlike flat pictures, my artwork had different textures, and was three-dimensional.

Aunt Sara pointed out that many of her pins ended up on the floor, most of them trapped within the cracks and spaces between the old and worn floorboards of her workroom. And that’s where my magnet entered the picture. With that amazing device I could extract pins that could not be reached with fingers—that could not even be lifted by a vacuum cleaner. With my gravity-defying instrument, I could return her lost pins to service.

At first, my technique was very simple. I got down on my knees, bent over, and I just dragged the magnet along the lines that separated the floorboards. The magnet could hold five or six pins at a time before it became so cluttered that I could no longer keep it close enough to the floor to attract any more pins. When that happened, I would pull the pins off and drop them into a small paper cup, and continue trolling for precious metal. Sometimes I would latch on to an extraordinary treasure: a large sewing needle, for example, or a fancy hatpin. Aunt Sara was especially happy at their recovery, and when I would come to her with my “catch” after ten or fifteen minutes of work she would give me a big hug. For a small woman, she could give a very big hug. In general, I didn’t much like to be hugged, but Aunt Sara’s hugs were welcome and memorable because they were so warm and genuine. I think she liked having a little boy around while she worked.

After some time I came up with another recovery method. I tied a long thread around the loop end of the magnet. Then, instead of crouching on the floor in an uncomfortable position, I could stand up straight and dangle the magnet from the other end of the thread, which I held with a finger pressed to my cheek, just under one eye. In this way, I could “sight” down the length of the thread and guide the magnet to the hiding places of the pins. But this was not as easy as it sounds.

The magnet would swing like a pendulum every time I moved. So I had to develop a technique that let me swing the magnet in line with the cracks between the floorboards. But the motion of the magnet had to be slow enough that as it passed over a pin, there was time for the pin to be attracted to, and adhere to, the moving magnet. This technique developed into a fantasy that made the work more fun—and more exciting—for me.

It was wartime, the 1940s, and we were winning the war against Germany by bombing the railroads in the great industrial centers of Germany and the Nazi-occupied lands. Each Saturday (when I wasn’t working for Aunt Sara) I went to the movies and there I saw newsfilms of the bombing runs. So I imagined myself as the bombardier on a B17, flying through the barrages of exploding German antiaircraft shells, and maintaining my calm, steely concentration as I directed my payload to the targets far below. It made picking up pins seem more noble. I had a job to do, and I wasn’t afraid.

                                

Of course, I supplied the sound effects appropriate to my mission: the growl of the four big engines of the B17, the whine of the bombs as they fell through the air toward the target below, and the explosions as the bombs landed and destroyed the enemy’s railroad yards and factories. I did not think about it at the time, and Aunt Sara never said anything, but I wonder now if any of her customers in the front room heard the sound effects that accompanied the recovery of fallen pins, as I carried out my missions in winning the war against the Nazis.

I was much older when I learned the irony of my aerial missions. Latvia, the land of Aunt Sara’s birth, had been invaded and occupied by the Nazi’s very early in World War 2.

Because Aunt Sara did so much sewing, on so many different colors of materials, she had hundreds of spools of thread. When a spool was finally so depleted of thread that the bare wood showed, she tossed it into a small box. She saved the empty spools for me because I could use them in “projects.”

A wooden spool that
sewing thread was wrapped around

A “project” was an activity in which a small boy spent an hour making something of very little use. I discovered that if you glued several spools together, end on end, you could make…a bunch of spools glued together.

You could stand them up to make towers. You could paint them. You could glue popsicle sticks to them, but these combinations never looked as good as you had imagined them before the actual gluing.

                                                               

There was another aspect of Aunt Sara’s workroom that fascinated me—the animal heads! Aunt Sara trimmed and decorated some of her creations with fur. Sometimes it was just a strip of fur sewn along a portion of a hat. But sometimes the animal’s head was still attached! Against one wall she had a rack of little fox pieces. These were heads, still connected to the fur from its back. The heads had shiny black glass eyes that seemed to stare at you. That gaze made the fox look very angry. If you were careful, you could pry open the mouth a little, enough to see the tiny sharp teeth. I did not understand why women wanted angry fox heads attached to their hats. But this was just one of many things that I did not understand about the world around me, when I was six or seven years old.

What I did understand was that Aunt Sara was a special person, and that spending an afternoon in her shop was an opportunity to enter a magical world of color and texture.

SPALDINE COLLEGE

Spaldine College

4008 Oakford Avenue

Me at my steps.

I

n the summers we played a lot of “street” games. All this meant was that the games were carried on in the streets, rather than a block away on the fields at the playground at PS 69. Our favorite game was step ball, played with a pink rubber ball called a “spaldine.” I have no memory of ever buying a spaldine. As far as I knew, they just appeared as needed. Like paperclips.

Basically, a spaldine was a hairless tennis ball. We didn’t play tennis. None of us owned a tennis racket. There were no tennis courts at our playground. Tennis was for rich kids who went to private schools. Our “court” was Oakford Avenue or Cold Spring Lane, or the alleys that ran behind them.

The houses on both of those streets were about four feet above street level. Concrete steps led up from the street-level pavement to the walkway to the house. Step ball was played against those front steps, and into the street. Our streets were very narrow. If a car was parked on both sides at some point along the street, there was barely room for two cars to pass each other. For that reason, most of our streets were One-Way so that there was never opposing traffic.

Cold Spring Lane had row houses on both sides, and those houses had garages in the back that were accessed through the alleys. So there were fewer cars parked on that street, and it was easier to find a set of steps that fronted on a section of street that was free of cars.

You could play step ball with just two people. All you needed was a “batter” and a fielder. There was no bat; that’s what the steps were for. The “batter” threw the spaldine against the steps, and (if it hit the steps right) the ball would then rebound back toward the street. If the fielder caught it in the air, that was an “out,” just like in regular baseball. If the ball was not caught, then you got a “hit.” A few lines were drawn in the street at different distances from the steps, to define where a single or double or triple fell. If the ball rebounded from the step far enough to land past the curb on the opposite side of the street, without being caught by the fielder, that was a homer.

There was a science to step ball. And a geometry. A set of steps is just a series of “treads,” the flat part that you step on, and “risers,” the vertical part that goes from one tread to the next. As you go up the steps, where the riser meets the tread, that’s the edge or point of each riser/tread pair. And that’s where you want to throw your pitch. That’s called “hitting a pointer.” If the spaldine hits the point just right, the ball flies far over the head of the fielder and up onto the lawn of the house on the other side of the street. No chance for the fielder to get to it in the air—a home run!

It was not easy to hit a pointer, but if you practiced, and played enough, you could sometimes hit a couple of pointers in a game. But you couldn’t count on that!

              

So that’s where geometry came in. The strategy for getting a pointer involved getting real close to the steps and throwing the ball down at the point. But if you missed a little, and hit on the tread just past the point, the rebound went backward over the steps and against the front of the house that the steps led to.

 In the summer, the front door was behind a screen door. The ball might dent the screen a little, but not break it. At the end of the game we could push the screen back so that it was nearly flat, and no one would notice.

                                 

But in the winter, the screen door was replaced by a storm door. A glass door! And glass does not bend. But glass is pretty strong. So unless the ball was thrown really hard—like toward the end of the game when you really needed a pointer—it would just bounce harmlessly off of the glass. But even then, if someone’s mother heard the smash of spaldine on glass, it could be the end of the game. “Get away from there!” she would shout. “Play on somebody else’s steps!”

To avoid disruption of the game, we would usually employ a conservative strategy. 

This meant throwing the ball at the steps at a lower angle. The ball would bounce off the tread and hit the riser and then rebound toward the “field.” But it was much harder to get enough height in the rebound that the ball would go over the head of the fielder. So this kind of strategy usually saved the windows but lost the game.

Years later, when we took classes in Physics in high school or college, we already understood things like angle of incidence and angle of reflection. That was the best thing we learned from step ball. We were alumni of Spaldine College.

Throwing Up in My Cleats

Throwing Up in My Cleats

Most of us played baseball in the same shoes we wore to play football, or basketball, or volleyball.

Gym shoes.

They were the shoes we wore in gym class, of course, and they were the shoes we played ball in. They were canvas-topped shoes with thick hard rubber soles. They squeaked on the gym floor. If they were new, we got pretty good traction outdoors on the grass and dirt. But our shoes did not stay new for long, and our parents did not buy us new shoes as long as the old ones fit.

I wanted “cleats.” Baseball shoes. Shoes you wore only on the baseball field. The uppers were made of black leather. A set of metal tabs was riveted to the soles. Each tab or cleat protruded a little more than a quarter inch out from the bottom of the sole, enough to “dig in”—to get traction while running.

Some baseball shoes had spikes instead of cleats. They were like short nails coming out of the bottom of the shoe. Compared to cleats, these were considerably more dangerous to the opposing players when you slid into a base to beat a throw from the field. The fear that the runner might slash your calf with his spikes (which would, we were told, lead to gangrene and foot amputation) was sufficient to make most fielders shy away from a tag on the runner, at least enough to give the runner the slight advantage he needed to get a foot on the base before he was tagged.

Our parents did not approve of spikes. So if we had anything, we had cleats.

I don’t remember when Dad bought cleats for me. That lack of memory surprises me now. It was something I coveted, and did not really expect. All I remember is that one day I showed up for a game with my cleats slung over my shoulder, and I sat down and replaced my gym shoes with real baseball shoes. And I remember being disappointed, because none of my teammates noticed.

I had been warned with regard to the care of my cleats. “Don’t walk on the cement pavement with them,” Dad said. (Actually, what he said was, “Don’t walk on the see-ment payment with them.” In Baltimore, the sidewalks (payments) were made from see-ment. (Later, in Junior High School Hygiene class, I could not understand how my sperm would get to my wife’s egg if it were attached to little bits of see-ment.)

Dad told me that walking on the payment would wear the cleats down. So I knew I was expected to take good care of them. But I also knew how good they sounded when I walked on cement. I could hear the click-clack of metal on the pavement. I knew I had my cleats on, and I felt special—a real ballplayer. Never mind about my batting average—I had cleats!

“Click-clack!”

Another part of caring for your cleats was keeping them clean. Dirt would cake up around the base of each cleat, where it attached to the sole of the shoe, and as a result the cleat did not go so far into the ground, and was less effective. So periodically you cleaned the dirt away, usually with a strong twig or a nail as a scraper/digger. And, of course, each time you stepped up to the plate you banged the bat against the side of the shoe to knock the dirt out of the cleats. It was not really very effective, other than to announce, “I’m wearing cleats. I’m a real baseball player!”

So, I was proud of my cleats, and I took good care of them.

Until the Baltimore Playground League Baseball Championship of 1949, when I found another use for my cleats.

We made the City Finals! We were the champions of our local school playground league, in the 12 to 14 year-old division. (We beat the All Saints Church Blue Rockets to get there.) And we were terrified!

The finals were played at Patterson Park. This was on the other side of Baltimore. The Southeast Side. Where the “other” Polish People lived.

Or, as our parents called them, “the Po-locks!”

Po-locks were not popular in Jewish homes in Baltimore in 1949. Lots of us were Polish or Russian Jews whose grandparents remembered the pogroms of Eastern Europe, and especially of 19^th Century Poland. And if we had the temerity to ask our parents why they still hated Po-locks, we were told that most of the Nazi concentration camps of the 1940s had been built on Polish soil.

“You’re playing where?” my mother screamed. “Why do you have to go to the other side of the city to play a ball game? You got a playground down the street.” She called for my father.

All I could say was, “It’s for the champeenship, Mom.”

“Champeen, shmampeen. You’re all nuts!” She turned to my father. “Tell him they’re nuts!”

Of course, our fathers sided with us, and there was no question that we would show up and defend our neighborhood honor. The team we were to play against in the championship (oops, champeenship) game was the Red Shield Boys’ Club.

The Red Shield! We weren’t sure what that was, but it sounded like something from the Crusades! That did not make my mother feel better.

I guess my mother’s fear was contagious. The morning of the big game, I woke up with a nervous stomach. By the time I had finished breakfast I had moved on to nausea. I grabbed my glove and my cap and my cleats and headed down the street to meet my teammates at our home field. Our ride to the game was to be provided by our playground supervisor, Miss Houston. Miss Houston was a student at a local teachers’ college, where she majored in Phys Ed. Her summer job was to organize activities for the kids who met at the playground at PS 69, our neighborhood elementary school. Our team was one of those activities.

The entire team did not fit into her car. But she did get seven of us in. Two in front with her. Four across the back seat. And the smallest one—me—on the floor.

It was about 8:30 in the morning by the time we got started on the drive to the game. Patterson Park was in Highlandtown—another name that brings up fear, like Treblinka. Highlandtown was simply the name of a Baltimore neighborhood, this one on the northeast edge of the Baltimore Harbor. The temperature was already in the 80s and climbing. We had a nine mile ride ahead of us. Seven of us—and Miss Houston.

Me on the floor.

Nauseous.

There was no Beltway, then, that years later ringed the city so that you could get from one side of Baltimore to another in fifteen minutes of continuous, smooth, driving. Worse, there was no smooth driving. Miss Houston’s car, like just about all cars in 1949, had a stick shift. She had not mastered the art of the stick shift.

So it was ride a few blocks. Shift, jerk, speed up. Brake, down-shift, stop. Constant jerking back and forth, at the feet of my teammates.

So it wasn’t my fault when I threw up.

And I was on the floor, so I couldn’t get my head out the window.

Miss Houston’s car was not equipped with vomit bags. I used my shoe, instead. The baseball shoe. With the cleats.

The boys in the back were groaning and shouting—fighting to get their heads out the window for some fresh air. The boys in the front were laughing hysterically. Miss Houston pulled over so that I could get out and empty my shoe, and wipe my mouth on my arm. I got back in the car—took my place on the floor—and we continued to Patterson Park in a mood that was more amusement than hostility. My own mood was embarrassment. I spent the rest of the trip staring at my one dry shoe.

When we got to the park everyone spilled out of the car as fast as they could. Miss Houston asked if I was all right, and I said I was. I walked over to a nearby drinking fountain and washed my shoe as well as I could.

 

Me at the Water Fountain at PS 69

Yes—in the drinking fountain. Kids held their dogs up to the drinking fountains in the parks. No big deal!

I dried the inside of my shoe as best I could, and pulled it—still damp—over my sock. I laced it up and put on the other shoe. When I walked I could hear, just above “click-clack,” another sound: “squeak-squeak.”

I played right field that day, and I no longer remember much of the game. My feet stayed in my shoes. The remainder of breakfast stayed in my stomach.

And we won the game!

“CLICK-CLACK!”