Spaldine College
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4008 Oakford Avenue
Me at my steps.
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I
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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.
