memories of long-gone summer days...
SUMMER, WHEN I WAS A BOY IN DENVER, WAS...
SUMMER, WHEN I WAS A BOY IN DENVER, WAS...
WAS A STRING OF TOGETHERNESS, AND A SUM of small knowings, none of which cost any money. Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning was the beginning of everything which lay ahead. We didn't decide what to do with our time; the day decided for us. Each day had its own rhythms. I don't recall ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some adult to arrive and direct us. Usually the day would tell us to meet in the park right after breakfast. We lived and breathed the game of baseball. When there were enough players, we started the full games, with rather elaborate, specific ground rules: Over the the playground fence was, of course, a home run, and into the street was an automatic double. Around the neighborhood there were dozens of other variations.
We didn't have giant radios, the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in back to hear clearly. But somehow we always knew the Score of each and every game that the Yankees or Dodgers played because Red Barber and Mel Allen were giving us a play-by-play. We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores. We got Knothole Club tickets for the Denver Bears professional triple A baseball team and were almost always in the bleachers, could hardly see the game, but we didn't care; and up in the big leagues, we now knew that a black man had a right to steal home because our Dodgers and a man by the name of Branch Rickey, who had made Jackie Robinson's dream come true.
We collected baseball cards, which came with bubble gum, and meant that we could actually see the faces of Pee Wee Reese and Stan Musial, Johnny Mize and Ted Williams and Enos Slaughter and Joltin' Joe DiMaggio. We would read the papers, memorizing statistics, knowing each minor fluctuation in averages, at bats, strikeouts, or walks and ERA's. And when we finished with the sport pages, we could turn to the comics: "Dick Tracy," Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates," and, later, "Steve Canyon," and some of us would cut them out, pasting entire runs of the strips into scrapbooks, making our own comic books. Reading the newspapers, before or after a game, was usually accompanied by eating Yankee Doodles, iced Pepsi, Mission Bell grape.
We knew that sneakers had to last for an entire summer, no matter how worn and disgusting they became, so we learned to bandage them with tape. We would have one pair of roller skates for the season, and one skate key. The skates were the kind that clamped on shoes and had metal wheels. When the skates began to wear out, we took the skates apart, nailed them to two-by-fours, nailed milk boxes to the top of the two-by-fours, and scooter season had begun. When late summer came, we began to play touch football with a genuine Wilson leather football.
There was room to run barefoot in the streets, because there were almost no cars until our fathers came home for the day. We lived with marbles, comics, balls, newspapers, and baseball scores; then would go down to the public library on Colfax Avenue and 14th Street and vanish into books, or walk to the Bluebird Theater on 15th Street to see a movie, where Bobby Braswell's mother was a cashier. Books made us think; the movies let us dream. One tempered or enriched the other. And both were free. So were the streets. So were we.
We didn't have giant radios, the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in back to hear clearly. But somehow we always knew the Score of each and every game that the Yankees or Dodgers played because Red Barber and Mel Allen were giving us a play-by-play. We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores. We got Knothole Club tickets for the Denver Bears professional triple A baseball team and were almost always in the bleachers, could hardly see the game, but we didn't care; and up in the big leagues, we now knew that a black man had a right to steal home because our Dodgers and a man by the name of Branch Rickey, who had made Jackie Robinson's dream come true.
We collected baseball cards, which came with bubble gum, and meant that we could actually see the faces of Pee Wee Reese and Stan Musial, Johnny Mize and Ted Williams and Enos Slaughter and Joltin' Joe DiMaggio. We would read the papers, memorizing statistics, knowing each minor fluctuation in averages, at bats, strikeouts, or walks and ERA's. And when we finished with the sport pages, we could turn to the comics: "Dick Tracy," Milton Caniff's "Terry and the Pirates," and, later, "Steve Canyon," and some of us would cut them out, pasting entire runs of the strips into scrapbooks, making our own comic books. Reading the newspapers, before or after a game, was usually accompanied by eating Yankee Doodles, iced Pepsi, Mission Bell grape.
We knew that sneakers had to last for an entire summer, no matter how worn and disgusting they became, so we learned to bandage them with tape. We would have one pair of roller skates for the season, and one skate key. The skates were the kind that clamped on shoes and had metal wheels. When the skates began to wear out, we took the skates apart, nailed them to two-by-fours, nailed milk boxes to the top of the two-by-fours, and scooter season had begun. When late summer came, we began to play touch football with a genuine Wilson leather football.
There was room to run barefoot in the streets, because there were almost no cars until our fathers came home for the day. We lived with marbles, comics, balls, newspapers, and baseball scores; then would go down to the public library on Colfax Avenue and 14th Street and vanish into books, or walk to the Bluebird Theater on 15th Street to see a movie, where Bobby Braswell's mother was a cashier. Books made us think; the movies let us dream. One tempered or enriched the other. And both were free. So were the streets. So were we.
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