If it was fall, we played football. After school, we took an available-players inventory, gathered up any and all warm bodies, and headed for the vacant lot two doors from my house on Court Street, in Lewisburg, WV. Our neighbor, Paul Jones owned the lot and never had it developed. He delighted in seeing us enjoy it.
I think every neighborhood should have at least one empty lot for kids to play on. It should be in the Bill of Rights!
This particular lot was long and narrow and it was our Packer Stadium. Occasionally we’d have as many as 8 kids, 4 on a team, but usually it was 3 or 4. If we only had two, we played punt and kick. Whoever kicked one in the “end zone” and it wasn’t caught, won the points.
We played touch football back then so the little kids wouldn’t die – their Moms would have hated that. We came home grass-stained and muddy, but no one ever got more than a scraped knee or elbow.
A prized possession for Boomer kids in the 50’s and 60’s was a decent football – one that would hold air and didn’t have all the little “dimples” worn away.
I happened to have a Spalding football that was once used in a Duke/Wake Forest game. My uncle Jeffery Brogden was a fullback for Wake and gave me the trophy. It was our go-to pigskin.
We played every afternoon after school, weather permitting. No one ever had to tell Boomer kids to get more exercise. That came naturally.
There is a schoolyard in my back yard and I bet I can count on one hand the number of times I have seen kids playing football in the empty field in the last five or six years. And never have I seen 10 and 12 year olds playing a pick up game. They always need adult supervision, it seems.
The smell of burning leaves on the curbside of the street and the nip of fall in the air always stirs great memories of pick up football games with neighborhood kids on an empty lot.
