A few years before my father died on January 27, 2009 at age 76, he sent me a manuscript he’d written about his life growing up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. I’m missing him, and since I’m in the mood to feel his presence for awhile, I pulled out those pages and started to read. But because I’d like to feel him flowing through me for a bit, I’m going to retype some of it here. I could simply scan it to share—that would certainly be much quicker—but it wouldn’t bring him back quite as strong.

So here is what my father thought important enough to want to tell us. On the front of the yellow folder he sent me was written, “My Long Story,” but inside, he titled what he’d written:

Growing Up and Stuff: An Adventure

I grew up in Brooklyn. You have to understand the sound of the way we talked in Brooklyn. It was rough to the ear, and had its own unique sound. You’ve probably heard someone try to talk the talk of a kid from Brooklyn. They either come close or miss by a mile.

To me, it was a sweet sound, and never having been away from Brooklyn at the time, I had no idea that we sounded different. That is, until I began to travel and heard some very distinctive accents. Have you ever heard someone in Scotland try to imitate a Brooklyn accent?

All over the world, kids play in parks, playgrounds, backyards, and schoolyards. But for us at that time in Brooklyn, it was the streets, close by our houses. Our block was our playground. It was our own safe little universe.

Getting up a game on our block was easy. You’d meet up out on the street and in no time, you could get up a game of touch football. You have to understand that this was all before any formal leagues of any sort had been formed, in our area anyway, long before anything like Little League or anything like it.

It didn’t matter if it was winter or summer. If you were a young, adventurous kid growing up in Brooklyn, the streets were your playground.

The cold winters held the thoughts of snowball fights and ice-skating, maybe a sled ride down a driveway. Or if you were lucky, you could make it over to one of the parks.

The warm summer and long daylight hours helped when you were exploring your youthful needs on the streets of Brooklyn.

Not that this was a million years ago, but World War II was on, it was the ’40s, and we had gas rationing, so that traffic was pretty light on the streets, with just an occasional interruption to let a car pass. Other than that, we had an open playground right outside our doors.

And so we played our days away, right there on those paved streets, everything from touch football to one of our favorites, stickball.

To explain stickball to you—first, one of us had to be brave enough to get a broomstick, and if no one had a pink ball called a Pensy Pinky, then the group chipped in to buy one. Get a few kids together and you had a game so popular that they eventually started to manufacture stickball bats. But in those days, many a mother berated her kid over her missing broomstick.

Players for the game had rankings, all judged on the distance you could hit the ball. This distance was gauged by the manhole covers in the street—you could be a two-sewer man, and even more impressive, a three-sewer man. This was very rare, since it would be equivalent in our minds to hitting a ball to the Moon. Usually, everyone played. All you had to do was show up for the game.

Among the other games were Kick the Can, Johnny on the Pony, Hide and Seek.

Good weather would come along and we’d all pitch in and clean a piece of empty property we called our lot. It had everything from old car tires to bed springs in it, but come early Spring, it became our baseball park.

One of the basic problems with our littie field was that it faced windows of homes and stores. When we first started our ballfield, we were still young, so that even our best hit balls fell far short of those windows. But as we grew older, our hitting ability also grew, and many a window felt the impact of a well-hit ball.

I remember this one storeowner who stood in front of his store windows brandishing this large knife, daring you to even come close to his windows with our ball. Let me tell you, for an old man, he was fast on his feet, and could catch a fly ball coming anywhere near his place. He and his knife usually ended our game when he would destroy the only game ball we had.

To be continued …