Lakewood Kid Games...A Half-Century Ago...

Let's face it, Lakewood kids have never had it easy as far as finding places to play. While we've always had plenty of residential areas to live in, finding safe places where kids can be kids in a city like ours is a perpetual challenge.

For us kids living in Lakewood 50 years ago, the choices as to where we could play were simple and fivefold. We had our yards, the parks, the ball fields, the pools and Winterhurst. Those are still the fundamental choices for childhood recreation around here. If you liked playing ball, or ice skating, this was your town!  Every long-time Lakewoodite over the age of 50 will remember the "George Usher Insurance" and "Geiger's" T-shirts worn for years by young Lakewood ball players during the summer months. Lakewood ball teams of all ages enjoyed the hometown playing fields. Many summer evenings were filled with the cheers of parents and the crack of balls and bats under the lights of breezy starlit Lakewood skies.

Back then, with the absence of video games and many-channel televisions, kids often occupied their time with outdoor pursuits. Biking was, and continues to be, a great activity for Lakewood kids. Back then, there were many brick streets, so you had to be very careful, especially after a rain, as the bricks had all the traction of mid-winter ice. Those bumpy bricks helped to make a good business with spoke-truing for local bike shops. Middleweight and newspaper bikes were starting to make way for 20-inch bikes with banana seats and high handlebars, as well as for those exotic 10 speed "English racers." Some of the early inexpensive 10 speeds, however, were neither English nor did they race very well. Many American bikes were built like tanks back then, compared to their foreign counterparts. They may have been sturdy as all get-out, but when we lined up for a race, let's just say there was a reason for that "English racer" name. Speaking of races, I actually got the city to sponsor bike races back then. We had a "Lakewood Day" city festival around the middle of July each year, and that's when we ran those races. Great fun.

Another activity that kids did back then was to play "hide and seek" with the rough and tumble names of "Army," "Cowboys," or "Guns." Toy guns were all the rage back then and the more realistic they were, the better. No red tips were found on those toy gun barrels back then either. The things had to look real, or else! Schools even had gun clubs, where .22 rifles were regularly shot in the school gymnasiums. With W.W. II and the Korean War recently past, and the Vietnam War just getting underway, there were many movies and television shows depicting military or cowboy activities. There were also numerous Army-Navy surplus stores where kids could obtain all manner of militaria for their games. It was nothing to see 30-40 motley-uniformed kids crawling through the neighborhood bushes and going house-to-house in Lakewood searching for the "enemy." Sounds of "rat-a-tat" and "I got you!" and "No you didn't!" rang through Lakewood streets on summer evenings. Perhaps in retrospect all of that play was probably good basic training, because the military draft was still very much in effect and a few years later, the same type of helmets that the kids bought for $3 at the Army-Navy store would again be put on their heads, as they were flown off to places having names like DaNang, Pleiku, and Saigon.

Tennis was BIG back then too. You had to wait, sometimes for HOURS, for a net at one of Lakewood's many tennis courts. Our problem with tennis back then was with keeping the ball inside the fence. Many's the time that we had to run outside the cage at the park at Orchard Grove in order to retrieve our fuzzy yellow tennis balls.

We had great active games in Scouts too in the church basement where we met. There was "Battle-ball" where two teams stood on either side of the room and we tried to whack each other with every thing we had, until one team had eliminated the other one! Then there was a spy kind of game where the lights were turned out and you got down on the cold linoleum floor. Two teams, each having their own passwords, crawled towards each other in the dark. The password was asked for, and if not given correctly, you were dragged kicking and screaming towards the other wall by the other team. You had to give up only when a part of your body came in contact with their wall. It's a wonder we all survived, but yeah, it was a blast. There was probably more than a few torn Scout uniforms received in the process!

The only place to play ball, other than the parks, was unfortunately...on our streets. Once in awhile, a car or house window would be shattered by a line drive, and then there was a piper to pay. More than a few kids skinned their knees pretty badly on Lakewood's unyielding curbs. Of course, this activity was frowned upon by Lakewood authorities and the parents. Heck, when I think about it, virtually all of the above was probably frowned upon by the adult world, but let's face it, there was so often very little that a Lakewood kid COULD do in this city EXCEPT get into trouble. Once, I even got in trouble for setting up a lemonade stand on my street. Some shirt-and-tie wearing Lakewood bigshot stopped his car and lectured me about needing a vendor's license. That was a telling lesson for a young pre-teen!

To keep kids out of trouble, there were the pools, and there was Winterhurst. The pools (Madison and Lakewood) were and continue to be great fun. Ice skating was often the ONLY social thing to do on a Friday night in Lakewood. Strapping on those old worn leather rental skates was quite an adventure back then. "Weak ankles" were no excuse, and it was interesting to see otherwise macho friends' ankles turn to jelly on that unforgiving ice. In fact, I go back to when we had an outdoor rink. There were some great times up there, as Lake Erie's bitter winter winds blew across that night-time ice! Many lifetime relationships came out of cuddling up with your significant other at the edge of that Winterhurst ice.

We had roller skates and later skateboards too, starting in the late '50's. Both skates and those first boards had steel ball-bearing "trucks" that could be quite bone-shaking on those sandstone Lakewood sidewalks. The sign of a "cool" guy or gal was wearing a skate key on a string about one's neck. Other modes of transportation included home-made scooters and box-cars made from wagon wheels and wooden crates.

These days, Lakewood kids so often seem to spend their leisure time connected electronically to something or other. Whether by cell phone text messaging, or with video gaming, or with those earphone-connected music players, so many kids connect to the rest of the world in an almost one-on-one kind of isolation. The social media seems to have largely replaced "Kick the Can" and other kid games. All too often these days, for kids the "game" of "Guns" has become real. Kids no longer need to visit DaNang or Pleiku to be in danger of their lives from gunfire, and there is no longer any doubt regarding the question as to whether or not they were really shot either. The times of our lives have indeed changed, and not always for the better. The alienation and social disconnect that seems to be prevalent among so many young people these days must continue to be addressed by our own community and nation, as so many of yesterday's kid games are sadly. . . no longer games.

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Volume 8, Issue 8, Posted 9:41 PM, 04.17.2012