Bridge Views: Jersey Boys of Summer

This is the time of year when the summer sun shines its light upon our memory and casts shadows of those golden Fort Lee summers of our youth upon the screen of our monotonous present. When together, banded by friendship, we walked these streets, climbed the cliffs, fell in love. Those perfect summers when the toughest decision had nothing to do with which bill to pay first, but whether we were going to Hiram’s or Callahan’s.

For me, it’s the summers of the 70s. For you, it may be the summer of the 60s, 50s, 40s or 30s. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that every summer of our youth called us forth and filled our empty days with endless possibility. In the end, what we’re left with is a string of bloated moments hemorrhaging meaning and memory. 

The other day while sitting in the kitchen of my mother’s house in Coytesville, the house I was born and grew up in, the sight of her dust mop leaning against the paneled wall rushed my brain back to those summers in the 70s and I could almost smell the lingering smoke from her filterless Philip Morris cigarette and hear her threatening screams, “Did that brother of yours take the handle of my dust mop for a stickball game again?” 

Then the other day while roaming the baseball aisle with my son at Modell’s I came upon a box with a big sign that read, “Stickball Bats.” I started to laugh thinking, “Really? They’re selling mop handles?” Then I saw the price tag and gulped. $25 for a mop handle?  Yes, $25 for a mop handle. If our moms had any foresight, they would be millionairesses now and could afford to hire someone to mop their floors. 

Summer is a lot of things to a lot of people, but for the boys of Fort Lee, summer was…stickball.

Stickball was, perhaps, the greatest of any unorganized sport. You didn’t have to try out for it, you didn’t have to wait for field time, and you didn’t have to buy any special equipment—all you needed was a mom with a mop, tape for the handle and a pink Spaulding Hi-Bounce rubber ball from Feiler’s or County Discount. Stickball was a pickup game that could be played pretty much anywhere. 

That distinctive hollow pop of the pink rubber ball perfectly connecting with the wood of someone’s mother’s pilfered mop or broom handle; a fusion of excited voices caught midway between youth and manhood; the scraping of black converse high-tops upon the sun soaked gravel; the crack of the bat splitting the ball in half—one part dropping dead to the ground, the other hurling through the air like a spastic spaceship. 

The boys from Fort Lee, Englewood Cliffs, Edgewater, Cliffside Park, Palisades Park, Leonia, Fairview and every town in-between all had one thing in common (other than their paper routes)--stickball. 

In Fort Lee there was the handball wall of Sixth Street Park, the handball wall of Holy Trinity’s field (anyone in Coytesville remember that?); the parking lot of the Yellow Building on Washington Ave; the south-facing red, brick wall of Madonna’s CYO Hall; the old Bell Telephone parking lot on Main Street (the Fenway Park of West Fort Lee) where boys aimed to hit the Bell sign on the top of the building; the Junction where over “The Devil’s House” was a homer; and Westview Park. 

In the summer of 1978, my best friend and daughter of then Deputy Police Chief Ray Lutz, Mary, created what was to become known as "the great stickball scandal of Westview Park."

It’s been a cold case for 33 years--until now. In retaliation for her Frisbee interrupting John Pagano’s perfect pitch, one of the boys purposely tossed her Frisbee onto the roof of the house next door to the park where the crankiest of old men lived. As cranky as he could possibly be, the old man told Mary that her lousy Frisbee could rot on his shingled roof before he retrieved it for one of us hoodlums.

In an act of pure vengeance, beneath the cover of night, Mary withdrew her pocket knife from the pocket of her Levi cut-offs and severed the ties of John Pagano’s meticulously webbed batting box from its perfectly centered position on the chain link fence. The sweltering wrath of all the neighborhood boys--Zevits, Peterkin, Wolthoff, Ross, Stengle, Pulise--reigned the next day, and for many of the days that followed. These pious, genuflecting altar boys promised that the perpetrators of such a heinous crime would be shown no mercy. Although accusations were hurled, no suspects were ever charged.

So here’s to all those Jersey boys of summers past and their stickball games, especially the boys from Westview Park who waited 33 years for their case to be solved. Ah, sweet summer memory…