Abraham Lincoln Playground - Part One

Abraham Lincoln School metamorphosed into Abraham Lincoln Apartments


Sports

Most school playgrounds today are ghost towns if there is not an official community sponsored event going on. If they had their way most kids today wouldn’t be caught dead hanging around a school playground—even though they are designated safe zones or maybe this is because they are designated safe zones.

It was just the opposite when I was a kid because we didn’t know where else to go. As we grew older we would find our way to other places but in those early days everything seemed to start and end at the playground. My world through about the sixth grade ranged no further than about four or five blocks in every direction from my house. That put Abraham Lincoln School and its playground on the western-most border of my very small world. There was rarely a need to venture into the frontier that lay beyond it.

My kids have all played in organized neighborhood sports. I never played in any organized sports, which in my day could have only meant Little League. But for about three summers from about the third or fourth grade on I played baseball every single day. In the afternoon and then again every night, one assortment or another of the same 20 or so boys that started together in kindergarten in 1951 and were still together at the end of sixth grade in June 1958 would meet at the playground to play ball.

If enough boys showed up we would have a game. If only four or five of us showed up, we’d play 500—where a one-handed catch of a fly ball counted 200 points, two-handed flies counted for 100, one bounce grounders went for 75, two bounce grounders got you 50 and anything that was at least rolling when you ran it down would net you 25. If we wanted to make the game tough, you’d have to land right on 500 without going over. This made for some pretty sloppy baseball when you would have to let fly balls drop and then catch them on just the right bounce with just the right number of hands.

Somewhere in those years I crossed paths with my first legend—someone actually bigger than the neighborhood that we lived in. His name was Carmen and in time I came to realize what everyone eventually learned about Carmen. Carmen was crazy as a loon. Nevertheless, he had played some level of minor league or semi-pro baseball and we didn’t know anyone else that could make that claim.

In today’s world, Carmen’s real life adventures would be made into a movie in which he would probably play himself and the common, mundane lives of everyone else in the neighborhood would pale in comparison. But Carmen was more Irondequoit’s answer to Mark Twain than Indiana Jones. Carmen was a storyteller. By his own account, he had wrestled alligators and traveled to foreign countries, which back then no one in the neighborhood was doing.

There were even occasional rumors floating around that he had killed a man. We knew most of the stories were exaggerations or down right lies. He even knew we knew. But he liked telling the lies and we liked hearing them.

Nobody ever doubted that he was telling the truth about his baseball career, though. He could hit the ball a mile, which to fourth grade boys wasn’t quite as far as a real mile but was far enough to clear the fence and keep putting it in the first row of houses that bordered the playground.

And he could field like nobody’s business. He was the Joe DiMaggio of Lincoln playground. The rest of us were just the Joe’s. He carried a monstrous mitt on his left hand that he kept well oiled and he would never carelessly toss it in the dirt the way the way the rest of us did, not realizing that a man’s glove was his badge and how he cared for it was his honor. He’d slip his big hand inside the glove like a knight in King Arthur’s court slipping into his armor. In went a man and what you got was a knight. That’s how it was with Carmen.

Without that glove, he was nothing more than the Abraham Lincoln playground nutcase but with it he was a baseball player, which back in those days still meant something. He would glide under a fly ball holding that black, glistening mitt up to shield the sun and suddenly just snatch that ball out of the sky like a black hole sucking in space debris. Back then none of us had ever heard about black holes but watching Carmen play the outfield as boys made the concept easier to understand when the phrase did start popping up.

The rest of us had dusty, dried out mitts that we could barely force our sweaty hands into. When we put our mitts on, we were still boys.

We would lunge at balls and more often than not wound up tossing the mitts at them as they rolled past. We’d catch balls in the webbing and never know it or sometimes think we’d caught one only to have it bounce off the heel of the glove. It was never pretty—even when we did catch them—and we didn’t catch many. On the other hand I never remember seeing him drop one. Us boys and Carmen were in two different worlds that just happened to co-exist in the same Abraham Lincoln playground universe.

As we got older, we got cockier and by the sixth grade we were calling him a liar to his face. His response was always the same. “Okay, well maybe that didn’t happen but listen to this story about when—” and he would go off on another whopper even bigger than the first. By this time, “Carmen” had become somewhat of a codeword for someone who told unbelievable stories. Even when we got older and one of us would try to exaggerate some exploit, a chorus of “Carmen” would erupt from the audience to shut the big talker down.

But he sure could hit and catch a baseball. I don’t even know if a Carmen would be possible today. Even if a bunch of ten year olds could possibly find themselves assembled together at a playground, parents wouldn’t stand for a twenty-something mentally challenged, unemployed story teller hanging around and telling them one tall tale after another. It’s too bad because at times I’d have to say Carmen was even better than Mark Twain.