Five o’clock in the summer of 1975, and the block was already the playground. A rope slapped the pavement one house over.
All of them gone from the block.
In this video:
✓ Kickball in the middle of the street until a car came
✓ Pitching pennies against a wall for the pot
✓ Four square, H-O-R-S-E, and twenty-one on the court
✓ Chalk games on the sidewalk: skelly and hopscotch
✓ Jacks on the stoop, from onesies all the way to tensies
✓ Hide and go seek when the streetlights came on
✓ Clamp-on skates and the key worn around your neck
✓ Tonk on the front steps and Ringolevio across the block
The concrete did not go anywhere. That is the strange part of all of this. The same sidewalk that held the chalk and the slap of the ropes is still underfoot on those blocks, and the sun still works the same way, and somewhere on every one of those streets there is a child with nothing scheduled.
So which one did your block wear out first?
The people who played on it kept everything else.
# 1970sStreetGames #BlackChildhood #StreetGames #1970sNostalgia
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