Shortly before my fiftieth birthday in 2005, a long tube-shaped package was delivered to my home. It was about four feet in length and was completely encased in clear wrapping tape. My thought was that it could hold a rolled-up poster or other piece of hangable art. I hesitated opening the package because I didn’t want any more hangable art unless I selected it myself.
Nevertheless, I did battle with the tape for several moments, careful not to damage whatever was inside. When I finally did slide the contents onto our dining table, I was initially confused. It was not a piece of hangable art. Instead, it was a piece of swingable art. Lying there gleaming on the table was a customized half ball bat, with my name burnished on the narrow shaft of wood. But there was something else remaining in the tube. So, I upended it and shook. Tumbling out came six half balls and a business card from the owner of Halfball.com (“personalized nostalgic bats & half balls”). The back of the card bore a handwritten message:
Joe: Hope you enjoy your gift. Tell Mike I sent you 3 extra balls. Enjoy.
I could not have been more surprised, or more pleased, with this gift from Mike, my younger brother. The three and a half foot length of wood, with a diameter a bit larger than a quarter, and its companion rubber half balls, sent my mind back to summers during my youth in Philly when much of my time was spent playing half ball (AKA halfies) or stick ball, step ball, wire ball – you name it ball.
All of those games were made possible by the pimple ball – an air-filled rubber ball, a bit smaller than a tennis ball. The pimple ball was apparently a cousin of the Spaldeen ball used in New York City, although that item was unknown to us. Where there were Philly kids trying to fill the long hot days of summers in the 60s and 70s, there were pimple balls. They could be bought at any corner convenience store.
When new, a pimple ball was very bouncy. In that state, it could be used for a variety of street games:
- Wire ball – object was to catch “pop ups” thrown by your competitor who tried to make that more difficult by having the ball hit an overhead wire.
- Step ball – one kid would stand in front of a set of row home front steps, throw the ball against them, creating “grounders” and “line drives” for another kid to try to catch.
- Chink – sort of a street version of racquet ball, with kids using their palms as racquets and the brick walls between row homes providing odd bounces.
- King block – two kids would select adjoining squares of pavement and hit the pimple ball back and forth to each other’s block, using open palms as paddles.
- Stick ball – a batter stood in front of a wall, with a strike zone painted or chalked onto the wall behind. As a bat, he would use a sawed-off length of wood that formerly was a broom or mop handle. The pitcher stood about fifty feet away and threw that darned pimple ball as hard as he could. The batter’s two objectives were to hit the ball and to avoid getting hit by wild pitches.
Many pimple balls ended up rolling down into the sewer from which no balls returned. Those that did not meet that fate gradually lost their bounce and eventually went dead, becoming the raw material for two half balls. A kid would go into his kitchen, find the sharpest knife, ensure that his mom was nowhere in sight, then proceed to slice through the ball to create two half globes. In doing so, a small amount of a liquid was released, which we assumed to be poisonous or maybe even radioactive. When finished, two new halfies had been brought into the world. They were used, along with a stick ball bat to play the game.
Halfies was a one-on-one contest, usually played in a neighborhood street, with one kid pitching the halfies underhanded, making them fly like a frisbee, while the other kid, standing about twenty or so feet away, trying to hit the flying object. A swing and a miss was an out. A halfie that was hit as a grounder and caught cleanly by the pitcher or was hit in the air and caught cleanly by the pitcher also were outs. Three outs per at bat. A grounder that got past the pitcher was a single. A fly or liner past the pitcher was a double. Successively longer flies or liners counted as triples or homers. Since only two kids were playing, the various runners on base had to be imaginary and retained in one’s memory.
Before any game started, the ground rules had to be set. For instance, “The street is fair territory. Everything else is foul. Anything past the Buick is a homer. And no German helmets.”
Ah … German helmets. That was when a pitcher would turn a halfie inside out so that the pimples were on the inside and the smooth interior was on the outside. This made the half ball take on the appearance of a World War II German army helmet and robbed it of most of its aerodynamic properties. Most kids usually agreed to the German helmet prohibition.
I spent many peaceful hours playing halfies with my friend Paul or John, but it was different when Mike and I played together. Now here’s the deal with Mike and me. I was born in 1955 and Mike came along two years later. We were supposed to grow up together joyfully, sharing our toys and playing happily, one glorious year after another, hand-in-hand as loving siblings. Instead, we spent our childhood years at each other’s throat. I did not care for him, and he did not care for me. The dislike manifested itself constantly in word and deed, with arguments and physical clashes.
Our lifelong conflict climaxed on a hot 1969 summer afternoon. I was 13, and Mike was 11. By that point in our lives, we each had our own group of friends and did very little together. Undoubtedly, we both had been abandoned by our friends that day and must have been bored out of our minds with nothing to do. One of us, in desperation, asked the other if he wanted to play a game of halfies. The challenge was accepted. The ground rules were agreed to, including a prohibition on German helmets. We went to the street in front of our house. Cue the dramatic music.
It didn’t take long for the sniping to start. I taunted him, and he yelled back at me. I insulted him, and he insulted me back. Once I stepped up to bat, Mike did something I had never seen before. During a typical game, about six to eight halfies would be used interchangeably. The pitcher would hold the extras and put them into play as needed, thus eliminating the need to chase down a single halfie after each pitch. What my despicable brother did, in an effort to break my concentration and to get my goat, was to take two of the extra halfies and attach them to his cheeks as if they were suction cups! If the game of halfies had established standardized rules or a code of ethics, certainly such behavior would have been outlawed. And if I had any inkling that he was going to do it, I would have called for a prohibition on suction cups in the ground rules. But this was a first-time event that I could not have predicted.
So, I did all that I could do, which was to scream at him to take them off his face. He just cackled and said, “No.”
I then shouted, “Take those halfies off your face, or I’m gonna hit a line drive and knock them off.”
He and I both knew that it was a hollow threat. Hitting halfies was not like stroking a putt or lining up the six-ball in the corner pocket. It was more like you swung as hard as you could and hoped that you hit the halfie. I had no control over the flight of a halfie that I hit. It was ludicrous to think that I could make a halfie fly back and hit my evil brother in the face. Mike knew that, too, and the halfie suction cups remained in place on his cheeks as he went into his wind-up.
That beautiful pimpled halfie came out of Mike’s hand and floated straight in front of me. With a power, determination and anger arising from eleven years of competition and fighting, I took a mighty swing and made powerful contact. As God and Mike were my witnesses, here is what happened. That halfie went screaming off my stickball bat and rocketed in a direct line to Mike’s face! It was a dead bullseye. He didn’t have time to cover himself. The suction cup halfies went flying.
For a split second, we both stood stunned. Then Mike realized he was in pain. He grabbed at his face and went running up the steps to our house.
Through the screen door, he yelled, “Mom! Joey hit me in the face with a halfie on purpose!”
I gloated about this incident for a long time, and took great pride in it. Although, deep inside, I realized that my accomplishment was just dumb luck. It was clear then that a fortuitous positive accident could happen, just the same as an accident with negative consequences could happen. That’s a basic bit of education that came to me via the flight of a halfie.