A Fortunate Life Made Possible by Freedom

Starting back to the point of memory, around age seven, I was living in one of THE BEST city neighborhoods in the country, Edmondson Village in West Baltimore. Well designed and economically diverse by income, the housing was mixed from single dwelling homes with off-street parking to multi-family apartment buildings. We lived in a brick row townhouse where the second floor was a separate apartment. My parents purposely bought this property as a side hustle to make ends meet.

Directly across the concrete street was a recreational park called Leakin Park (my private playground). At least I regarded it as mine. Hundreds of acres which bordered the backend of the development. It had several baseball diamonds, tennis courts, large fields for possible lacrosse, soccer, or football areas. On the backside of these open fields were the woods. The woods was my favorite getaway where, as a young boy, I could hide out, urinate, defecate, smoke cigarettes, shoot a .22 cal. rifle at squirrels and birds, dig out underground bunkers, chop down trees to make logs for a roof (Swiss Family Robinson), pick blackberries, eat pecans and chestnuts, snag crawdads, climb up and down rock cliffs, climb trees and build tree forts out of scrap lumber, climb down into the sewer system, explore abandoned cemeteries with graves more than a hundred years since burial, swim in a polluted creek (be treated for typhoid), ice skate on the creek in winter, ride sleds down the hills, start fires, play army combat, play advanced Hide & Seek, and I cannot ever remember seeing a snake.

The neighborhood housing layout was a jewel with concrete streets, curbs, sidewalks, alleys, and bus stops. We loved to play "curb ball" where you throw a "pinky" down onto the edge of the curb to maximize the ball flight. If the ball made it all the way to the other side of the street, it was a homerun. Playing "Team Curb Ball" you could throw the ball onto the vertical side of the curb to launch a grounder and run to a base to try and gain runs. If the opposing team caught the ball in the air, it was an out, and three outs the inning changed to the other team. We loved this game, but it had one big drawback: the pinky would lose air and become unresponsive, dead. Pinkies cost a quarter. If we could not get our parents to cough-up the quarter, we had to walk up to the Edmondson Village shopping center (the first of its kind in the country at the time) and go to "Tommy Tucker's" five and dime and try and steal a couple pinkies. I do not know how many times we did it, but I do remember getting caught one time.

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