Still swinging 60 years later
Love of stickball brings old pals back to Brooklyn nabe
The only green on their Brooklyn field of dreams came from the painted cinder blocks along the third base line.
Back in the 1960s, on hot summer days, Henry Terranova and his Sheepshead Bay buddies played stickball from sun-up to sundown on this concrete diamond tucked behind an old city public schoolturned-21st-century yeshiva. Now in their 70s, seven surviving members of the old crew reunited for a few final swings with a broomstick bat on the hallowed ground of their youth.
“I had this epiphany — wouldn’t it be nice to get back here once again, to sit on the same steps where we used to sit?” said Terranova, organizer of the happy reunion last Friday on their old turf.
“It brings back so many memories. We learned the lessons of life here. How to win, how to lose, how to interact with people.”
Terranova, 72, and his lifelong pals got together on a cloudy Brooklyn afternoon, the skies as gray as their hair, sharing old tales of their 1962 games in a time when Casey Stengel was managing the first-year Mets and President John F. Kennedy was facing the Cuban missile crisis.
Broad smiles and happy handshakes abounded as they reassembled near their parked cars, sharing tales of past heroics — including the kid who once scaled a skinny drain pipe to recover a ball stuck high above the old field.
“Dennis, my man!” said Terranova’s brother Billy as he greeted old friend Dennis Gelfand, 73.
Four of the players were Vietnam vets. One worked for the Sanitation Department, another became a doctor. A few more passed away over the years, lending a melancholy touch to the joyous gathering.
“This is wild,” said Eddie Musco, 74, the retired city sanitation worker, gesturing toward his childhood friends before the start of the old, old, old timers’ game. “It’s terrific, with this crew over here. I lived 15 minutes away, and we were here dawn to dusk. It was great.
“Now my game is golf.”
A quick refresher course for those born in the last half-century: Stickball is played not on a field, but on a street or a concrete playground. There is no bat, just a broom handle, used to hit a pink rubber ball known among aficionados as a “spaldeen.”
Incredibly, Henry Terranova showed up with both relics of the past.
The game was once a city staple, as prominent as the Empire State Building and ubiquitous as the subways. Hall of Famer Willie Mays famously played stickball on the streets of Harlem while with the old New York Giants, while his Cooperstown colleague Sandy Koufax did the same as a kid in Brooklyn.
The alumni of Public School 98 took the field wearing smiles but no gloves; players use their bare hands. In the blink of an eye, all were transported back to a simpler time to play the game they loved so deeply.
The passing years initially took their toll. Billy Terranova took the first cuts, whiffing on three pitches.
“I want to see somebody do better than I did,” he said.
“Couldn’t do worse,” offered Musco. But it felt like 1962 again when Dr. Ron Savarese settled under a fly ball to make a juggling barehanded grab, much to the delight of his pals. On the brick schoolyard wall behind him, still visible after all these years, was the number 357 — weathered and worn, right where Henry Terranova painted the digits in homage to the distance in feet for a home run at the old Yankee Stadium.
When the game came to a close, the players enjoyed a throwback lunch of sub sandwiches from from Jimmy’s Deli (still there, right on Sheepshead Bay Road) before heading their separate ways, each with a commemorative white T-shirt.
The front celebrated the “P.S. 98 Boys,” while the back cheered the “Stickball Reunion 60 Years in the Making.”
“Where does the time go?” asked Gio Gorgio, 72. “We were 15 years old just the other day. Where does it go?”