Playground Regulars, All Grown Up, Keep Macomb Memories Alive

To the kids who played baseball on the Macomb Street playground back in the 1960s, the drop at the edge of far left field might as well have been the Grand Canyon. If the horsehide skittered past your glove and rolled down that ball-swallowing trench, it was a sure homerun for the other team.

But on Saturday afternoon, at a 40th (roughly) reunion of playground regulars, former child after former child came to the same conclusion. "It doesn't look so big now," said 52-year-old Wai Hom, who'd traveled all the way from Nashua, N.H., to reconnect with old friends.

For Wai and the dozens of other Macomb veterans, the Northwest D.C. playground was a skinned-knee utopia. It seems almost unimaginable today, when we won't let children out of our sight and every extracurricular activity is programmed down to the millisecond, but once upon a time, kids were kids.

"I can't remember my parents ever watching me play here," said Adam Stern, who organized the reunion from San Francisco. "They never dropped me off or picked me up."

He didn't mean it as a complaint. It's what was so great: Kids would just materialize after school or on weekends, pedaling their bikes from home or from John Eaton Elementary School down the street. They'd coalesce into unruly clots and play "maulball" and "lines" and "newcomb," games they were sure existed nowhere else in the world.

"This is where people lived their lives," said Laura Klein, a psychoanalyst who now lives in Berkeley, Calif. "For many people, this was another form of family." Laura added that it was only after leaving Macomb that she realized not all girls grew up playing tackle football with the boys.

In the clubhouse (so tiny!) would be an adult director provided by the city's rec department. Some of them came back for the reunion, too. Maria Otero remembered taking some of the kids to an antiwar rally on the Mall in 1970. She's 58. "Now I'm their age," she laughed, "but back then, those six years made me the boss."

Herb Holmes used to pile the baseball team into his Ford convertible, including a few kids in the trunk, for away games against other playgrounds. (We know what happens when you put a kid in the trunk these days: You end up featured in The Post's Metro section, and not in a good way.)

Eldridge "Sacky" Lee, 72, was a director at Macomb and worked for D.C. Rec from 1958 to 1968. "We had no bullies here," he said. "No bullies on this playground."

I told him it sounded suspiciously like paradise.

"It was. I couldn't believe it when I came here. I kept waiting for the time bomb to explode, and it never did. This is probably the best playground I worked on, and I worked on quite a few."

Could it really have been that halcyon? If there is kickball, there will be a child picked last for kickball. And as a matter of fact, I found him. Even all these years later, he didn't want his name associated with that shame.