Playground Regulars, All Grown Up, Keep Macomb Memories Alive

By John Kelly
Monday, September 15, 2008

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.

But there he was, at the Macomb reunion, laughing with his childhood playmates, remembering a time when the playground was his world and when he prayed the sun would never set.

Still Jonesing for Barnaby's?

A reunion of a different sort is being planned by the regulars from Barnaby's, a saloon in Wheaton that Jim Perretta opened with his partner Geoff O'Neill in 1973 and owned until 1994.

Barnaby's had good sandwiches, cheap booze and the sort of decor -- Tiffany shades, old photographs, a penny farthing bicycle on the wall -- that the T.G.I. McApplebees of the world have since made us all sick of. It also had employees who say it was just about the best place they ever worked.

The new owner ran it until it closed last year. Now Jim's planning a reunion for the hard-core customers, the folks who remember things like the Barnaby's bell drink: When a bell rang at 5:30 p.m., you could get a refill of whatever you were drinking for the price matching that day's date. The second of the month? Your vodka tonic will be 2 cents, please.

If you were a Barnaby's regular and want info on the reunion, call Perretta at 301-598-0830 or former waitress Kathleen Combs at 301-622-4423.

High School Reunions

Here are a couple of corrections to last week's list of high school reunions: The Eleanor Roosevelt class reuniting Saturday is the Class of 1983, not 1988. And the James Madison High Class of 1968 is reuniting Sept. 27. Go to http://www.greatreunions.com for more information on both reunions.

A bunch more reunions have come flooding in. To see if your school is among them, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/johnkelly and click on "High School Reunions."

My e-mail: kellyj@washpost.com.