My brothers and I were born in the mid-to-late 50’s, ran wild staring in the early 60’s and had really hit our stride in the late 60s and through the mid-70s.
In our small town of Livermore, we roamed free, an experience that few children have known in the last 40 years or more, and in truth at a level that few children knew even back then. We chased rabbits in the fields with homemade slingshots, jump shot ducks and “pinkie baited” crawfish along the arroyos; we gigged frogs in the flooded and abandoned rock quarries, fished in the golf ponds after hours and road bikes hither and yon all over the valley seeking, and mostly finding, adventures.
But, just about two blocks away from our house sat what was destined to become our alma mater, Livermore High School. Foundered in 1891 it had already been attempting to bring culture, knowledge, and maturity to some 80+ years-worth of wild boys well before any of us graced its hallowed halls. And one can’t blame Livermore High School, its teachers, or its staff for the spectacular failures it experienced in Barry, Jeff, and I. For as alchemy proved centuries earlier, you simply can’t turn lead into gold to any high degree or with any regularity.
Now, I’m not saying that my two older brothers were troublesome, but for the longest time I thought my first name was really Ogodnotanother” by the way each of my teachers called roll on the first day of each school year when they got to my last name.
By our time, the campus consisted of an over-sized two story main building opened in 1931 during the height of the Great Depression, later stucco’d in 1937 as a WPA funded project, and three long single story general class-room buildings, a science class and lab building, an imposingly tall music building, and a large gym complex consisting of separate Boys and Girls locker rooms, separate full indoor wooden floored courts, and a pool that during the summers double as a community pool for the town where kids and adults both sought refuge from the triple digit temperatures that were quite common. There was a metal shop and woodworking shop on campus as well, while the automobile shop was farther out East Avenue some mile and a half or so away from the main campus.
The property also included a baseball and soccer field off one side and a large paved basketball court, track and field, and a football field complete with steel pole and wooden seated bleachers off another side. Each of those two areas was fully as large as the building section of the campus proper.
As it happened, along with being very close to our house, the high school track and football field was in a straight line with one of the access points to the fields and railroad tracks that ran east out of town.
Now railroads just seem to have a natural hold on the imagination of a boy, and we three spent a great deal of time walking those rail lines in the summers, and when we could get away from chores on the weekends as well, looking for treasures. Rusty pieces of rail that had been bent and replaced, even rustier tie plates, old spikes, and whatever junk someone had chosen to throw out, whether off of a train, or just out of a pickup along the dirt road next to the tracks.
We’d find upbroken soda pop bottles now and then, and even here and there a penny or a nickel that some other kid had lost. Most of the coins I am sure had been placed on top of the track in an effort to get a passing train to squish then flat, rather like the penny crushers you see at fairs and arcades, but without the fancy embossed patterns. Problem was, and I know this from vast personal experience, when a freight train that weighs 500,000 pounds or so comes rattling along (back then the rails were bolted together with ½” open joints or so, not welded into single pieces like now) a coin seldom sits there and waits to be crushed (most people won’t just calmly sit there either, so who can blame a penny).
Those soda bottles and pennies seldom saw home, mostly they went to the cash box of some local liquor store where we could trade in the bottle or penny for a piece of bubble gum or so. Vut, as usual, I am drifting a bit. I was talking about scrounging for treasures, and heck, I still have a number of old glass power pole insulators and even a couple old ceramic ones on display in my house that I found while kicking rocks along those creosoted rail ties, even though the pennies are long gone.
What with the proximity and location of the football field, my brothers and I spent a lot of time around those old wooden seated bleachers doing one thing or another. Not sure how tall they were all in all, I know for a fact they are long gone now. But they had most of 20 or 25 rows of seats and at the top there was a pipe railing across the back of the stand that must have topped out at 22-24 feet high. In the middle of the “Home-team’s Side” was an added large wooden announcer’s box with wooden railed deck top for camera platform rising an additional 12 foot or so.
The whole structure was fabricated from 2” pipes sunk deep into concreted holes underneath and braced and cross braced all directions with 1-1/4 inch pipe. Then 2” x 12” lumber was bolted down for seats and 2” x 6” lumber was bolted down for foot levels and steps. Early on I don’t remember there being any chain link stretched across the back of those structures, and the track and field teams kept their landing mats for high-jump and pole-vaulting under the bleachers to be out of the way.
My first memories of playing on the bleachers are of swinging around under them in the pipe maze. It was the world’s most elaborate jungle gym from our perspective and we spent hours pretending to be Tarzan flinging our way through the tree jungle without ever setting foot on ground. Chase, tag, even “knock the nut” from the tree greased our hands, thickened our palms, and now and again knocked the wind out of us when we found ourselves the “appointed nut”. Those times were wonderful in the cool dark shade offered by those bleachers on days that ran in the 100s and even 110s, even when we tore open a palm on a sharp bolt end or other metal bur.
But nothing ever remains the same as you grow older and those bleachers evolved as we grew up. From expansive jungle gym they morphed into a tool when we started backpacking. There is no exercise or conditioning quite so good at preparing you physically for carrying all your food, clothes, and sleeping gear on your back up and down mountains than running up and down bleachers until your calves and thighs screamed out an insistence that you stop and rest and catch your breath. Good for conditioning the lungs and blood for hiking at 10,000 feet of elevation too. At nearing 66 years of age, my calves remain the size of most people’s thighs and without any distinct layer of fat on them. I firmly believe that is from the years of throwing papers from bikes and from running bleachers several dozen times a year in preparation for weekend and weeklong backpacking trips.
Then to complete the circle, as we grew into our mid-teens, those bleachers morphed back into play structures again. Once we got old enough and strong enough, together, we three could grab ahold of the netting bags that enclosed the large foam blocks used to cushion pole-vaulters falls and drag them out from under the bleachers. We would pull them out just far enough to use them as landing pads.
Once positioned, we would run around to the front of the bleachers, run up the stairs to the top, climb the railing, and launch ourselves out into space, freefalling, twisting, flipping, as we dropped to land safely in a cushion of foam; scramble off, and back around to the top again.
In our minds we dreamed of being stuntmen making movies, at least for a couple years, until reality wormed its way into our lives and set us all on different paths to more sure, more secure, healthier ways to make our livings.
Sometime around when Barry was a senior at Livermore high, when Jeff was a Junior, and I was a freshman; some coach, or janitor, or principal likely noticed us launching from the top of the announcer’s box and while they hollered and chased, we certainly were far too fast and experienced by then to be caught by some old man (who was then likely half the age I am now). Once they spied us, they were certain to notice that no matter how sure they were that the pole-vault pads had been completely stuffed under the bleachers, the darn things kept creeping out. And in a moment of uncharacteristic (for the time) concern about being sued by some parents whose kid misjudged the distance and hit dirt instead of foam, the decision was made to hold those things in place and chain link was installed with lockable gates to keep the net bags of foam from escaping ever again.
Copywrite 2024 © Marty K Vandermolen
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