Somewhere, in the hustle and bustle of technological change and all the abundant news reading that rolls over all of us in indigestibly monstrous portions from all digital and ink print corners by the nanosecond, I missed the Chron.Com story from 2.5 years ago about the part that dear old Pecan Park played in the earliest deployment of the new Super WiFi technology in Houston. Here’s the link to an article from April 2011 that describes the inititation of the project that got started with the strong and able support of Rice University in April 2011.
I have no idea where the fruits of this early experience have fallen into growth and use elsewhere by now. I just know that we have a wireless system at home that shuts down if you set a bag of groceries down in a way that blocks the WiFi system’s signal blaster – or zapper – or whatever you choose to call it. Like many of you, I have grown into the bane of modernity – as the person who is now totally dependent upon a technology that he still barely understands.
When I was a kid in Pecan Park, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, we invented a few things on the street, but nothing that would invite any of us to have been renamed as the next Edison or Einstein. Most of our stuff had to do with dangerous, but less than deadly instruments of street warfare. For my best example, we “invented” something we called “The Willow Wand.” – The Willow Wand was made from the last three to four feet of fairly stable, but flexible Willow Tree branch that grew in the McGee’s back yard on Japonica Street, across the street and immediately north of our house – and immediately east of our sandlot base at Eagle Field.
Willow Wands formed out of our perceived need to defend Eagle Field from invasion by interloping gangs of kids from other streets. They worked like this: Warning! Kids, Please Don’t Try This at Home! We Were Stupid Back in the Day! (1) find your willow stick and pick it clean of little leaves and small off-shoots. (2) Form some black soil gumbo mud and roll it in small pieces into balls that were about one inch thick. (3) Find a small rock and insert it into the mud ball. (4) Then insert the mud ball onto the smallest, most flexible end of the stick. (5) Teach yourselves and the younger kids how to whiplash that little mud ball straight and hard-flying off the end of the wand with just the right flick of the wrist once your stick is pointing toward the kid you are trying to hit in protection of your territory. (6) With practice, you hardly ever miss.
We learned better. The hard way. And I’ve told this story before.
Willow Wands were fine until we learned that one of our younger and childless married neighborhood husbands, a machinist named “Harry”, could actually make us a couple of pipe cannons that used Baby Giant firecracker sticks to propel gravel out the end of a long pipe. We got Harry to build these items for us from some scrap materials and we told him it would be a good way to learn about shooting guns. We didn’t tell Harry that we planned to start those lessons just as soon as the Kernel Street kids again tried taking over Eagle Field – which, as luck would have it, took place on the Sunday afternoon following the Saturday we got the cannons and the firecracker power they each required.
The Kernel Street Kids crossed the alley which separated them from Japonica Street and Eagle Field. Lucky for us, we got earlier word that they were coming and already had set up the loaded pipe cannons on the sandlot. Then, when the Kernels came charging at us, we set off both our blasters. One missed, but the other sprayed a shirtless kid in the chest, causing a discharge of blood and a general halt to everything.
It was like time stopped and we all got hung up on “what have we done?” But sooner than we could react, my dad came running out of the house, shouting “STOP!” in all the ways he knew how to express that idea. I don’t know where the other parents were, but dad was the only one who showed up. He gave us all a healthy reprimand for what we had done as he ministered first aid to the one kid who, fortunately, was only scratched from the gravel that hit him.
Dad told us strongly that we didn’t own the field to the exclusion of others. “If you kids have any differences with each other, then settle it right here and now with a game of baseball,” he added. Which we did.
We won, but so what. It didn’t seem to matter after that scary day. The Kernel Street kids joined in with the Japonica-Myrtle bunch after that Sunday – and from that date, we would blossom eventually into the sandlot club that became The Pecan Park Eagles.
Oh yeah, I still got a whipping from dad that night, but that’s more than OK. I had it coming.
I’ll never know what was said to the neighbor who built our cannons for us back then. Maybe nothing. It was a different time and place.
Houston, Baseball, & Other Musings.
The Pecan Park Eagle 