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They’re Drawn Back, Once Again, by Stickball
Eric Mortensen swinging for the fences at P.S. 95 at the 31st Annual Stickball Reunion and his class’s 50th reunion.
Alan Frishman showed Sunny Dolney Moles a photograph of her that was taken on graduation day in 1958.
Yiggy showed up early, carrying the mop and broom handles he keeps in his closet back home. Barry Heyman, 63, arrived soon afterward, bearing a large black and white photograph of the eighth-grade class of 1958. David Sternthal, 63, the blurry one in the photo because he jerked when the boy next to him pinched him in the behind, brought his video camera.
Eric Mortensen, 66 — a retired teacher who carries his stickball gear in his minivan because, he explained, “You never know” — held out the hard rubber Spaldeen ball in his hand. “This stupid little ball, for a working-class neighborhood, provided us with all the entertainment we needed, until we got old enough to chase after girls,” he said.
They met Saturday morning on the blacktop of a schoolyard in the northern Bronx. They played in this yard when they were children and teenagers, and decades later, they still play in this yard, even if it is only once a year.
For 31 years, on the second Saturday in June, dozens of men and women who lived in the Van Cortlandt Village section of the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s play stickball at their old school, P.S. 95. They called it Stickball Days at first, and this time they called it the 31st Annual Stickball Reunion.
Ed Yaker, 63, a retired math teacher who lives near the school and who everyone calls Yiggy, started the tradition in 1977. That first year, about 10 or 12 people came, said Mr. Yaker, an easygoing sort whose business card lists some of his activities as “beach” and “golf.” After a while, more than 100 attended annually, and they started making commemorative T-shirts and handing out an award called the Novi, in honor of a classmate who died years ago, Alan Novikoff.
Mr. Yaker has since been inducted into the city’s Stickball Hall of Fame, affiliated with the Museum of the City of New York.
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