Schuckman: Memories of wiffle ball battles help keep game prevalent for generations

QUINCY — Has wiffle ball become the forgotten game?

Quiet fields and empty side streets suggest so.

Temperatures pushed toward 90 degrees Wednesday afternoon when three kids and two adults cast their lines into the ponds near R.J. Peters Drive running through South Park. Although they hadn’t caught any fish, they had been there for hours and had no plans of going home early.

“This is as good as it gets,” 13-year-old Jeremiah Quick said. “We’d rather do this than anything else.”

Near the horseshoe bend at the southern end of the park, 32-year-old Brian McMahon and his 4-year-old labrador retriever, Bruno, played fetch with a frisbee. McMahon said they do that two or three times per week because of the vast expanse of the grass field.

“We never see any kids playing wiffle ball,” he said. “Usually, it’s just people walking.”

He pointed toward the creek winding along the west side of the park drive.

“We do see kids jumping in there,” McMahon said.

Seemingly on cue, two middle school-aged boys popped out from the creek bottoms, got on their bikes and sped away.

They nearly crashed into a couple of walkers before cutting through the park and disappearing.

“That’s rare,” said Linda Smith, a 63-year-old lifelong resident of Quincy’s south side. “I grew up in this park when people were using it all the time. Now, we come down here and walk and you don’t see too many kids. Those kids that nearly hit us were the first two we’ve seen on their bikes in the park this week.”

Less than a mile away, Johnson Park was quiet, too.

There were teenagers hanging out on the swings and playground equipment and a young couple with toddlers looking like they were setting up a picnic in the shelter house. But the eastern half of the park, which is an open grass field, was empty.

A drive through the neighborhoods bordering both parks yielded nothing.

No backyard games. No driveway battles. No asphalt struggles.

No wiffle ball anywhere.

“I’ve told my two boys how we grew up playing wiffle ball almost nightly,” said Chuck Johnston, who lives with his wife, Trinity, and two sons — 11-year-old Zander and 7-year-old Jordan — three blocks from Johnson Park. “I didn’t grow up in Quincy, but the Wisconsin town I grew up in is very similar. I feel like I’m in my old neighborhood around here.

“Wiffle ball games were epic. And there were plenty of boys in the neighborhood to keep the games going. My boys don’t have a lot of kids their age that they know or are friends with living around here. That’s part of the problem.”

Or maybe it’s a generational gap widening.

More than three decades ago, the streets between South Park and Johnson Park were some of the best wiffle ball fields any of us could find. Sure, we rode our bikes to both parks and played games there constantly, but none of those games compared to the ones which took place on 14th Street between Monroe and Adams Streets.

My lifelong buddy, Pat Berter, grew up on that corner, four blocks from my boyhood home. The number of wiffle ball games played in that street is incalculable. Sure, we played on 10th Street near my house or in the backyard or across the front yards of the three houses between the corner and the church in the middle of the block.

But 14th Street seemed to be the perfect setup. There was a hill to the east. The road was flat. And traffic was light no matter the time of day.

The only thing that slowed us were the rocks and the cinders on the street. Trust me, road rash is a real thing.

And when the summer heat got to us, one of our moms — Virginia Berter and Kathleen Schuckman deserve sainthood just for putting up with all of us boys — had a pitcher of Kool-Aid or popsicles ready to be crushed.

Then it was back to play. Baseball was — still is — our favorite pastime. We watched baseball when it was on TV, collected baseball cards and loved everything about the game. Wiffle ball was an extension of that. We played until the sun set and sometimes later if the street lights enabled it. 

It’s a memory we share, cherish and wish we could relive.

The goal Wednesday was to find a game that brought those memories into focus. It didn’t go as planned because there wasn’t a game taking place, but the pursuit of one made me think about those days, reach out to longtime friends and embrace the fact we pick up right where we left off no matter how much time has elapsed.

So wiffle ball can’t be the forgotten game when such wonderful memories never fade.