Park and school - Memories from Flynn Park

TALES OF LONG AGO: Childhood memories from Flynn Park Elementary School

Last updated: March 27th, 2019

Stories from childhood are like myths and legends of oneโ€™s life. They can be told for their own sake, and a listener or reader will often find them fascinating for this very reason. Our childhood memories, if we can recover them, stand shining and clearโ€”poeticโ€”representative of a magical world. The heroes were real knights. The villains, genuine ogres and dragons. Every day was an eternity. Two years, I personally remember, made up a space of time I referred to as โ€œforever.โ€Trees in park - Memories of Flynn Park

Above is a back view of Flynn Park Elementary School in University City, Missouri, where I was an indentured servant, often a happy one, from 1954 until 1960. The building looks drab, almost industrial here, but itโ€™s actually surrounded by a jewel of a park of several acres that is practically forested with venerable oaks and maples, and benches interspersed here and there.

The blacktop

The blacktop was the location of a daily before-school soccer game that set two mobs of first- through sixth-grade boys loose kicking at the ball and incidentally at one another! Girls did not play soccer in those days; I imagine they were jumping rope and playing hopscotch nearby.

Iโ€™ve heard accounts of intense soccer games in the UK and Latin America, during which people are killed. But except maybe for when the fans pour onto the field and join these melees, I canโ€™t imagine a more intense mass fervor than we had going.

How did a person even know what team to join? It didnโ€™t matter! Youโ€™d just get in there and start kicking, most days. I dimly remember a few โ€œsixth grade against the schoolโ€ days, too.

There would be concentric circles of children around the ball wherever it wentโ€”maybe 50 boys vying to get a kick in, and only the closest ones having even a chance! The ball would go up against the cement curb into which the fence was embedded; get โ€œstuckโ€ with two boys at a stalemate just kicking away; and then the masses would swarm in and join them.

There was one fellow whom I remember as legendary in these games. His name was Buddy Lerman. Everyone called him โ€œLerman the German.โ€ He was a couple years older, and I didn’t know him at all, personally. He could dribble through the mob of both teams, somehow, and kick goal after goal! I donโ€™t remember anyone else being able to do that.

At 8:45 a.m., the school bell would ring, and the game would quickly disperse, to be resumed again the next day.

Inside the building

The classrooms were on the upper floors. The basement, which fed into all the doors shown here, contained the cafeteria and three other rooms I remember. There was the auditorium, where we had occasional assemblies, like the “Yo-Yo Man” demonstration; Christmas caroling, during which I would, as a Jew, lip-synch the word โ€œChristโ€; and the dreaded Rhythms (dance!) classes. We also learned the minuet here. Our elderly, maiden teachers actually made learning this dance all the rage, somehow. I donโ€™t know how they did it. They were geniuses at publicity. Agencies would vie for their services today.

There were also the Boysโ€™ Playroom and the Girlsโ€™ Playroom, two identical long, rectangular rooms with floors of dirty grey concrete and walls of bricks painted โ€œpuke greenโ€ with bars on the windowsโ€”not prison bars, they saidโ€”but bars to keep the windows from being broken by thrown balls.

And throwing balls was the point, the very point, of the boysโ€™ playroom! I have no idea what went on in the girlsโ€™ playroomโ€”more hopscotch and jump-rope, I guess.

When it was raining or snowing too hard to play on the blacktop, or when we had our winter cold snaps and the temperature went down to around zero, we played a game called Bombardment. The idea of Bombardment was simple: you tried to smash the heads of the boys across the centre line between the ball and the wall behind them! When you got the volleyball, you just aimed and hurled it as hard as you could. When someone was hit, he came over and became a thrower: a merciful fate.

I never saw anyoneโ€™s head splatter. I did receive an injury during one of these games, but not from the ball. My friend Steve pushed me hard, and my forearm just crashed into the wall. I ended up getting seven stitches, and retain a scar which to this day I occasionally display to the children I teach!

A casino for boys

At a certain time of year, our St. Louis Cardinals went to St.Petersburg, Florida for spring training. Harry Caray, “the voice of the Cardinals ” on KMOX Radio, which somehow could be heard all over the Midwest and in parts of the South, would start to broadcast the games; and there would seem to be a spring breeze flowing from the radio, accompanying his crazed-with-enthusiasm play-by-plays. At this time of year, the Topps baseball card company and the smaller but more aesthetically-minded Bowman company would bring out the new seasonโ€™s cards,

Then, regardless of the weather, we boys would congregate in the Boysโ€™ Playroom, and in a church-like silence, would engage in our obsessive pastimeโ€”flipping baseball cards for fun and profit!

There were three main games we played:

ยป Odd Man Wins:ย Three boys would say in unison, โ€œOdd… Man… WINS!โ€ and then each would flip a card. The cards would flutter down. When they landed, the boy with the odd cardโ€”the head amid the two tails or vice versaโ€”would gather up the cards! If all three cards landed either as heads, or tails, theyโ€™d become part of a jackpot that would accrue until there was a winner.

ยปย Matching:ย Somebody would come to you and say, โ€œMatch me three!โ€ Or even, โ€œMatch me ten!โ€ Then he would flip, in the latter example, ten cards, and you had to get the exact number of heads and tails that he had gotten. If you did, you got his cards; if not, he got yours.

There were boys who had โ€œa method,โ€ and could flip cards with incredible accuracy. I once saw someone flip 50 heads in a row! The method involved either careful straight-on flipping or, in some cases, standing sideways and holding each card with a thumb above it and three fingers below it, then letting it go ever so gingerly.

I had a โ€œmethod,โ€ but what with my various nervous tics, it was not as effective as some!

ยปย Sailing, Closest to the Wall:ย Just what the name says! You could, if you were good, get a card to โ€œkissโ€ the wall. Once in a great while, a card would flip itself vertically, and stand up against the wall! (No one could do that deliberately, of course; it was always just an accident.)

If two boysโ€™ cards were both โ€œkissingโ€ the wall, they each became part of a jackpot for next time. One of the good things about Sailing was that a lot of people could take part in the same game.

Dad would often buy me a whole box of Topps cardsโ€”which my eyes ever lusted for, as some grown-ups might desire the Crown Jewels of Englandโ€”when the baseball year began; and occasionally, as a surprise or reward, another as it went on. Opening these packs, each with the sugar falling off of its pink slab of bubble gum and onto the cards, was one of the most exciting things a boy could do. Glad my cardiac rhythms were strong in those days!

Iโ€™d take my shiny-clean, crisp-cornered treasures to school, making me a standout mark for cardsharks. Once or twice, I ended up the equivalent of a pauper coming home from Vegas wearing a barrel in lieu of clothes.

Trauma by the dumpster

To the left of the silver boilers in the top photo (which were not there when I went to Flynn Park)ย were some big green dumpstersโ€”in fact, they were the first dumpsters I ever remember seeing, though I donโ€™t think we used that word for them then.

Green dumpsters - Memories from Flynn Park

One day, I was out of class and walking with a friend across the blacktop, near the dumpsters. I donโ€™t remember why we were out of class, or where we were going, but I think it was all โ€œlegitimateโ€โ€”when a teacher I didnโ€™t know very well, Mr. O., who was one of only two male classroom teachers, appeared and began to snap at us like an army sergeant! I canโ€™t even remember what he thought weโ€™d done, but I think it had something to do with putting something into a dumpster.

All I clearly remember is how his sharp words suddenly made me feel like crying. They instantly seemed to produce a pool of tears in my tummy and chest, making me feel vulnerable and violated, I donโ€™t think I actually cried. But I had that feeling every child knows, of wanting to melt into the Earth, to disappearโ€ฆ to be anywhere but in your own skin and clothes, standing in front of that ogre, in that moment.

This was the first time I remember ever having that feelingโ€”which has revisited me over the years in quite a few forms, even during adulthood.

My brief career as an apostle

In sixth grade, there was a boy who became kind of a mythic figure to us, his pre-pubescent classmates. He was around a head taller than we were, maybe 50 pounds heavier, and he already had facial stubble.

His name was Ben. Heโ€™d always been a little โ€œlarger-than-life,โ€ from kindergarten on. Now, however, the gulf between him and the rest of us had widened into an abyss!

Besides being large, Benย was also extremely precociousโ€”intellectually, but especially in sophistication. He read adult magazines, and introduced me to Tom Lehrerโ€™s satirical songs and Shel Silversteinโ€™s book,ย Uncle Shelbyโ€™s ABZs, which became like a bible to me.

This was shortly after the year 1958, when author Boris Pasternak had received, and then had been forced to refuse, the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was still probably the most famous person in the world. His last name resembled Benโ€™s, and before long, someone had given Ben the nickname โ€œBoris.โ€

The name stuck. I donโ€™t know how long after that it was whenโ€”โ€œwhile futzing around during math class,โ€ as he later described itโ€”another of our compatriots-since-kindergarten, David Lazarus, happened to call him โ€œBoris de Poop.โ€ โ€œPoopโ€ then vaguely suggested what it means now, but it wasnโ€™t an oft-used word. I doubt that David was doing more than playing with words. The French in the middle may have been unconsciously inspired by Benโ€™s sophistication.

Whatever its origins in the labyrinths of Davidโ€™s mind, โ€œBoris de Poopโ€ immediately became a sensation. This boy had needed to be given a name that honoured his differences! He truly resembled someone of another race who had come to us to give us โ€œgrown-upโ€ ideas and tastes, and even a preview of what our own bodies were soon going to do!’

Boris on playground - Memories from Flynn Park
“Boris de Poop” on the playground

I caught the fire of enthusiasm and made myself Borisโ€™sโ€”apostle? Publicist? Was he โ€œrealโ€ as a religious phenomenon? If there is such a thing as a religion for 11-year-old boys, then Iโ€™ll answer with at least a qualified “yes.”

At home, I asked Dad to go with me down into our basement, where I knew we had stored some yellowed sheets that looked a little like parchment. Together, we burned the edges, and I wrote (and embellished) the โ€œscriptureโ€ of Boris de Poopโ€™s origins!

Alas, nothing of โ€œde-Poopism,โ€ as we named our short-lived religion, has survivedโ€”not the parchment, and not the De-Poop Weekly, the one-issue newspaper several of us mimeographed and handed out to everyone at school.

The Weekly was revolutionary! Junior high schools had newspapers written and edited by students, but back then, no one had heard of an elementary school that had one. We did have to bring our material before Mr. H., my classroom teacher, who functioned as censor. Mr. H. let everything go except for a phrase I’d cribbed from MAD magazine in the lead story, which was a purported โ€œbiographyโ€ of the Great One. One section, entitled “A Day in the Life of Boris de Poop,” listed a chronology of Borisโ€™s daily activities. Between 8 and 8:15 a.m., it had him โ€œkicking kids around the playground on their butts.โ€ Mr. H. made me excise the words โ€œon their butts.โ€ (I still wonder, did he feel it was OKย to kick kids around the playground, as long as it wasn’t on their butts?)

Then, just as we were gathering steam and my head was feverishly concocting future plans for de-Poopism and the De-Poop Weeklyโ€”Boris up and quit!

This may even have happened the day after I presented him with the faux-yellowed scripture. He would not discuss the matter further. He would not โ€œissue a statementโ€ for our next issue. He just made it clear that the whole thing was over. I believe, in retrospect, that Boris was really a rather introverted fellow, and felt our enthused mass activities were an invasion of his privacy.

There never was a second issue of the De-Poop Weekly. I went back to being a sixth grader and then a seventh grader, and, well, here I am todayโ€”possibly the shortest-lived apostle in the history of religious movements.

(Note to self: might the Guinness World Recordsย book recognize that as a category?)

Read more of Max Reif’s writing>>

image 1: Max Reif; image 2:ย Historical Society of U City (MO); image 3: Row of garbage dumpsters via Shutterstock; image 4: Max Reif
  1. WHAT WRITING CAN DO (one little very concrete example):
    A month or two ago, TMW pubished this article of mine about the games we played before the bell rang at Flynn Park Elementary School in Missouri, 6 decades ago. Here is a brief snippet relevant to this comment:
    “The blacktop was the location of a daily before-school soccer game that set two mobs of first- through sixth-grade boys loose kicking at the ball and incidentally at one another! …There was one fellow whom I remember as legendary in these games. His name was Buddy Lerman. Everyone called him ?Lerman the German.? He was a couple years older, and I didn?t know him at all, personally. He could dribble through the mob of both teams, somehow, and kick goal after goal! I don?t remember anyone else being able to do that.”

    Well, this morning, as I was “doing my Facebook”, making breakfast, etc, an email with no subject heading came in from someone whose name I didn’t recognize. I opened it and read:

    “A friend of mine forwarded me an article you wrote about Flynn Park school brought back wonderful memories would love to talk to you please give me a call 314-409-1215
    Looking forward to hearing from you
    Paul [Buddy] Lerman AKA Lerman the German”

    Now, I don’t usually do call-backs. I prefer to communicate via email. But when I “grokked” that it was Buddy Lerman, THE Buddy Lerman who to this day remains a mythic figure in my imagination for his exploits in our blacktop soccer games…”the great ‘Lerman the German’!”…you can believe I picked up my phone and dialed!
    We, who “hadn’t known one another from Adam” back then…Buddy was 2 grades ahead of me, and I didn’t know very many older kids…are now–retroactively, in a way–friends! I have a standing lunch invitation, next time I get back to St. Louis!

    I had shared the Flynn Park article as widely as I could, in a few online forums in my old home town…and Buddy told me he received calls from more than one friend, gently ribbing him about that old rhyming nickname.

    For the moment, I’m completely satisfied, my life’s been a success! ๐Ÿ™‚

    1. I never even knew him! I mean, we never talked! To me he was just a 2-years’-older kid who was a soccer miracle! And he left our school district. This was our first communication ever, except for my watching him admiringly from afar! ๐Ÿ™‚
      JAN 29, 2017: COMMENTS NOT ENABLED NOW, BUT JUST RECEIVED THIS NOTE:
      Max,
      Just came across your article TALES OF LONG AGO: Childhood memories from
      Flynn Park Elementary School” while browsing the internet. I can’t tell
      you how much I enjoyed reading this. I, too, and an alumnus of Flynn
      Park. I was in Buddy’s class and grew up with him through Hanley Jr.
      High and U. City High (class of 1964). I remember so well all the things
      you wrote about and they brought back warm memories of a great childhood
      in simpler times. BTW, Flynn Park keeps photos of all the classes that
      went there. For our U. City 30th reunion I and some of my classmates
      went to Flynn, borrowed photos, made copies and displayed them at the
      reunion. Great fun.
      Thanks again Max for writing this wonderful piece.
      Sincerely,
      Richard Levy

  2. We still played soccer exactly as you described 1973-76. I remember the screens on the windows, too. Thanks for writing this.

    1. Amazing! That was still a long, long time ago! Wonder what it’s like now. Anyway, great to hear from you, Neal! Thanks for writing! “Have you heard the Flynn Park Band? Oompah-oompah-oompah-pah!” (I don’t know if that school song survived till your time or not ๐Ÿ™‚ )

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