Last week while driving past Beverly Park Elementary School I noticed it was boarded up, a victim of its age (circa 1945).

Saddened, I also noticed the chain link backstop in the playground where I coached neighborhood baseball in the early ‘50s. We lived a few blocks from the school. My volunteer spirit and age of my own kids made me take on the challenge of competing with other community boys of summer.

I was a great coach. I learned that 12-year- old boys don’t listen all that well and when they strike out they stomp their feet and pout in the dugout.

I learned about “riding the pine,” an expression about those kids who play right field; they play right field for a reason. Most boys are right handed. Right fielders don’t see a lot of action at that level so the kid who can’t run very fast, catch very good or toss a ball more than 20 feet is usually the son of your insurance man who just might raise your rate if the kid does not play.
 
   I enjoyed those years as I suspect my own boys did (I never sold insurance) but begged off coaching football. I was a skinny kid in Portland, Oregon in 1931 and quite possibly the fastest kid on Simpson Street but my hero, Bobby Grayson was faster than me. Bobby was an all-star at Jefferson High a few years ahead of me. I was a good reader. The handwriting on the wall said, “Take up coaching.” 

Beverly Park has a nice wide play field behind the school. Perfect for flag football. Son Mike tossed the pigskin for Joe Pless and son Ken was quarterback for Allen Edmiston’s 1955 team of rascals.

Both boys never quite found their calling on the gridiron even in those formative years. Mike has my stork-like, pipe stem legs; never figuring out which leg was supposed to go first when running straight ahead.
Ken was often busy on the sidelines charming the cheerleaders when he should have had his head in the game. Fred Babb, his sixth grade teacher could not flunk him for the same reason.

The boys followed my lead coaching their own kids in different sports. Maybe athleticism skips a generation. Their kids were good players.

Number three son Tim never got close to playing ball since there simply wasn’t time. His first day of school at Beverly Park, he walked the three blocks to the portables at the north end of the playground. There he sat on the steps for an hour returning home to officially announce that he’d been to school and it was boring so he decided not to return (I took him back and could not leave until I handed out crayons while explaining to the teacher that the door handle was too high for him to reach so he just sat on the steps while class was in session).

The shuttered school sits with silent grace along 3rd Avenue South at 114th Street. The plywood window covers conceal the echoes of the thousands of students who attended there.

Voices that now speak of memories of Dodge Ball, Soak-Em, Capture The Flag Old Woody and Old Ozzie. They speak of running backs and end runs from lines in the dirt or passing to the open man. Of coaches yelling encouragement from the sidelines.

Voices now victims of their own age but not yet boarded up.