Ed Flynn and the Battle for the Schoolyard, '64

I promised to tell my Ed Flynn story here one of these days. With the Reunion coming up, I guess I’ve procrastinated about all I can.

It’s a long reach back to the summer of ’64 - too long for most of you, but you can Google all the clues you need to set the scene:

It was the year of the British Invasion, when the Beatles claimed the top five spots in the top ten at the same time. The Stones made their first American tour that June.

It was the last year of the old “Twilight Zone”, the first year of “Man From U.N.C.L.E.". Spies and secret agents were big. Sean Connery was hitting his stride as 007 in "Goldfinger". I was eyes glued to Diana Rigg and “The Avengers”. The Brits were everywhere.

No hippies, no ‘Nam to speak of yet; but Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that August. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act and Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam while Goldwater was busy nailing down the Republican nomination.

Shea Stadium, now closed, opened in '64, with the miracle Mets and the newly renamed Jets from the old AFC. It was Mickey Mantle’s last world series.

Simon & Garfunkle released their first album later that year.

Yeah, it was that long ago. If you don’t remember it, you can place it: it was the 60’s before “The Sixties.” You could feel it was a year of transition – to what, it wasn’t clear; but that summer had a punky, in-your-face smell to it. I was 15. Ditto for me.

So here’s what I remember about the Battle for the Schoolyard that summer of ‘64…

Truth is, I think I started it. I do apologize, and only pray that I’m beyond the statute of limitations…

My parents (rest their souls) had gone to North Carolina over Memorial Day weekend and brought me back a big souvenir box of fireworks. Inside were a dozen packs of firecrackers, a couple dozen skyrockets and roman candles, and a 12-count box of ashcans – the originals: M80’s (military ordnance) with the silver tube, declared illegal (along with cherry bombs) by federal statute only later, in ‘66. Which isn’t to say they were exactly legal in NYC even then.

I couldn’t believe my luck. My eyes were like pie plates. I kept mumbling thank you's. My old man told me to be discrete, which made us all laugh. Say what you like about my folks, they knew the way to a young lad’s heart. Hey – times were different then, nobody got hurt, and I lived to tell the tale…

Anyway, I put most of the rockets and candles aside for the 4th of July (a whole ‘nother story), and sold a good portion of my cache, which I figured was more discrete than setting them all off myself.

Only first, of course, we had to experiment. The firecrackers were soon a bore. But I was fascinated by the ashcans, which were scary: "one and one-half inches long and 5/8 of an inch in diameter, with a green waterproof fuse sticking out the side. They contained two grams of flash powder and were 40 times more powerful than what’s legally sold as an M80 today". They were small sticks of dynamite, really. And they could float…

We should have gone down to Park Drive East and sent one out on the lake. But we didn’t want to hurt any fish. Yeah, yeah. Truth is, all my buddies and I could talk about was setting one off in a toilet. This was what ashcans were famous for. And one evening, after Ed Flynn the parkie had gone home, I did just that, in the girls room in the parkhouse. It was incredible.

The explosion in that small, tiled room was air, ear, and nerve shattering, even standing safely outside (we weren’t total idiots). When we looked in, the porcelain was, needless to say, shattered and water was gushing from the pipe sticking out of the wall. We ran away, too terrified to laugh or even talk about it later. We just looked at each other, shook our heads, and filed that one away forever. Almost...

I made sure I wasn’t around when Ed Flynn came in the next day. It was his park, and he was no one to mess with. I heard he was swearing up a storm that morning. That evening when I came by for bball, I couldn't get in, On his way home, Ed Flynn had quietly locked up all the gates to the schoolyard, for the first time ever so far as we knew. And he locked them again the next evening. Things had changed. He was mightily (and rightly) pissed off.

But this was summer and the schoolyard was the place to be in the evenings, for basketball and stickball and just hanging around. Lots of us were pissed off, too. Finally, someone came by with wire cutters one night and snipped a couple of the wire ties holding the chain link fencing to the post out in center field. A corner of the fence was pulled back, and we had access once again.

Ed Flynn wasn’t about to give up so easily. He re-fastened the fence with extra reinforcement. But neither were the opposing forces so easily defeated. Two nights later, the wire-cutter returned with a vengeance, and in the morning the entire outfield fence, from the corner of the Salgo’s yard in deep left-center field to the third base line, was hanging loosely rolled over the sidewalk. We kids basked triumphant.

Ed knew when he was licked. He reattached the fencing and from then on he left the front gate open and, eventually, the back gate as well. Things went back to normal, almost...

Coming to the schoolyard one morning soon after this, we witnessed an odd sight. A large dead fish had appeared on the very far edge of the backstop over the softball diamond. It had to weigh 15 pounds. No one thought much about it until it began to rot. And by then, it smelled so bad that no one had the intestinal fortitude to crawl out there and knock the fish off so we could dispose of it. For the next week or two, stickball and other activities on the school end of the playground came nearly to a halt as the stench ran its course.

As stickball was my life back then and I hadn’t yet heard of karma, I was more than a little pissed off myself with Ed Flynn, who seemed in no rush at all to remove the fish. With school out, there was apparently no pressure on him to deal with it. Then too, his parkhouse was on the other side of the schoolyard, and being a fisherman himself, he was naturally more used to the smell…

Guess I deserved it. But those of you old-timers who remember these events most certainly did not. So let this be my long overdue confession and apology to Ed Flynn and to all those who suffered the collateral damage of our anonymous summerlong skirmish: I was the clearly the punk in this affair and Ed Flynn, if he didn’t win the battle, most definitely and deservedly had the last word. I stand here chastened and corrected, having never lit another firecracker from that summer on, I swear. So here’s to you, Ed Flynn, wherever you may be – may the fish always be biting!