15' X 30'

15’ x 30’

It’s only a 15’x 30’ plot of dirt, not big enough to build a house on, but oh so many other uses.
As a small child living in the city of Chicago this little piece of dirt was our playground. In front of every house all the way down the block were the small rectangles of earth. They were formed by the curb at the street 15’ to the concrete sidewalk in front of our house, and from right to left about 30’, which were divided by two sidewalks that ran down to the street from every house.
Occasionally someone would cultivate weeds to make it look green, because nobody had enough money to plant grass, and even if you did the kids were always running through it. Most of the buildings down the street were muti-family units four to six units each, and the owners did not lived there, which was another reason there was no grass.
We would dig a hole in the middle of the clay soil and play marbles all day long, or mumbley peg by trying to stick our pocketknives into the tightly packed dirt. This also served as our prison when we played games. If you were captured you had to stay in the prison until one of your teammates could run through the dirt patch yelling everybody free before the guards could tag them.
I remember as I entered my teenage years John Willis who lived on the first floor below our apartment decided to fix up our yard, as he called it. He worked for the Hotpoint Company, and they made washing machines, so he brought home the counter weights from washing machines that were out of specification, and going to be thrown in the trash. These were round rings the size of large bicycle wheels without the spokes. They measured 3 “ by 3 “ with a diameter of about 24 “, and they were covered on three sides with metal, and filled with concrete.
John dug down about 12 “ into the hard dirt all the way around the perimeter of the rectangle in front of our house, and placed the rings in so they stood up half way out of the ground one right next to the other to form a fence all the way around the little plot of dirt he called his own.
This was the first fence on the block, and even though it was kind of ugly (it looked like small thick hula hoops) it was unique, and it served its purpose since it was almost indestructible. After a couple of years of planting grass seed, and yelling at the kids to stay out of there he finally was rewarded with the first grass in the neighborhood. This encouraged other people to start putting up small fences, and plant grass, eventually destroying our playgrounds. To an outsider the dirt was just an eyesore, but as kids we came to love that little patch of dirt, and all that it meant to us growing up.
Kids today have I-pods, laptop computers, and cell phones, but we had “dirt” and the enjoyment of getting dirty with our friends playing games that today have been forgotten.
To be honest I would not trade my “dirt” and all my friends for any I-pod, computer, and a cell phone combined.

Robert L. Murdoch 07/13/09