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During good weather, we played outdoor games extensively besides playing hockey in the winter. As I've related, we played baseball and football at the Tracys, sometimes almost every afternoon after school. The gang would assemble, sides would be chosen, and we'd go at it. I suppose five or six on a side would be about average but we had a lot of fun. I was always small and looked rather frail which makes it all the more surprising that in football, I played in the backfield and had a reputation forwhat we'd call today, "extra effort." They had a nickname for me in this regard —- I think it was Bulldog Craton! In baseball I usually played in the field. Otz Tracy was even more delicate than I was but he'd always play quarterback and pitch -- he was good at both and was that kind of guy. He finally went to Culver and, I think, West Point, and I'm quite sure he ended his career as president of Gulf Oil or one of the big oil companies. Before we got big enough to play ball, we used to play such things as hopscotch, which required a sidewalk (cement), a piece of chalk and a small flat stone; we'd play this by the hour, fascinated. We did a lot of tricycling and then bicycling, in the latter going on into trick riding like riding backward sitting on the handlebars, no hands, and so on. I’ve already covered the ”auto” racing promoted by Pusser Lyman. Tree climbing was a great sport and I can't recall that there was too much opposition to this by parents -— maybe they just didn't know how much of it went on. My parents apparently were concerned about my puny build and had a soft floor of padding under canvas installed in one of the attic rooms where a Mr. White used to come and teach me boxing and wrestling; however, this didn't last very long -— it may have been interrupted by my father's death, which cut off any superfluous expense of this kind. At any rate, it was insufficient to convert me into a boxer or wrestler of any skill.

The Sedgwick Farm Club, some 2-1/2 blocks north of us on Dewitt Street, was a big, rambling building sitting right on the west edge of several hundred acres of open fields which were to become built up over the next decade or so. It seemed that most of the families in our neighborhood who had children belonged to the Club and got a lot out of its facilities. The clubhouse had some large rooms suitable for dances, plus two bowling alleys, a squash court, two locker rooms, and a small kitchen in the basement. Outside were six tennis courts, which were flooded in the winter for skating, and a children's playground complete with swings, trapezes, horizontal bars, and a sandbox. We used the club primarily for skating and tennis. They had an honor system for dispensing soft drinks which were kept in a refrigerator in the kitchen; you simply got your own drinks and then either left the money or signed a chit and left that. For some reason, I'd never secured my parents permission to sign these chits and it was an embarrassment to me. In some respects, I seem to have been extremely timid about asking my parents for favors -- maybe it was a hangover from the St. John's School incident. However, I had