Whatever happened to spaldeens?\n
You know what spaldeens are, they’re those pink rubber balls, fist-sized, fairly bouncy. My Dad played with them on the streets of the Bronx in the forties. I happened to be thinking about them because we took him back to P.S. 6<\/a>, where the strip of hip-high molding (not really molding, but an architectural detail much like it) that they used to bounce balls off is still there. Down the block, there was a game of catch going on, probably a mother and daughter, but the point is that they were using a tennis ball.\n When I was a kid, we had a variety of games with a variety of balls: big inflatable red balls with lots of bounce for dodgeball and kickball and ga-ga, softballs and hardballs and whiffle balls for baseball-like games, little superballs for, well, just for bouncing around, really, and tennis balls for tennis-like games, and also for playing catch. Racquetballs were a lot like spaldeens, I suppose, although a bit harder. But we never used them.\n Were tennis balls much more expensive than spaldeens? Spaldeens wouldn’t be (I’m guessing) quite as good on grass games, being ideally designed to bounce off walls, and the big suburban shift presumably led to a shift in demand there. But there were certainly plenty of urban kids, and even in my suburban neighborhood there were plenty of places to play on blacktop against a wall, and we certainly did. Or wall ball, or stair ball, or off-the-roof—well, I can see why a tennis ball would be better for off-the-roof, and a whiffle ball better yet. Still.\n