the Night That I Called President Nixon

Yes, as a seventh grade student I made a phone call to Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon while they were in Peking (now Beijing) on their historic China trip. A little background is in order, especially as I have posted a picture of the Kenilworth Police Station at the top of this post. That is where I spent part of the evening. During Junior High a few of us figured out how to make free long distance phone calls by switching some wires in a box on the outside of what was then the Chicago & Northwestern (now Metra) train station in Kenilworth, IL. We could then use the outside phone booth for free and the bills went to Chicago & Northwestern. This was a fairly big deal during the early '70s as phone rates were both regulated and very high. We really didn't have anybody to call outside of our area code except during the summer. During the summer we could call friends at camp and friends visiting out of town relatives.

Well during a boring February evening (the town ice rink must've melted) a few of us got the brainstorm to call Nixon and Kissinger while they were in China. Yeh, I know, hopelessly political. So we headed over to the train station, switched some wires and soon I was on the line with a long distance operator asking for a person-to-person line to Peking. Well the operator asked a very reasonable question, "Pekin, Illinois?" No I answered, Peking, China. We knew the hotel that the American delegation was staying at so I asked for that hotel and requested a person-to-person connection to either Henry Kissenger or President Richard Nixon.

Needless to say this prank got some attention at AT&T and the local Bell, they called the railroad to report the phone calls, the railroad promptly called the Kenilworth Police who quickly crossed the street to find two scrawny seventh graders making phone calls from the outside phone booth. Well we spent about an hour explaining to the police how we had rigged the phone booth for our use and how we had figured it out in the first place.

I was reminded of that bit of childhood hijinks by this hysterical story about an Icelandic high school student who called President Bush on a private White House line. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Jens Jensen and Shaun's Homerun

What the heck does the great landscape designer Jens Jensen have to do with baseball? Good question. I was reminded of Mr. Jensen's link to America's Pastime while reading this great blog piece about Jensen's Garfield Park Conservatory by Beth Botts of the Chicago Tribune. For starters, the author notes that the Conservatory opened the same year the Chicago Cubs last won the World Series; by winning back to back World Series' in 1907 and 1908 the Cubs performed the "two-peat". The Tribune blog piece is fantastic largely due to the knowledge the author brings to the piece, she not only volunteers as a University of Illinois Master Gardener at the Conservatory, but she has taken the El past Garfield Park and the Conservatory for years. As a fellow long time El rider (different lines), I can appreciate her ability to take in the long-term changes that are taking place out there.

I can add my own baseball related Jens Jensen recollections, as a kid I played pick-up baseball games in a Jensen park. Mahoney Park is a Jensen garden (there is only a mention of the park near the end of this great link) that straddles Sheridan Road at Tenth Street, at the extreme south-east corner of Kenilworth, Il. Sheridan Road runs along the shore of Lake Michigan from the north side of Chicago to at least Fort Sheridan, the former Army fort it was built to serve. The Jensen park was built on some of the final Mahoney family land that was left undeveloped by Joseph Sears, the man who developed Kenilworth. Much, if not all of what is now east Kenilworth was a farm owned by the Mahoney family, thus the name Mahoney Park. The town school was named after Joseph Sears. Ironically, considering the neighborhood, there was a time when a portion of east Kenilworth, north of Mahoney Park was a golf course.

Mahoney Park consists of two fields, to the east of Sheridan Road is a park open to the street in the center with trees and bushes on the outskirts, the east side of the park sits on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. The eastern park is rung by a walking path and contains two fire pits with chimneys at the lake-side corners. On the west side of Sheridan Road the park is similar, it is open to Sheridan Road, it is rung by a walking path and contains two fire pits, although the fire pits are much larger and sit at the north corners, the pits contain no chimneys. The south end of the west side of the park contains a wooded area featuring a small water fall and a stream. By the late sixties Mahoney Park had become somewhat overgrown, and although it was kept up by the village and some volunteers, the park was being used. It was being used by families, it was being used by the Girl Scouts and it was being used as a baseball diamond by the neighborhood boys.

To the chagrin of garden lovers but no doubt to the joy of many mothers in my childhood neighborhood, there were enough boys around my age in the area to play full baseball games in Mahoney Park. Sure, we all played Little League but that wasn't enough, if we couldn't get eighteen kids together to play we had ground-rules for just about every contingency. We could play a half field game or even have one outfield as out of bounds, depending on how many played in a particular game. And there was usually somebody with a broken or sprained something or other who would umpire. The park's grass had long since given way to baseball by the time I arrived, showing the dirt patina of home plate, a flat pitcher's mound and the three bases. We played fast pitch hard ball, one much younger kid who was good enough to play with us later played in the Cubs minor league system, another later played in the NFL, becoming a member of the NFL Hall of Fame. It was good competitive fun among kids of a variety of ages with no adult supervision.

We played in that park through the summer after my seventh grade, during part of each summer we were forced to play ball elsewhere or do something else because the Girl Scouts ran a day camp in the park during the mornings. During the rest of the warm months we considered that park our baseball diamond. When we started to play baseball again during the spring of eighth grade we were joined by a new neighbor, Shaun. Shaun had lived in town but had moved out of town before moving back from suburban Detroit, and despite our recent growth spurts, Shaun was much bigger than all of us. One of our ground rules involved home runs and the ever changing list of limbs on certain trees that signified home run territory, frankly we probably had more of the inside the park variety.

On that first warm spring day we were playing a tight game when our friend Shaun came up to the plate and hit a shot that not only sailed over all of our carefully crafted sets of limb-based home run markers, it was not only over all of the trees in the park, but that ball sailed over Tenth Street into Wilmette and into the construction site for a bank before sailing straight through a plate glass window that was being installed in what is now a Harris Bank branch. We all heard the smash, and we all knew there was a construction site across the street, so we all ran through the wooded area at the south end of the park to peer through the bushes and a cyclone fence to see what was hit. The construction guys spotted us right off and told us not to run, we all figured that we were in big trouble, but the construction guys laughed about it and told us the glass was insured, then they gave us back our baseball. As I look back at that incident as an adult I can see a certain Norman Rockwellish view from those construction guys' perspective, what with nearly twenty kids peering out at them through those bushes and that fence.

Walking home that day my friend Dave and I both agreed that we had outgrown the park, we both continued to play a lot of baseball and softball after that day but neither of us ever played in Mahoney Park again, we moved on to bigger arenas, in baseball and otherwise. Some years ago I happened to walk past Mahoney Park and noticed that all traces of our baseball days at Mahoney had been overgrown, given up to smaller families and organized sports. Thankfully, the Jensen Park has not been overgrown, the village has worked with the local garden clubs and other volunteers to restore the park. Not only are there likely not enough kids in that neighborhood to support such a localized ball game, but people are reasonably reluctant to let their kids play baseball on a major road like Sheridan, on the other hand we did have a whole bunch of baseball bats, which came in handy on a few occasions.


I do feel like I may be stepping on toes of Publia from the fantastic Wilmette blog with this North Shore themed post, but reading the linked Tribune piece on the Garfield Park Conservatory reminded me of all the time I spent in a Jensen park. Besides Publia has a great piece on Veterans Day today.

Geography Baseball at Sears School

While casting around for subjects to write about some time back I thought that I would write about a game that we played in Jr. High, Geography Baseball. I did the obligatory Google Search and was surprised to find that Geographybaseball.com exists and further that the proprietor of the site claims to have “invented” the game and has trademarked the name. I was a little shocked by that because the man who “invented” the game of Geography Baseball has been dead for some time now. The bio of the alleged “inventor” of the game,” Robert A. Pierce says that he started his teaching career in 1969. The Social Studies teacher I had during both seventh and eighth grade was the late Robert Karp and we played Geography Baseball during the ’71-‘72 and ’72-‘73 school years. Mr. Karp had been playing the game with his students at Joseph Sears School for over a decade by the time I came along. While searching for anything concerning Mr. Karp on the web I found that my Sears School classmate Rep. Mark Kirk (R-IL) (here’s Mark’s blog) had submitted Mr. Karp’s name as his most memorable teacher for the National Educational Association’s National Teacher Day last May. Mark’s quote is great:

"Mr. Karp invented 'Geography Baseball' and turned it into a right of passage in our town. We memorized the locations of Georgia (then in the Soviet Union), Goa (in India) and the Gobi desert (in China). It sparked an interest to see each of these places and to understand America's role in the world. I have seen each one and am now working to expand language and exchange opportunities for all American students. Mr. Karp has passed away, but I carried his legacy as a nursery school assistant, middle school teacher, and now as a congressman."

I’m glad that Mark got Mr. Karp’s name out onto the internet as the inventor of the game although it is probably something that Mr. Karp would not have taken credit for. Anyways, here is how we played the game Geography Baseball At Joseph Sears School starting sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s.

The game was played on Fridays in Mr. Karp’s classroom, the classroom contained large pull-down maps on three walls; all of the maps were pulled down on game day, after school and during lunch time for studying. Each class was divided into two evenly matched teams and each class was given two lists of geographical points (city, town, mountain, river…) and as the season progressed different classes got differing lists each week. The first list was for “Singles”, an obvious play on the “baseball” theme of the game and consisted of 50 relatively easy places to find on one of the maps. The second list contained 50 spots representing “Doubles”, another transparent riff on Major League Baseball and those were more difficult places. Both lists got more difficult during the two years that we played the game, some “Doubles” migrated to the “Singles” lists but both required study each week.

When the game started each team divided into sides of the classroom and sat according to the “order” that the week’s “manager” had written on their “scorecard” and turned in to the “Umpire”, “Commissioner” and all around Grand Poobah, Mr. Karp. It is worth noting that the randomness of baseball was introduced into the game by Mr. Karp through his “on the field rulings” that were often arbitrary; for instance one could be called out for touching the map too hard or by not touching the map and both were potentially arbitrary. Just like in the game of baseball the rulings sometimes stole a line smash.
To begin the game the “visitor” team would send their first “batter” to “the plate” by having that student walk up in front of the class and behind Mr. Karp’s desk. When the student was in the “batters box” Mr. Karp would ask a question from the singles list and the student had a limited amount of time to walk over to a map and point at the place in question. Another bit of randomness was that the better students had much less time on the easy ones. At that point the “batter” has a choice of taking “first base” or going back up to “the plate” to try their hand at the “doubles” list. The same rules applied to the doubles questions except that “rulings on the field” were likely to be even more stringent. I think that the player is out if the “doubles” attempt is a failure. If the “batter” is successful at “the plate” again the student has another choice of taking second or attempting a “triple”. A “triple” could be attained by standing in front of the classroom and accurately reciting a report on a current event without verbally stumbling. The “Homerun” consisted of bizarrely out of the way spots that were both obscure and difficult to find on a map, these “homeruns” came from a “secret list”, parts of which were occasionally “left” on Mr. Karp’s desk so that we could see what we were up against. Naturally the normal rules of baseball applied as far as advancing runners, scoring runs, outs per side and the number of “innings”.

Mark was correct to describe Geography Baseball was a right of passage in our town and frankly a pretty good one. The game made the rather dull task of memorizing geographic locales and turned it into a game that also included socializing as part of the studying process (all of us had an atlas but none of us had pull-down maps at home) and even included some public speaking. The game was eventually discontinued at Joseph Sears due to the complaints of some vocal parents that their children were spending too much time preparing for geography. Years later many of us learned that Mr. Karp had been a fighter pilot in the Pacific during World War II, that tidbit explained why we all had to know the name of damn near every island and atoll in that ocean. Flying Debris referred to Mr. Robert Karp here.

As to the gentleman who has trademarked the game I must ask you to take care of the game that so many of us played years ago, it is a great game and motivator.

Thanks to Dr. Sanity and her Carnival of Insanities for linking to this post about a great learning game.