New York 9

Listen to New York 9, a 54-year-old man from New York City, New York, United States. Click or tap the triangle-shaped play button to hear the subject.

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BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

AGE: 54

DATE OF BIRTH (DD/MM/YYYY): 05/03/1946

PLACE OF BIRTH: New York City

GENDER: male

ETHNICITY: Jewish

OCCUPATION: retired

EDUCATION: N/A

AREA(S) OF RESIDENCE OUTSIDE REPRESENTATIVE REGION FOR LONGER THAN SIX MONTHS:

The subject also lived in Chicago, Illinois.

OTHER INFLUENCES ON SPEECH: N/A

The text used in our recordings of scripted speech can be found by clicking here.

RECORDED BY: Alexandra Goodman

DATE OF RECORDING (DD/MM/YYYY): 11/26/2000

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF SCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

ORTHOGRAPHIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH:

I was born a long time ago, and we, as kids, did not have what the kids have today. We had no video recorders. We had no — certainly no computers, certainly no Play Stations, Ataris, or anything like that. We didn’t even have remote-control cars or robots. So, most of our days were spent on the streets. And on the streets, we had to make up a variety of different games to play. Some games included just what we called — what you people in Chicago called as a pinkball; we people in New York called as a spaldeen [sp?], which was a simple game of punchball. Other games required that that same ball, but various — but of two various size of sticks. One game you would only need two or three people, a pitcher and a catcher against another team of the same size, and you would — you would would pitch fast to the batter, and he would try to obviously hit it, and the different distances meant whether it was a single, double or triple. Other forms of stickball, we has played actually on the street. Where you would have — the length of a single, double or triple would be measured by the various sewers that were on the street.  A third form of stickball was called “Off the Wall.” In that game, you would throw the yellow — the pinkball, as you call it here, or a spalldeen, off the wall and the batter had to hit it either on the fly, off the wall or on one bounce. That takes care of the basic stickball games. Then we go on to what we would call a nice little game of football. But there again we had to play on the street. So, a typical play would be tell someone to go down, and I get behind the yellow Chevy, and you throw the ball to him that way — the football that way.  It was not a game where we had any width, because the streets were narrow. And we’d use the cars as blocker. Now, if you had absolutely no equipment with you, you could play a game called “Johnny on a Pony.” This game gets a little rough. You would have one team, s- where one person would stand flat up against the wall. And the various other members of this team would crouch down in front of him. The opposite team would run, and jump on that team that is bent over, and try to break them apart. Now, you could jump any way that you like. You could land wit’ your knees, your elbows, and anything.  The team that is crouching had to hold the other entire team on for approximately ten seconds. So that was a game like that. Now, getting back to the spalldeen type of game, if you only had a spalldeen and no sitck, you could play various games. You could play stoopball, which you would — you would, uh, stand in front of, uh, a set of stairs in front of a building. And you would throw the ball against the stoop. And again, depending on how far that ball went, again would depend on whether you got a single, double, or triple as well. The la — another game would be curbball. There you would lay in an intersection, where each corner of the intersection; one would be first base, second base, and third base. And you would do — and you would play that game as such.

TRANSCRIBED BY: Jacqueline Baker

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): 05/10/2007

PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION OF UNSCRIPTED SPEECH: N/A

TRANSCRIBED BY: N/A

DATE OF TRANSCRIPTION (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

SCHOLARLY COMMENTARY:

See this PDF. 

COMMENTARY BY: Eric Armstrong

DATE OF COMMENTARY (DD/MM/YYYY): N/A

The archive provides:

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