Playin' Pickey
Growing up in Holyoke, almost every summer night you could find kids playing Pickey all over the city. Nobody knows where the name Pickey came from. I’ve been trying to find out for years. Maybe it’s a Holyoke thing.
Pickey was played with a pee-gee ball (practice golf ball) and a taped-up broom handle. We played Sandlot style in streets, alleys and schoolyards. It was a game of “automatics.” A grounder past the pitcher was a base hit, a line drive past the pitcher was a double, a liner into the outfield was a triple and a long ball up a tree or onto the roof was a home run.
My friends and I played in the road under a streetlight. Our home run was a blast into firefighter Kenny Keighley’s big oak tree. An old lady in a Minnie Pearl hat used to putt-putt up the street in her antique clunker and cause a game delay almost every night. We nicknamed her Granny Dunlap.
After a couple weeks of these disruptions, we did a little cahootinizing one night and hatched a plan to put a stop to it. Sure as shootin’, the next night Granny comes down the street at a pace where she’d lose a race to a turtle. Time to put our plan into action. We all ran to the telephone pole, pretending to be struggling to hold it up like it was about to fall into the street.
Christ, as soon as Granny saw us, she turned around in a neighbor’s driveway and hightailed it out of there. We never saw her drive so fast and we never saw the old bat again.
Sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do to preserve the summer pastime. Keep your dukes up.