Let’s crank the Wayback machine back another notch. I lived just over a block from Rogers from age one until partway through age seven. One of my early memories was the sound of the band practicing. Believe me, we could hear it.
I can see the press box in my mind’s eye from our yard on Hoffman Ave. Remember that we had gray wooden bleachers and a gray wooden fence that backed on the unpaved Perry St? We kids used to sneak onto campus through a loose board in the fence.
Sometimes we watched big guys fly control-line model airplanes on the football field. Other times we would jump the hurdles and high hurdles – pretty rough when you’re six. Once, we took our bikes onto the track to race them while Dick, my next-door neighbor called the race Santa Anita-style.
It was fun was getting inside the bleachers to climb inside to poke our heads through the hole behind the topmost seats. The bleacher on the Rogers side of the field had a tractor parked inside that must have been used to mow the grass or groom the track. Once a scary guy found us and kicked us out. I figured out that it was coach Brown 10 years later when I was inside Rogers legally.
I remember that those bleachers met the Baseball field bleachers to form a shallow V. We used to like to walk along the top of the football bleachers and onto the baseball bleaches. If we fell, we would have serious problems. I remember watching a few baseball games on that field played by company teams.
Recently I located two of the older kids from my block on Hoffman by using the Internet. I’ve corresponded with the former Judy Wakley and Nancy Blodgett (her parents owned Blodgett’s Grocery on Wellesley and Nevada). They informed me that Judy’s brother Gary (Buster) Wakley and their cousin, the former Linda Wakley are still around. Gary is a retired Spokane police officer, following the footsteps of his father and uncle next door. Gary was my first male playmate. Our block had a lot of girls, including the late Sharon Anderson of our class. Nancy and Judy refreshed my memory of some of the names of other kids on that block. Many of those kids preceded us at Rogers by two or three years.
We have lived so long that sometimes I think I dreamed living on Hoffman in the 40’s. I was thrilled to locate those folks. It refreshes some of my really early memories of Rogers and its neighborhood. Still, I think there is nothing like the 21st century. Life is good here.