(Sixth in a series)

What’s a yard for, if not a playground for kids?  And what’s a neighborhood for, if not that?

Those, I’ve come to believe, were my father’s views, and they were shared by many residents of northeast Marion in the 1940s and early 1950s.

But not by all of them. A few resented seeing children in their yards. And among the least welcoming was a person who gave them an even greater gift.

Her story comes later. First, you must visit the neighborhood.

In 1941, with the nation struggling out of the Great Depression and America on the brink of entering World War II, my parents purchased a quarter-acre lot on 18th Street and built a two-bedroom bungalow with an unfinished attic and a detached one-car garage. Total cost was about $4,500. I turned 5 that year, and my brother was 2.

We lived there nine years, and as we boys grew, this small property turned into a four-season sports complex where we experimented with and honed our skills at basketball, football, baseball, boxing, wrestling, golf, table tennis, skiing and sledding. We hoped to ice skate there, too, but that didn’t work out.

WHEN I WAS in fifth grade, my father responded to my requests for a basketball court. A carpenter fashioned a roughly triangular wooden backboard that just fit the peak of the garage front. An orange hoop was nailed on it at the meticulously measured height of 10 feet. (I remember insisting on accuracy, a pint-sized perfectionist.)

My father hung a powerful work light near the basket. It was attached to a long extension cord that snaked through a window and was plugged into an outlet in the bedroom my brother and I shared. It was one of the few places in town where we could play after dark.

We played basketball on that narrow driveway in all seasons, even in winter, although we often had to chase balls that bounced to the left and rolled down a small slope covered in snow.

The balls came back soaked, so some of us older boys, taking a page from Tom Sawyer, tried to persuade my brother that it would be a privilege for him to chase the balls down the slope, bring them back, dry them off and then present them to the players — as soon as the spare ball they were using rolled down the hill, which he could then retrieve.

My brother, who grew up to be a scientist, willingly experimented with the concept, but soon abandoned it in disgust.

ONE YEAR, we asked our parents for skis. We thought we could schuss down the slope somewhat in the manner of the basketballs, hang a right and glide through the back yard of our neighbor, with no limits after that.

We received the skis for Christmas, rudimentary black boards with a single leather strap over the toe for a binding. We could not get down that slope without exploding out of our bindings at the sudden flattening of the land, but it was not for the lack of trying.

Eighteenth Street was at the edge of town in those days, and saw little traffic. The street was not regularly (or promptly) plowed or cindered, and it was (and still probably could be) one of the best sledding places in all Marion.

Crystalline nights. Air so cold it stung our nostrils. Moon, stars and weak street lights reflected off the new snow, packed just right by a few motorists.

We are out there, a bunch of us, after supper, not a car in sight. My brother and I are dressed in Mackinaw coats, pilot caps with ear flaps down and tied under our chins, woolen gloves speckled with ice, black galoshes buckled tight over snow pants. Ready to fly.

With a hard running belly flop on our Flexible Flyers, we skimmed past our own house, past Ebsen’s, past 11th Avenue, past three other houses, past even the Kruger’s and on down almost to the Brewer’s on English Boulevard, sometimes even dragging our feet to come to a stop.

A great run. It was a long climb back, but worth it. Clouds of steam poured out of our mouths as we slung our sleds under our arms, bent our heads against the incline and trudged up through the snow to the starting point.

The sledding was so good that our father sometimes came out and took a few runs. Sometimes, my brother and I performed our own version of the two-man luge: He lay on top of me and we rode a short distance to get up speed, then deliberately swerved to create a spill, tumbling off the sled and over each other, flopping as far as our momentum could take us.

One winter, inspired by the town’s success in flooding a softball field to create an ice-skating rink, we decided to do the same in our back yard. Our father participated fully.

On cold evenings we got out the hose and sprayed water over a significant area. This was repeated on successive nights, but the result was little more than frost-covered grass. No ice skating here.

OUR PARENTS did not fuss about damage to the lawn. One summer we were allowed to create a golf course. We dug nine holes, sinking used vegetable cans in each one. Two holes were in the front yard, one in the side yard, five in the back, with the final hole on the same driveway-side slope that had proved so difficult as a ski run.

This was a hopelessly optimistic decision. Using our father’s clubs, we tapped balls around the house, sinking them with great success. Then we came to the ninth hole. The approach shot needed to clear the driveway. If it didn’t, the ball could easily skitter down the concrete, bounce onto the street and take off for the bottom of the hill.

This hazard conquered, we now faced an even greater obstacle in the sharp tilt of the land surrounding the last hole. We were rarely able to sink a putt on the side of a ski slope. We reduced the course to eight holes.

OUR YARD was not off limits to neighboring children, nor were theirs to us. Asking no one’s permission, we often played football on the vacant lot next to the Brewers' house.

These games had complex rules because of the varying sizes of the players. I was two years older than George Brewer, who was big for his age. So George and I acted as coaches and captains who could be downed by touch, while my brother and his classmates Bobby Kruger, Paul Elias and some others played tackle. The smallest regular player, and the bravest, was Donny Schuettpeltz, a year younger than my brother.

Donny threw himself into his tackles of the older, bigger players. He brought them down, but at a great price. After tackling them, he lay on the ground, curled up and twitching in pain like a wounded caterpillar, choking back tears. Then, after a few moments, he got up, the game went on and he tackled one of the players again, with the same results.

It was a great pleasure for me to learn, decades later, while doing research for a book I was writing, that Don Schuettpeltz grew up to play end for the Marion Indians.

I also made another discovery during that research. I had always assumed that the vacant lot we played on was owned by the Brewers since it was next to their house. It was not. The family on the other side, the Baileys, owned it. Not once during all our games were we told to be quiet or to get off the lot.

WE FELT AT LIBERTY to cross neighbors’ yards if they presented a decent shortcut to our destination. We seldom lingered on property owned by people we didn’t know, but a homemaker in the neighborhood would not be surprised to look out her window and see a small boy striding past her peonies with a softball bat on his shoulder, headed for the Emerson school playground.

No such tolerance was shown by Old Lady English. Slight and white-haired, she lived in a large house on an oversized corner lot at 10th Avenue and 18th Street. For us, it was the height of good sense to angle across her yard on our way home rather than walk past her open yard to the corner, cross the street, turn left and walk the remaining 125 feet or so to our front door.

Why do that, when we could cut left, sprint across her yard, leap an embankment to the street, cross it at full speed and be home in seconds?

Because Old Lady English didn’t want us too, that’s why. She strung a metal wire about three feet high from her front porch to a tree at the edge of her yard, cutting off the passageway. She hung some white rags on the wire to warn us of its existence, but we still saw the maneuver as an attempt to decapitate us.

In our bravest moments, we cut across the yard anyway, ducking under the wire at full speed, hoping she wouldn’t see us.

Once we dared climb the apple trees at the end of her property. She came out of her house wielding a broom and swatted at us wordlessly, as if we were a pestilence of snakes or raccoons that had infested her trees. Ducking her blows, we dropped to the ground, materialized as little boys and ran to the safety of our own yard.

OLD LADY ENGLISH, we believed, had no sympathy for kids. Little did we know. For, as I discovered during my research, in 1921, as president of the Federation of Women’s Clubs, Mrs. Mary English headed a committee to raise money to purchase a tract of land west of Marion that bordered the boulevard to Cedar Rapids. The land, through which ran Indian Creek, was to be annexed by the town to become a public park.

As the fundraising campaign progressed, Mary English was its most visible proponent, according to “The History of Marion, Iowa, 1838–1927.” The history, based on the journals of historian Marvin Oxley, was edited by students at Marion High School.

“When many of our townsmen were raising their automobiles up on ‘stilts’ for winter storage, Mrs. English’s car and its energetic driver were ‘carrying the message’ (about the importance of creating a park),” says the history.

There were 20 pledges of $100 (one of which came from Mrs. English) and many more of $50 and $25, enough to purchase 13 acres for $6,500. In recognition of her “potent efforts,” Mary English was asked to name the parcel. She dubbed it Thomas Park in honor of her father, Richard Thomas, an early settler who had once owned the land.

A few months later, there was a move to create an appropriate entranceway to the park. But Mary English said no, that a more immediate need was for playground equipment. She helped raise $750 to provide swings, slides and whirl-i-gigs for children. (Thus giving them no excuse, a skeptic might say, for climbing in her apple trees.)

But Mrs. English had bestowed an even greater gift on the town. She had started something really big. Two years later, a baseball field was created just south of the park. In 1930, the park was graced with a magnificent swimming pool. In 1935, just across Indian Creek, Marion High School’s football field and track were built. Nearby was the town softball diamond, which in winters became a skating rink.

This was a true year-round sports and recreational complex, enjoyed in all its great variety by thousands of citizens over many years, including my brother and me and all our friends and classmates. It was all started by Old Lady English, who hated to see little boys on her property.

THE STORY might end here, but there is more to be told about Mary Thomas English and her remarkable father, Richard Thomas. According to a report in the Marion Sentinel, Richard Thomas was a baby when George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the United States. Her life and that of her father spanned 171 years of American history.

The Sentinel wrote that Richard Thomas came to Marion as an early settler, a prosperous widower, well advanced in years. In his 70s, he took a fancy to a much younger woman, Julia Jones. Julia was in love with a young man, but the two young people decided she should marry old Richard for his wealth and when he died, they could live together in comfort.

But on July 30, 1861, as the nation edged toward the Civil War, when Richard was 77 years old, Mary was born. And George lived on. And on. He and Julia celebrated their silver wedding anniversary and the old man still lived on, finally dying at the age of 112 (110 in other reports).

His daughter, Mary, our Old Lady English, outlived her husband and two sons. She died on Friday, Feb. 13, 1959, at the age of 97. Which means she was more than 80 years old when she chased us out of her apple trees with a broom.

(Dan Kellams is the author of “A Coach’s Life: Les Hipple and the Marion Indians,” which has been issued in a second edition by its publisher.)