The Basketball Goal

      Once upon a time, we had an old red barn that ran north and south some 30 feet or so north and west of the meter pole in the farmyard.  Dad always said it was made of “native lumber”, which I guess meant it was made of an inferior grade of pine.

      The walls were vertical 1 X 6’s.  There were gaps between the boards and at the bottom of the wall many of the boards, secured to nothing, twisted, warped and curled.  There were a couple of windows, covered on the inside with the residue of countless flies and millers, and on the outside with an overspray of red paint, left by some fly-by-night painter whose paint didn’t stick to the old boards very well, but clung to the glass all right.    

     Inside, the barn was divided roughly in half by a stanchion where the milk cows stood while being milked.  On the north side of the stanchion was a manger of sorts, a manger that always provided me an image for the first Christmas, a pretty humble birthplace indeed.  There must have been some concrete under the hay and manure of the “milking floor”, as I recall hearing the old iron scoop shovel hitting cement whenever Dad cleaned out the gutter, which was close to the right distance from the stanchion.

      The “cow door” opened outward on the east wall a short step south of the gutter.  A scoop shovel toss east of the cow door lay a semi-permanent manure pile.  Dad tried to train the cows to do their thing before entering the barn.  Some of the milk cows were amenable.  One old cow, a roan we called “Blossom”, would contain herself for hours so that she could evacuate bladder and bowels right in the middle of milking time.  Thus the existence of the manure pile.

    The north part of the barn was mostly a calf pen for the milk cows’ offspring, fenced off from the manger that formed the south border of the pen.  There, young calves were trained to drink their “milk”, either skim milk from the separator or a powdered milk substitute combined with warm water, from a galvanized milk pail.  The training consisted of getting the young calf to suck two fingers spread apart.  When the calf was sucking well enough, the trainer directed the calf’s nose down into the milk far enough that his sucking drew up some of the liquid.  The trainer could remove his fingers and the calf would continue to drink.  At least that was the theory. 

     In a step towards modernization, we bought a couple of buckets that had teat-like valves sticking out of them.  The calf didn’t have to be trained, just directed to the imitation nipple.  The buckets had brackets that allowed them to hang on a wooden rail.  That worked well until the calf got big enough to knock the pail off the fence rail.

     I remember Dad installing tarpaper around the inside of the calf pen walls in an attempt to protect the calves from cold north winds.  It must have tasted good.  The first generation of calves disposed with most of the tarpaper.

     The “people door” to the barn was in the southwest corner.  In the southeast corner was a loft where we threw the alfalfa we harvested from north of the Pratte’s house.  In June when the alfalfa was ready, Elmer would call to let us know it was time.  Up we would go with the old horse drawn mower and rake and the Ford pickup.  We would mow and bunch the hay.  The bunches were thrown onto the pickup, hauled to the barn and thrown up into the loft a forkful at a time.  The milk cows got the alfalfa.

     When the REA came early in the ‘50’s, the meter pole had a yard light mounted on it to illuminate the barn and adjacent chicken house.  Our cousin Keith outgrew his basketball goal.  Somehow, the entire apparatus landed in our yard. The “apparatus” consisted of a basketball rim mounted to a square composed of one-inch boards, which were bolted to a 6 X 6 beam.  The beam had to stand on the ground to get the required standard ten feet from playing surface.  No burying the end in the ground to help stabilize it.

     Those two seemingly unrelated events, the arrival of electricity, and later, the basketball goal in our yard, colluded to provide a perfect recreational opportunity.  The south end of the barn was the perfect place for the basketball goal.  The old splintery beam could be fastened to the barn wall.  The yard light was perfectly positioned to light the court.

      Many a fall and winter evening were spent playing “21” or “horse” under the yard light.  Sometimes, if there was a piano student either waiting to take a piano lesson or having finished his lesson and waiting for a sibling to go the course, participated in a game of two-on-two.              

      There were hazards.  The east wall of the chicken house formed the west boundary line of the basketball court.  It was an unforgiving boundary.  No heroic jumps across the line to divert an errant ball back to a teammate on the court.

     On the east at a diagonal from REA post top to an anchor in the ground ran a cable guy to hold the meter post upright.  It too could be hazardous.  In the dark, it was a little hard to see.  It could take your feet out from under you if you ran into it.  It was the eastern boundary of the court.

     On the school court, we were taught to shoot the layup and pass under the basket and go back in line to wait our turn for the next layup.  None of that on our court.  Going under the basket would run you into the stickery old beam at worst, the barn wall at best.  Layup shooting had to be modified.

      The greatest hazard entered the court from the chicken house.  The chickens were free range, free to poop wherever they wished.  Rarely did a game occur without a timeout to clean the chicken do off the basketball.  Ugh!

     The basketballs presented a problem, mainly keeping them aired up.  We had no air compressor.  When we needed to air up a tire, we pulled a spark plug out of the old Ford pickup, replaced it with the “Engineair”, hooked the hose to the Engineair, which used the engine’s cylinder to run a spark plug sized pump.  It was slow and way too much trouble for a basketball.  A series of hand pumps served, none very well.  Then there was the problem of finding the “needle” needed to insert into the basketball’s bladder.  They seemed always to get lost, or one would break off in the ball during an inflation attempt.  At least one ball with a broken needle inside rattled as it bounced off the bare ground.

      Erecting the goal was an event, well, really two events.  I don’t recall the successful attempt.  I probably wasn’t present. I remember pretty visibly the first attempt.

     It was probably a Saturday morning, a late fall Saturday morning when football season would have been over and basketball season had begun.  My two older siblings and I were all present dressed in warm jackets.

      There were two problems, how to raise the all wood-structure, and how to secure it to the barn wall, both way beyond my ken or skill at the time.  With about 12 feet of 6 X 6 post and 15 or 20 feet of 1 X 12’s forming the backboard, the thing was heavy.  We probably had made an attempt or two to raise it into place, but the weight coupled with the surety of getting a handful of stickers from handling the old beam insured failure.

     Dad to the rescue.  He placed the teeth of the Farmhand fork beneath the bottom board of the backboard.  The grip on the backboard was tenuous.  With the Farmhand, he raised the goal upright and close to the right place.  Our job was to hold the thing in place once he got it there, hold it in place until Dad could fasten it to the wall.  We failed.

      When the backboard slipped off the Farmhand fork teeth and started to fall, I beat feet.  No way I wanted to be under that.  The goal with its backboard slowly slid against the barn wall as it arced like a big second hand on a clock face.  It picked up speed and landed on edge with a crash.

     During that second or two Dad yelled something, “Catch it!” “Get out of the way!”?  I’m not sure what he said over the popping of the John Deere tractor.  In an uncharacteristic fit of anger, he backed the tractor away, drove it to its place by the gas tank and shut it off.  At least I thought it was anger.  In retrospect, it might have been fear and relief that nobody got mashed.

     Anyway, there would be no basketball game that Saturday morning.  At least not in the yard.  We did have a couple of makeshift goals, one a bottomless coffee can hooked to a ceiling joist in the basement, and a similar one fixed to an interior shop wall which we used during inclement weather.  Various rubber balls or tennis balls served as the basketball.  We learned to shoot flat shots because the ceilings thwarted high-arced shots.

     So the basketball goal lay horizontally, leaning against the barn wall.  It was a tribute to its construction that the backboard, goal and post remained intact through the experience of crashing to the ground.  Then one day it was in place, where we wanted it, where it belonged, fastened securely to the barn wall.  Had Dad figured out a way to do the job himself?  I probably wasn’t present for that event, as I have no memory of it.

      We put a new net or two on the rim, but they didn’t last long out in the weather all year long.  The goal, at the standard ten feet above the “floor”, provided many an hour of entertainment for us.  With the yard light, a game could extend into the dark of a fall or even a winter night.

      The goal stood there until the old red barn came down, replaced by a new barn further east and north.  The beam and backboard succumbed with the waste wood left from the barn’s destruction.  Most of the destruction mess disappeared with a man named Roy Snavely.

     Mr. Snavely had a reputation for salvaging lumber from old buildings.  Grandma had called him and told him about the barn.  I think she wasn’t pleased with how long the waste lay there.  She misrepresented the amount and type of lumber to Mr. Snavely, not intentionally of course.  He had asked her if there was any dimension lumber when she called him.  She thought there was.  When Roy arrived with pickup and trailer, he could see that there wasn’t. 

      Dad had salvaged most of the good two inch stuff.  Roy contained his disappointment stoically.  He explained that he could use the scrap lumber.  He would drag a dead cow into his hog lot, cover it with the scrap wood, set the pile on fire and let the hogs clean up the cooked carcass.  Hmmm.

     He filled his trailer, but there was still some scrap let.  I think the old red barn faded into complete oblivion when we trimmed the Chinese elms.  The elms north of the house had been let to run wild.  With handsaws, we attacked the thick underbrush.  A sizable pile of branches from that trimming operation formed over the former site of the barn.

     That pile of branches served for a year or so as a fine place to hide during games of “Cowboys and Indians in the dark.”  A cap pistol fired from a hiding place in the pile at an unsuspecting enemy, who was trying to get the drop on you, was quite effective at scaring that enemy.  The branch pile also served as camouflage for BB gun toting hunters preying on sparrows.

      Eventually, the branch pile dried and settled, and on an appropriate windless day, it went up in flames.  The remains of the old barn and the wooden portion of the basketball goal, if there was any, disappeared forever.  Only the metal rim remains, resting comfortably in the metal pile behind the shop.