Freeway baseball

In these days you rarely see pickup baseball games. When I was a kid we played pickup baseball all the time. So did me Pops. In fact, he and his friends played a very rare type of pickup ball. They played it on the Lodge Freeway.

Not once it was open for traffic, of course. But when the Lodge was being built in the early 1950s it ran right alongside of the house he grew up in. When the roadway had been graded but not yet paved, he and his friends would go down on Sundays, set up bases, and play baseball on the Lodge.

A nearby bridge, the Warren Avenue bridge in fact, had already been completed. It overlooked their makeshift diamond. Pops said that every time the guys went down to play, a crowd would eventually form on the bridge (and also along the service drives in place) and watch the games, cheering the young men on as they pitched, hit, and took the field.

They were only able to do it for a few weeks one summer, until the freeway construction had progressed to where play was not possible. But boy, I bet that was a sight to see. It was exactly the sort of thing which happened when neighborhoods were neighborly.

Tearin' up jack

I remember Amos. He was one of Grandpa Joe's best friends, and lived just up the street. Often he would walk down to visit Joe and if one of us kids were out, he'd stop to shake our hand and say hi. I always thought that was pretty cool of him.
He had a phrase for when he was going some place in a hurry. He'd say he was "tearin' up jack". One day his tearin up jack cost him an extra ten minutes.
Amos was coming down the Lodge Freeway here in Detroit, hurrying to get home. Now, I don't know if other parts of these United States have such things, but on Detroit freeways many exits have turn around lanes at the top of the ramps which allowed you to make a U-turn without making a left turn onto the street where you exited. Maybe you wanted the street a couple blocks back, say, so this way you could loop around to it without making two left turns. It was thought to help traffic flow, I've always guessed.
But anyway, there was often an entrance to the freeway on the far service drive after the turnaround lane. If the street merited an exit it merited an entrance too, right? In this case, Amos was exiting at Forest Avenue but wanted to double back to Warren, which was two streets north. So he intended to take the turnaround lane at Forest and double back to Warren.
"Here I am headin' south on the Lodge tearin' up jack', Amos explained, "And I fly up the ramp and take the turnaround tearin' up jack, and I get on the far service drive and run right down the entrance ramp onto the northbound Lodge." Yep. In his hurry to get home, Amos had become for an instant absent minded and tore up jack right back onto the freeway.
That's the peril of tearin' up jack. You can forget where you're supposed to go.