Highland Park The Highland Park Neighborhood of Pittsburgh

The club's quick community acceptance and growth came largely from the success of its boys' midget, junior and pony league baseball teams. As Franklin B. "Herky" Allison remembers,

We had always played ball at the caddy grounds. It was great because no parents came around. Teenagers were more or less left on our own. There was no such thing as little league in those days. And when we felt like taking a break, we just sat down.

Well, we were primed for it -- I was fifteen or sixteen when the club started. One day, all these fathers show up, with pads, uniforms, all the best equipment. And they coached us. Before you know it, we're doing pushups, sit ups, and playing real baseball.

Our coaches. were great. They all knew the game, strategy, skills, and how to practice.

They took kids used to goofing around in dungarees - remember, a lot of us kids were not big enough or good enough for the school teams, so we never had the chance to play organized sports - we learned discipline and we found out what it's like to be part of a team.

In 1948, the midget team won jackets by winning the Salvation Army League. Coaches James P. Ifft Jr. led the boys to winning records in the '40s and '50s. The first uniforms were simple: a red shirt with no lettering and a cap. Baseball was a mainstay of the club for twenty-two years.

In the 1950s heyday of neighborhood teams, Branch Rickey of the Pirates sent scouts and personnel to teach and encourage young players. Coach Tom McDowell Sr. taught his sons Tom and Sam -- Sam went on to become a phenom in the major leagues, leading the American League in strikeouts -- the basics of pitching in the club's little league.

To open the 1961 season, Pirates announcing legend Bob Prince, waving from an open car, led eighty players from six teams, two ponies, and the Peabody High marching band, escorted by police and fire engines in a parade from Peabody to home plate at the Highland Park Caddy Grounds.

When Jerry Shaub led the team in the early sixties, there were fewer children in the neighborhood, so the team was expanded to include children from the blocks of East Liberty right around Peabody field, and the club ran three teams with a total of sixty children.

Russell V. Davis is remembered as an excellent football coach. Davis was short, bald, funny, and a no-nonsense coach who knew the sport, rules, and techniques. He had been a coach at Shadyside Academy, and had two sons who played on the team.

In the 1946 season, good, affordable football uniforms were hard to come by, a lingering effect of war production shortages. So the team played with only three uniforms. Players felt lucky to be learning the sport, but parents were concerned about injuries, and the team lasted just a few seasons.

Basketball, played in the basement of East Liberty Presbyterian Church and Peabody High's old cat-box gym, was a popular activity from 1946 until 1961. Dale Armstrong, a student at Shadyside Academy, was the first basketball coach. He went on to be a Dartmouth football star, was drafted into the NFL and played for the Philadelphia Eagles as a defensive end. Norm Frye, the baseball and basketball coach whose career at Peabody spanned five decades, coached the boys for several autumns in the 1950s.

Girls learned ballet, tap, and acrobatic dance at Saint Andrew's from Genevieve Jones, a dancer with a reputation in ballet. She was a tall, slim, striking young woman with dark hair pulled back in a tight bun.

Girls also went to the Fairgrieves dancing school on the corner of Penn and Shady Ave in East Liberty. Ruth Fairgrieves was an exacting teacher. She also taught ballroom dance, and wasted no time with tittering teens, matching partners by lining up girls on one side, boys on the other, and marching them to the center of the floor.

The club sponsored whatever people wanted -- roller skating, ice skating, bowling, dancing school, charm school, tennis lessons, cub scouts and brownies. Consistency and flexibility have served the club well; when an activity started to wane, it was dropped, and new activities put in. But two popular activities have stood the test of time -- swimming and summer day camp -- and been around since the club started.

"Family swim" meant separate swims for males and females in the late 1940s. That adds up to around two-thousand Friday night swimming sessions at Peabody High, now in its fiftieth vear.

Summer play school was initiated in 1947 by Mrs. Doris Ifft, a gifted teacher who grew up on the North Side and graduated from Ohio University. Sitting on benches placed around the porch, children started the day with an opening prayer, song, and flag salute, singing ditties such as:

"I say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to you,
and you say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to me.
I throw up my window, pop out my head, and say 'yoo-hoo yoo-hoo yoo-hoo' to you ... '

Following morning exercises, they were divided into two age groups. One group went to art class, the other to music and games. After a milk and cookie break, the age groups switched places.

Over the years the program grew, and Mrs. Ifft managed it while hiring artists to teach and college students to assist. The program has been held at both Saint Andrew's and the farmhouse ever since. Mrs. Ifft retired from teaching in the 1950s and continued volunteer teaching. She presently teaches preschoolers to read.

Members remember that when children are involved, parents pull together and a sense of community takes hold. It was unique, then and now, for an urban neighborhood to possess such cohesiveness and run programs that pull families together.