A Shared Cycle

I was a teenager in the mid-1950s, a boy from the tenements of Hell’s Kitchen in the Times Square section of Midtown Manhattan, New York City. My “playing fields” were either the traffic-filled streets or the local playground or Central Park—if I didn’t mind trekking more than a mile to get to the softball diamonds near Sheep Meadow.

I was a gang member—that is, I was one of a “gang” of jocks who adopted the name Crusaders because of the College of the Holy Cross nickname