Stickball, Anyone?

A write up on the late Antonin Scalia reads that as a youth he played stickball in the streets of Elmhurst, Queens using a broomstick and that pink hollow rubber ball called a "spaldeen". We kids growing up in Philadelphia in the 1940s had our own version of the game. We shortened the playing field to avoid auto traffic by cutting the ball in half with a razor blade and the "halfball" floated up to the manhole plate and required precise timing to hit it. But we never let Spalding know we were defacing their equipment.
tjs