It could be a tied game, or in the middle of an intense rally. But when a father’s whistle came shrieking down the 2000 block of Mifflin Street on a muggy summer evening, the game was over, or at least postponed.
It was dinner time.
Dozens of adolescents dropped their basketballs, baseball gloves or hockey sticks and scurried to their West Passyunk homes to scarf down some supper. Then it was gametime all over again.
The Dixon House at 1920 S. 20th St. would fill up again with young kids waiting for their turn to shoot hoops or play the field.
“I come from a family of nine,” said Chuck Stewart, who is now 69. “There were, like, 60 kids in the neighborhood so we didn’t have to go anywhere. We played inside and outside and went to an overnight camp there. And everyone got along. There were never any big fights.”
The Dixon House was a safe haven for young kids in the late 1960s and ’70s with an indoor basketball court and an outside lot that hosted thousands of pickup games for the neighborhood kids. They were great memories for guys like Stewart, who decided to get the band back together and reminisce about the old days of sweat and skinned knees.
A group of more than a dozen guys, now mostly in their 70s, decided to get together once a month for a breakfast or lunch to rehash old stories, and bring up bragging rights about who had the best jump shot. A few months ago, the group even gathered at their own stomping grounds to breathe in the nostalgia while wearing some newly printed Dixon House T-shirts.
“We all played ball in there as kids more than 50 years ago,” Stewart said. “When we went back last month, nobody could make a shot. We were laughing at each other because no one could make a basket.”
For now, they’ll stick to lunch and laughs.
Stewart and a few others started it off as an intimate group of just a few bodies about 12 years ago. Then word of mouth spread and others wanted in. About 17 people attended the May meet-up at the Penrose Diner. In June, they had lunch at the Gatehouse in the Navy Yard.
“This is great,” said Joe Moscariello. “I’ve been retired three years. I was in a car dealership and I ran into one of the guys I see on Facebook. He took my number and texted me to come down. It’s great seeing these guys. We used to go 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. playing basketball and run to Fuzzy Joe’s for the best iced tea. We’d come back to the Dixon House and keep playing. They were great times.”
Moscariello must have been on the wrong end of the scoreboard a few times.
“If you lost, you had to go and buy,” said Stephen Michielli with a laugh.
Michielli was a few years older than the core group and was actually a counselor during the heyday of the Dixon House. As a young teenager, he was entrusted with the keys to the Dixon House and began opening the place up for the games that day.
“I would get home from church on Sundays and they’d all be waiting for me to open up the Dixon House,” he said. “I was around 12 to 14 years old. But we took care of the place. We would change the lights in there by moving a desk over and grabbing a ladder, with four guys holding it. We did everything we could. We never had any problems. We played and we went home.”
Michielli eventually ran the Dixon House and has refereed basketball games in various areas for the last 60 years. The 1968 graduate of South Philadelphia High School will receive an Award of Excellence for community service later this year from the school’s alumni association. He began taking part in the Dixon House get-togethers over the last couple of years.
“It’s great,” he said. “They kept telling me I had to come. Some of these guys played in my programs so they kept on me that I had to come out. It’s really great seeing them.”
Most of the crew went to the former St. Edmund’s school before splitting up between Southern and Bishop Neumann for high school. Years later, parents passed on, the South Philly row homes were sold, and their kids moved away to different parts of the city or to New Jersey. They come back at least once a month now to share a good meal and a few stories.
The Dixon House itself still stands and is used as a community center in a different capacity. It provides the neighborhood with social services, community forums, health services and other activities.
It somehow seems a lot smaller now.
“It seemed so big back then,” Stewart said. “When you go back there now, it’s really small. And it was actually even smaller back then because there were bleachers that aren’t there anymore. And even outside, we were swinging a bat and a ball in this little place?”
Right up until that suppertime whistle was heard.
