the end of the free range

 Wait a minute, I never did hear why it was called seven swamps.  Or maybe that is just what kids called it and nobody else will ever know why.  

The vastest prairie in my neck of Gage Park was the area east of the Grand Trunk tracks and west of St Louis from 55th to 57th, two blocks long and about one block wide.  Once we graduated from the kids' game of corner baseball with the 16th inch pillow to games with a real baseball, (we called it League in that cool way kids have; the ball was called a league ball, and when you played the game with it you were playing league.) we played it in the prairie by the tracks.

There were no actual diamonds, you just scoured the area for large pieces of junk and those became the bases.  We had more kids than when we were playing corner baseball, so we actually filled the real positions, though we may have skipped the shortstop and an outfielder, and the catcher was generally of the other team.  The field itself was kind of lumpy with a big rock here and there,

I remember one time some adult walked up to the ballfield and he was talking about how we could do some rudimentary landscaping, pulling rocks and mowing and maybe some kind of evening of the ground and make a better ballfield out of it.  That sounded like a pretty good idea and we stood around like kids in a movie saying, "Golly, that sounds swell, Mister," and nodding our heads,  But after he walked away we got to thinking that that sounded like an awful lot of work and nobody ever spoke of it again.

Not only would it have been a lot of work, but we would have to use tools, and adults had the tools so we would be dependent on them, and we knew how they were.  If they saw us having a duel with a couple shovels they would yell at us.  It wouldn't be long before they were supervising us,  It would be like school.  It would be like Little League.

There was no Little League in Gage Park at the time.  We'd heard of it, real ballfields with stands and uniforms.  Sounded pretty cool, but we knew it was going to involve a lot of rules,  They would give you a cool cap but then they would tell you how to wear it,

It was things like little leagues that brought the end of the free range kids.  Adults just started to be interested in what their kids were doing and they thought they could improve it, I remember visiting a friend of mine who had kids and they were driving them hither and yon for various activities.  I can imagine the blank stare I would have gotten from my folks if I asked to be driven somewhere to play baseball.

I have a vague idea of where Old Dog grew up  (maybe four blocks west and a couple south of the Ten Cat?) and it is older and more densely populated than Gage Park,  Vast swaths of Gage Park were owned by mean Hetty Green the witch of Wall Street, and held back from development until after she died in 1916, just before the bungalow became the rage,  Read it, fascinating story.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Green