Grandpa's Early Life
My Grandpa, George W. Hodgetts, was born on May 5, 1937, into a poor family in New Haven, Connecticut. When he was young, he lived right next to a ball field, where there were four fields, two hardball fields, and two softball fields, and he would climb over the fence in his yard to play. He could play out there for hours without being disrupted; he would invite his friends and get a good baseball game on. It was a huge open space that was simply magnificent. The baseball fields were facing each other and the softball fields were facing each other on the other axis, all of them looking at each other like they were having a conversation. Instead of doing work, like he should have been, he stayed outside and had as much fun as he possibly could. Doing this was “a great life, there wasn’t anything [he] had to worry about,” because he was just a kid, it was not like he was going to get thrown out of the inner city, New Haven, public school.
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They also played other games like basketball; Grandpa and his friends had three different hoops set up around the neighborhood. After school they would go to the basketball hoops and play until the neighbors got fed up with hearing them scream and would go out and yell at them to leave. After that, they would go to the next basketball hoop; it was one endless cycle some days. Grandpa made positively sure that he had as much fun as he could as a kid.
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