Former residents build online bridge to Highbridge's past

By Rachel Breitman
Contributing writer

From their homes in Dallas, Texas and Naples, Florida, Mike Voss and Bob Balogh take daily journeys to the Bronx of the 1950's, revisiting schoolyard crushes and stickball games in the "Highbridge Memories" Internet discussion group.

Started two years ago by Voss, the group has been the site of reunions and new friendships formed from a common past. Now over 290 members discuss their shared Bronx childhoods and the struggles they face as aging adults scattered throughout the country.

"Whenever I hear about a reunion, it makes me feel so darned good," said Voss, 65, who left the Bronx at the age of 13.

He got the idea for an Internet group when he happened upon Balogh's webpage entitled "Highbridge, Da Bronx," (www.bobbalogh.com).

Balogh, 65, included a section entitled "The New Highbridge," describing block parties, firefighters, new housing developments, and teens that characterize Highbridge today.

Still, he doesn't mind revisiting the blurred black and white photos of the past.

"It was a time when every adult was like your father; you just had surrogate parents all over," said Balogh.

The members recalled sledding down the steep steps that drop from Anderson Avenue at 166th Street in discarded tires, old mattresses, and filing cabinets with the drawers removed, barely missing a bus or cop car as they landed on Jerome Avenue.

In warmer weather, games included curb ball using the corner of 164th Street and Summit Avenue as home plate, football in the green space down by the Major Deegan, and scooters made out of two-by-fours and an orange crate attached to roller skates.

Often these recollections turn flirtatious. Walter Runz and his friend Ray Axberg, 68, use childhood remembrance as springboards into suggestive pick-up lines.

"Didn't anyone play post office or spin the bottle?" Reynolds asked, interrupting the discussion of Spaldings and hopscotch. "I sure wasn't playing alone."

Axberg, who writes in an approximation of Bronx slang, responded."Watch this guy, Walter. He has a history of preying on all yoos good, innocent goils from Highbridge and trying to confuse yooses memories."

Axberg occasionally grows somber about the lost time between dances at Sacred Heart School and his current life as a retired police officer in Virginia. "After watching 'Grease'…I always recall the scene at graduation when one of the guys laments the fact that they won't be together anymore…That is what happened to us, isn't it?"

His childhood friend, Barbara Buckley Gessell, offered him comfort about the missing years since they were last in touch.

"We have 50 years of stories to tell each other. It is kinda special that we were there at the beginning and hopefully will still be there at the end." And the notion of staying together until the end has become particularly poignant as different members have fallen ill and the others stood careful watch, updating the group with daily information.

Gessell was recently diagnosed with lung cancer, as her sister, Rita Buckley Merrill, informed the group.

A childhood friend since 1st grade, Pat Gear Larson hoped for a quick recovery for Gessell so they could return to bantering about their adolescent games. "We are counting on her for our stickball game with the 'boys'," said Larson.