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This is Jenna Barry at the Medford Public Library on July 10, 2024, and I'm here with Josh Hansen and Peter Hanson the second. I'm here to talk about the basketball courts where. Um, down in Hickey Park, which, I mean, it was always in my neighborhood. It

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was down the street from the Roberts, so it was a pretty popular hangout for just all the kids. I just remember. They kept redoing the park. They kept redoing specifically the basketball court and the tennis court, and they would never fix it. It was the weirdest

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thing. It's like they poured brand new tar and the same crack would pop up every single time. It's, it's like, you remember that myth about TD Garden, how it had all those spots, it's like, oh, they know where they are. So they can win games. That

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was that part. Oh, absolutely that part. The first time I invited friends over to play, like from outside of the Medford area, they didn't know what they were doing. They, you couldn't dribble a ball because it would just go every which way. Of course, it's fixed

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now, and I'm not going to lie, I kind of miss it. I lost many an ankle to that park, but at the Same time, um, so you knew the bounces? Yeah, you knew exactly if you played there regularly, you knew exactly where the ball was going

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to go. You knew every spot um to take a shot from and it was always just a great place because people would just go down there to hang out and it was one court in the middle of a neighborhood with a bunch of kids going to

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that school. So you got to. Learned basically how to share a court and you got to meet a lot of new people. Um, I remember playing with some kids who were on their school team. Um, at this point, I was homeschooled and They, I helped them

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with different drills that their coaches had taught them to run and in the same way they were teaching me a little bit more on how to play myself because I only played for fun. So it was a really good place that, you know, everyone just shared

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and gone along over there, you know. Was it close to your neighborhood? It was in my neighborhood. So what neighborhood? Um, right next to the Roberts, it's uh off of Salem, yeah, it's right off of we lived one street over, um, from where it was, so

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it's on Park Street, we were on Paris. And uh yeah, you know, it's funny, I remember when that uh park opened. Do you? Yeah, I, it was the Franklin was still open, so I had to be like. 545, maybe something like that. I remember, or maybe

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it was an opening, maybe it was a reopening, it was literally 24 years ago at this point, but um. Remember them redoing it and reopening it. And it was, I don't know, a year, and then the courts were like that. It was, I don't know what

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it was, it's there's something about that spot, I don't know, but I've seen him now and um. They look beautiful. Like they've completely redone it. It looks great. I hope that crack doesn't come back. I know exactly which crack you're talking about. Yeah, it ran through

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the entire court, the entire court, and if you stepped on it wrong, you were going down. There's, it was. That's the entire court kind of caved into the middle because of it. It was, it was interesting. I sometimes wondered if there was like a sinking under

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there or something yeah.