Playing King of the Hill was a favorite game for the guys who lived in my neighborhood, and also for some of the boys who went to Holmes School and were not from my neighborhood.
The object of the game was to gain the top of a hill and remain there without being knocked off by another person.
We played the game with 5-6 guys.
The neighborhood hill was at Dunnes’ house on the northeast corner of Oak Park and Chicago, and it was situated at the very back part of the lot.
The hill came into existence when the Dunnes had some underground pipe work done, and about half of the dirt wasn’t needed to fill the excavation, so over a period of two weeks, a number of the neighborhood boys brought shovels and tossed dirt on the hill, building it up to at least 12 feet.
The boys who were king most of the time were Richie Parmelee and Jerry Dunne because they were the strongest.
When we played, we would charge up the hill repeatedly only to be sent sliding and rolling down the hill.
No matter what frontal assault strategy we tried, not one of us could dislodge either Richie or Jerry.
One day Eric Bourne told us that he had devised the perfect plan.
Eric’s plan called for three guys to charge up the front of the hill and he and Johnny Merton would creep up the back of the hill and tackle the king.
The day we tried Bourne’s plan, Richie was king of the hill.
Richie’s attention was drawn to Becker, Schu and I coming up the front of the hill, and he did not see the other guys.
Bourne hit Richie with a tackle that sent Richie down the hill, and Merton took control of the top.
The next time we played, Merton claimed his spot on the top of the hill, but he lasted for only a few minutes before Dunne gained the top and tossed Merton down the hill.
Merton was enraged and said he was going to get his high school-age cousin Jimmy — who lived a block east — to roll Dunne into the bushes, which were about 15 feet from the base of the hill.
Merton ran to Jimmy’s house and brought him to the hill, but when Jimmy tried to dislodge Dunne, Dunne rolled him down the hill and into the bushes.
Jimmy ran away, and we never again saw him at the hill.
There was a dirt hill on the Holmes east playground that had been there long before anyone ever played King of the Hill.
If we played the game during the lunch hour, the game would be closely monitored by a teacher, so we couldn’t get too physical, and if the teacher saw that one boy had been king for a while, the teacher would stop the game and appoint a new king. This took the fun out of playing.
A real fun time was when we played during the winter. Most of the players couldn’t gain a foothold on the snow and ice that had formed on the hill, so many of us spent more time sliding down the hill than we did getting to the top.
We stopped playing when we started high school, but King of the Hill is another example of the fun times my friends and I had as we were growing into our adolescent years.
John Stanger is a lifelong resident of Oak Park, a 1957 graduate of OPRF High School, married with three grown children and five grandchildren, and a retired English professor (Elmhurst College). Living two miles from where he grew up, he hasn’t gotten far in 76 years.
