The news articles detailing some boys being detained for playing basketball on a temporary backboard curbside were appalling. How Auburn ever let that dirt piece of legislation onto the books is my question and issue.

I grew up in Jersey City, N.J., in a tightly packed neighborhood of row houses on a narrow street. Access to parks was limited by distance and use pressure. Kids played stickball, touch football, ring a levio, kick the can and a host of others in the middle of the street, during daylight. At night the street was packed with cars, so any game with thrown objects was out, and the running games were played. There was no television, so kids made their own entertainment. You usually had to be home by nine o'clock or earlier, or paid the price coming in the door. And that is another big difference with today#'s world: kid discipline.

I remember one basketball backboard on a lighted utility pole on the curb, about a block away. You could play there till you had to go home. Then the phone trucks would come and it disappeared. And within two weeks, up would go another one.

So I am against parents handing off discipline to our law enforcement, but I'm really against forbidding kids playing anything in the street. Whomever wrote that law, hatched from an egg into an old shrew, and didn#'t know the joys of friends playing together.

We knew some of the local cops: some were great, some were very, very tough. Just a look, and you knew that you had to watch your step. They walked, did not ride, except one really old geezer who rode one of the last horses in the P.D. Nobody messed with him. Today, police have enough to do with juvenile problems, so they shouldn't have to enforce stupid laws. More practical is to enforce a curfew, lightly. Come on.

Bill Dugan

Auburn