As the earth-moving machines do their duty at the old Lincoln Elementary School playground in Cedar Falls, the neighborhood anxiously awaits its new school building.

But something about that lot between Franklin and Clay; and Seventh and Eighth streets has been bugging me lately.

In the southeast corner of the block sits a huge mountain of excavated soil. That hill kind of gives me the creeps. Especially in the evenings, when all the excavating equipment sits quiet. It took a few walk-bys with the dog before it hit me.

There's no kids around it. There aren't even any footprints in it. Little green weeds are starting to take hold and grow out the sides of that hill.

Sure, there is fencing around the area, intimating the hill is off-limits. But trust me on this: Had that hill been there when I grew up in that neighborhood, we'd have been all over that sucker. I've never seen a better King-of-the-hill specimen.

I recalled a certain summer day when a train derailed as it sliced through town. The gods were smiling upon us. A car overturned right on Tremont Street, leaving us with a huge mountain of soybeans. I'm sure dozens and dozens of mothers were finding soybeans in their washing machines all week.

With my thoughts returning to the old Lincoln School playground, it seemed a shame that it had sat so quiet over the summers in recent years. I remembered how I spent my childhood summers. Playing ball. In that neighborhood, we never had a problem fielding two full baseball or softball teams.

All day. Every day. All summer.

We'd play until the sun went down and we couldn't see the ball anymore, or until dad's call pierced the summer air. Whichever came first.

No glove? No sweat. There was a huge box of gloves on the Longnecker porch (even a lefty) among the various other forms of sports equipment that was available for the borrowing. To my knowledge, nothing ever came up missing.

Once in a while, we'd find ourselves one person shy of two full teams. No problem. We'd just knock on some doors.

"Hey Tommy, we need one more guy."

You couldn't refuse the old "we need one more guy" plea. It was one of the unwritten rules of the neighborhood. Parents were known to temporarily lift a grounding sentence in order for their kid to be in compliance with the "one more guy" rule.

On the rare occasions we couldn't get enough people for a game, we'd play a little Home Run Derby, where the pitcher would serve us up fatties that we'd try to yank over the fence and into Mr. Searle's yard across Clay Street.

What happened? I know there are lots of kids in that neighborhood now. You just never see them. Every time I go past that unoccupied earth pile, I get an image of some pasty-white, weak-muscled kid up in his air-conditioned bedroom sitting in front of a computer monitor.

The horror. The horror.

Times change. I guess they're supposed to. Perhaps it was time for that old lot to be dug up. It was a bit disheartening to see it empty and quiet during the summers, with just a token bit of activity on the fringes - where youngsters climbed on playground equipment under the supervision of a parent.

Lifelong friendships were established on that ball field. Lessons in socialization, teamwork and organization were subconsciously absorbed. Some of those friendships have even extended into business connections decades later.

Try that with chat rooms, Pasty.