Do you remember when major league outfielders, when coming into the dugout to bat, would leave their mitts on the outfield grass?

If you remember, then you are not a teenager. This custom ceased about 25 years ago. The gloves of modern days are more like baskets or nets compared to the leather mitts we used in my childhood.

Let me tell you the sad story of my first glove!

My parents were European born and were storekeepers who didn't truly see the value of toys. Toys were frivolous things that took kids away from studying and obeying their parents.

There I was, growing up in the East Bronx with no glove, no bike, no basketball and no football. I was well-fed and adequately clothed (my father had a dry goods clothing store) but no accoutrements to be used solely for fun and games.

The baseball season came and all my friends had mitts. They oiled them with butter, crisco, spry or peanut oil and wrapped up a baseball tied together with a string, to improve the pocket. Luckily for me, my friend Abie Kantor had two gloves.

I bought his second mitt for $3. The webbing was missing between the thumb and forefinger. A glove was not a glove without webbing. The baseball would fall through and make the player error-prone. A dilemma! What to do! Solution?

Milk bottles were used in those days. Not waxed containers or plastic bottles with plastic caps. The top of the milk bottle was secured with a dead soft wire. That wire was my salvation.

I took about 10 of those wires and I fashioned my own webbing on my $3 glove. It worked - sort of! It didn't have the fluidity and ease of leather thongs that my pals had, but it sufficed - sort of!

I took plenty of ribbing and heat about my milk-wire creation. Any port in a storm!

My Uncle Murray gave me his used bike with the curved handle-bars. What a back-breaker! My friends had Schwinn truck bikes but I had a racing bike.

My Uncle Phil gave me a football. I kicked it on the car aerial throwing a pass in the gutter.

I didn't own a basketball until my sons were old enough to reach the basket. At garage sales I buy up all the old gloves that are being sold.

There it is. Does lack of toys ruin a child? Is deprivation reversible?

Ask my family, I don't know.

I wonder where my old glove is.

P.S. I just bought my 4 1/2 year old grandson Eli a Baseball Glove so he won't have to suffer the way I did!