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Hammond Indiana

Subject	Message	Replies
Hammond on Google Earth Date: 03-25-2009 By: Paddy	Google Earth is a free service, and I highly recommend it. It has rewarded me in many ways, such as finding the exact location of my great grandfather's farm in County Limerick, Ireland. The rock walls that have demarcated farmsteads for centuries remain today. By comparing maps from the 1850's with Google Earth images, I identified the exact place where my grandfather was raised. Google Earth has also identified places of my youth in Hammond, some of them already covered over by time. I can see the outlines of the old pond/ice rink at Irving Park, located at Hoffman and Columbia. That is where my sisters taught me how to skate. I had to pay a price, though, wearing their white hand-me-down skates until I saved enough to get my very own. I bought them at the sporting goods store across the street from Minas but don't recall the name. If you look at Harrison Park on Google Earth, you can see the outline of its ponds, which also served as rinks in the winter. I suppose that Hammondites who ice skate these days go to indoor ice rinks. I left Hammond in 1968 and raised my family in Minnesota. The place was, and still is, replete with outdoor ice skating ponds like we had in Hammond. My son and daughter still talk about how they learned to skate on those neighborhood ponds, just as I did in Hammond. For my great memories, I have to thank my sisters, white skates and all.	7

Replies

Date	Member	Message
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2903 )	tom w	Paddy Remember the clubhouse at Irving Park? In the summer you could go in and do crafts like leather wallets or keychains. You could do games like plng pong. You could watch the big kids wet paper towels and stick them on the ceiling. Do you remember box hockey? They had the only box hockey I've ever seen at Irving Psrk. I always remembered that hockey box for some reason and never saw one again or heard of the game. I also remember skating at Harrison Park and getting free hot chocolate. My grandparents lived right across the street from the park so we went there a lot too. Lots of memories centered around that park. Do you remember at the north end of Columbia was an area the mills used to dump mill scale and stuff? we used to go in and camp and mess around in there a lot. There were acres of hills and valleys and sand and oil. LOL. Tom W Hammond Tech 55-58
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2904 )	Cindy M	Oh I found my great-great grandfathers parcel of 40 acres of farmland in Starke County Indiana the very same way...by examing an 1870's plat map and comparing it with google earth map. I can also gaze down on my grandpa's farm in Marshall County, and so on.
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2906 )	Tom J	Google Earth is WAY COOL. I have used it for the last year or two, I guess. I play around with it all the time. Tom A 1967 Graduate of Hammond High who cherishes his memories of growing up in the Hammond of the 1950's and 1960's. Bring back those days! [IMG]http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y145/tsjay/Tom%20and%20Georgeann/img014.jpg[/IMG]
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2909 )	wvcogs	Paddy, How about that sporting goods store - Millikan? Being a Hessvillite, my skating was done at Hessville and Lost parks. The outlines of those rinks also are visible on Google. One thing I'm waiting for is the Google street level view of Hammond. Street level of Cal City is there, but not Hammond. It stops right at State Line Ave. A couple blocks of Ridge Road in Munster are there, but that's about it. At least I had black skates. They weren't hand-me-downs, but I'm sure they were used. Here in my adopted hometown of Hurricane, WV we have an outdoor skating rink with some kind of plastic surface! What??? Ken...
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2910 )	Paddy	quote: Originally posted by tom w Paddy Remember the clubhouse at Irving Park? In the summer you could go in and do crafts like leather wallets or keychains. You could do games like plng pong. You could watch the big kids wet paper towels and stick them on the ceiling. Do you remember box hockey? They had the only box hockey I've ever seen at Irving Psrk. I always remembered that hockey box for some reason and never saw one again or heard of the game. I also remember skating at Harrison Park and getting free hot chocolate. My grandparents lived right across the street from the park so we went there a lot too. Lots of memories centered around that park. Do you remember at the north end of Columbia was an area the mills used to dump mill scale and stuff? we used to go in and camp and mess around in there a lot. There were acres of hills and valleys and sand and oil. LOL. Tom W Hammond Tech 55-58 I remember the clubhouse very well, and the hockey box provided lots of fun. For the uninitiated the hockey box was a wood box where two players would use small hockey sticks to try to hit a wooden ball into the opposite goal. The box measured about 4X8 with sides around a foot high. A center wall divided the box into two parts and had a hole in the center that was large enough to allow the wooden ball to pass through. Opponents had to first get the ball through the center hole and and then get it through the goal. What a simple device, and such fun. And oh, the key chains. They were the plastic braided things, weren't they? I don't remember the mill scale dumps north of Columbia, probably because we had our own industrial playground at the LaSalle Steel yards on 150th.
03-26-2009 ( Reply#: 2911 )	Paddy	quote: Originally posted by wvcogs Paddy, How about that sporting goods store - Millikan? Ken... Yep, that was the place.
08-13-2009 ( Reply#: 3537 )	BobK	I use Google Earth all the time. The best park in Hammond for ice skating was Douglas Park. We scraped and watered the ice every night after closing. Had a great warming house with skate sharpening, refreshments and an annual skating show. Before we moved to the north side I used to spend all my Winter time at Harrison park. Bob [img]http://home.comcast.net/~rkekeis/Bob1.jpg[/img]