A ball hit onto the second-floor porch of Donald Grasso's house was a home run. It couldn't have been more than 65 feet from home plate; it gave new meaning to the term "short porch." The short porch was in left field. A ball smacking off the wall below the porch was a double, but if you did that more than three times, it was an automatic out. Don't ask why. It just was. After three doubles off the left-field wall, you started hitting left-handed.

This is what Jim Crowley recalls. This is what he takes from the summer of 1961, when he was 12 years old, and knew the starting lineup for every team in the American League. The face of childhood has changed since then. Twelve-year-old boys don't study baseball lineups. But memories stay the same. Memories are the saviors of us all.

"It was a good time" is what Crowley says about that.

Before every game had to be organized and every kid lived in the backseat of a minivan, you'd play Wiffleball - all day. There were no coaches or practices. There were no parents sending you to Wiffleball camp or fretting if you didn't make the Wiffleball Select Team. No one groomed you like a show dog for that all-important Wiffleball scholarship to college.

There was just you and a couple friends and an impossibly perfect summer of kid-dom.

Remember?

Jim, Donald and Dennis Crowell played in Donald's backyard in Plainville, Conn., because it had the best grass and because the smell from the peppers growing in Donald's grandfather's garden reminded them of the aromas at the ballpark. For a right-field wall, they used the cardboard box from a new washing machine. It was a prodigious poke to clear the right field washing machine box.

We all have our own Back Then mythology. If you are of a certain age, yours might include Wiffleball. All it took was a bat, a ball and some imagination. We bring this up now because they're playing Wiffleball in Blue Ash Sunday. They're playing for a charity called Boys Hope Girls Hope. All that charity does is save kids' lives.

"It meant everything to me," says John Richardson.

Richardson is a graduate assistant for the UC football team. He's working on his master's degree. He went to St. Xavier and graduated from Boston College. None of which would have been possible when he was a kid living in Bond Hill with his grandmother, sometimes falling asleep to the pop-pop-pop of gunfire. "I saw no hope in the direction I was headed."

Boys Hope found him. They put him in a house with six of his at-risk peers, a block from St. X. They paid his high school tuition. He got a football scholarship to college. The rest is memories, almost as sweet as Wiffleball.

The event Sunday costs $40 for adults and $10 for kids. Ballplayers Chris Welsh, Joe Nuxhall, Tom Browning, Tracy Jones and Bill Doran, all men old enough to remember cardboard outfield walls, will be there. Crowley, now a local lawyer and a volunteer for Boys Hope, will relive his youth.

There will be a clinic, lunch and autographs. And Wiffleball. A memory tie that still binds some of us to the game. Go watch and remember. Help save a kid's life.

Call 721-3380 for details. E-mail pdaugherty@enquirer.com