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A driver passing Aycock Middle School the other day saw the past in action. The baseball team was playing on the same field used when the motorist was a student 60 years ago.

The wooden bleachers looked the same. Teams still sat on planks without covering. The field still lacks a home run fence. Batters must “leg out’' homers.

James Fleet still returns foul balls from his yard, across Yanceyville Street, where he has lived since the late 1920s.

Aycock opened in 1922 as an elementary school, with grades 7, 8 and 9 added in about 1934. It now has grades 6 through 8.

From the start, Fleet says, baseball was played on the field by teenagers and adults who organized weekend games.

At first, home plate was in the middle of the field pointing north toward East Bessemer Avenue, Fleet says.

Youngsters such as Emo Showfety, who lived nearby and who years later hit 35 homers one season for the old Greensboro Patriots pro team, easily lofted balls across the avenue.

Fleet says several men decided in the early 1930s to enlarge the field by moving home plate to its present spot, what was then the corner of Percy and Hendrix streets.

All of this is to say — drum roll, please — that Aycock’s field likely ranks as the city’s oldest for the continuous playing of baseball.

Several other old fields, such as those in Greenwood, Pomona and the old Revolution Mill village, are used mostly for softball now.

War Memorial Stadium? It opened in 1926, four years after the crack of a ball hitting a bat was first heard at Aycock.

At Aycock, the coaching strategy hasn’t changed. Lewis Walker, who leads the present Aycock Lions, urges players to hit for the outfield gaps, just as Coach G.O. (Buck) Mann did in the 1940s and 1950s. The field’s surface, from years of football practices, field hockey, soccer and even marble and kite championships, is rock-solid.

Despite grading, there remains a slight slope in right field. Balls speed up on the downhill and accelerate more at a concrete basketball slab in deep right.

Without a home run fence, a batter must race around the bases or risk the outfielder catching up with the ball and throwing the hitter out at home plate.

A few years ago, Aycock erected a decorative wrought-iron fence along East Bessemer. The fence is so distant, even a muscular eighth-grader is unlikely to power a ball over it.

Coach Walker says his son, who played for him last year, hit one that landed about 8 feet short of the fence. He

sped around the bases for a home run.

Walker and his team have no complaints about their ancient, no-frills field. He says the parks and recreation department does a wonderful job maintaining it.

In the old days, fields at Aycock and the old Lindley Junior High on Spring Garden Street were the best. Lindley’s became in the early 1950s the birthplace of Little League baseball in Greensboro.

Of the junior highs of that era — Aycock, Lindley, Proximity, Gillespie, Central, Lincoln, Kiser and J.C. Price — only Kiser, Lincoln and Aycock remain as upper-level schools.

When Aycock played at Gillespie (now an elementary school), only the neck and head of the right fielder was visible. He was deep in a valley.

A field as old as Aycock’s deserves recognition. It’s done.

Aycock, including its ball diamond, and the surrounding Charles B. Aycock Neighborhood, are on the National Register of Historic Places.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or ale1@clearwire.net