Page A3 / The Joan De Arc Crusader / Wednesday, December 24, 2025
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The amazing all-purpose Bueker backyard

By J. Bueker

    There was no component of our Joan De Arc homestead with more lasting significance to me than our splendid backyard.
    Infinitely more than a mere grassy plot situated behind the pale-yellow structure of brick and wood in which we abided, the backyard at 3219 was a boundless universe unto itself, the setting for an endlessly rich variety of activities and extravagant flights of our kid imaginations. Stepping through the arcadia door into that space was akin to passing through a magical portal into a wholly different and wondrous reality of endless potentialities. Here was the veritable canvas upon which much of our childhood experience was painted.
     For suddenly we found ourselves astride an army battlefield under heavy enemy fire, or inside an exotic spaceship nestled upon the surface of an alien world, a boisterous football stadium on game day, an observatory unlocking the wonders of the universe, a dusty Old West town, a secluded campground in the wilds perhaps, or whatever dimension of circumstance with which we chose to brand it at any given moment. The tales of the Bueker backyard are of such a rich scope and variety that I am obliged to condense them down to a precious manageable sampling. That yard was part and parcel of our life on Joan De Arc.
     The Bueker backyard bio properly opens with the construction of the excellent fence our parents had erected in 1965 that effectively enclosed and defined the space. For our first year or two on the street, the backyard proper did not even exist as a discrete entity since our property merged seamlessly with the neighbors’ yards and so was possessed of no individual character of its own. Only once that wooden barrier was in place did our backyard materialize as a distinct environment with its own uniquely identifiable events.
     Our traditional privacy fence was installed by the American Fence Company of Phoenix and sturdily constructed of vertical pine slats nailed into neatly arranged horizontal rails, with each slat featuring a rounded arch-styled top that produced a rather handsome overall effect. The backyard was now completely enclosed on all sides with a convenient entry gate situated on the east side of the house. I have little doubt our immediately adjacent neighbors were very pleased indeed to see this fence appear as it conferred a degree of privacy and delineation to their own properties.
     Certain elements of the backyard remained relatively constant throughout our tenure at 3219 and so routinely became incorporated into the various events concocted therein. The standard Surrey Heights narrow concrete patio strip ran along the rear of the house terminating outside the master bedroom arcadia door and here resided a nice quality wooden picnic table with benches. Purchased not long after our arrival on Joan De Arc, the picnic table proved a vital focal point for a variety of different backyard activities over time for our family, myself, and my street playmates. Ostensibly procured as the dining area for our occasional outdoor meals, the table and benches were much more commonly commandeered by us kids for purposes ranging from a space ship or fort to a grandstand for backyard sporting events.
     Backyard cookouts were a very occasional but most welcome change in our dinnertime routine. My father was rather fond of outdoor cooking and early on introduced a charcoal grill to the back porch and later a small hibachi. The backyard culinary fare usually consisted of your typical hamburgers and hot dogs, but once in a blue moon we were treated to my mother’s excellent shish kebab recipe, the ultimate backyard cookout experience at 3219. There can be little doubt that the true highlight of these grill fests were the charred marshmallows that we toasted on the end of unraveled wire clothes hangers. Not terribly hygienic in retrospect but unquestionably yummy.
     Another enduring feature in the backyard was the clothesline that Carl installed at the western end of the yard soon after we moved in at 3219, which served its designated purpose for probably only our first couple years on Joan De Arc. Yet that clothesline was a fateful addition to the yard as it would soon prove useful to us kids in an eclectic variety of other roles including the base for football field goal posts and a prop in our frequent “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek” play.
     Doubtless the most memorable clothesline episode occurred the day my sisters somehow became inspired to construct a remarkably sophisticated tent on its frame using an assortment of blankets and bedding sheets purloined from the house. The tent was admirably well-conceived with multiple rooms, a door and roof. The supposed plan was for the four kids to spend that very night camping out in our new backyard quarters, but I awoke around midnight to discover my brother and sisters had all called it a night and quietly absconded back inside to the comfort of their own beds.
     The backyard at 3219 was spacious, grassy, open, and relatively clear of obstacles, making it one of the premier home sporting venues in the Surrey Heights neighborhood during the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s, an exceptionally desirable location for football, baseball, soccer, golf, tetherball and even hockey competitions. Preeminently, our backyard was the home field for our legendary street sandlot football team, the three-time Community Football League (CFL) champion Joan De Arc Cowboys.
     The Community Football League was the brainchild of neighbor Gene Harris and was one of my favorite Joan De Arc things ever. Gene conceived and organized the league in the later ‘60s, inviting neighborhood lads to each form their own street teams for raucous games of backyard (and occasionally front yard) tackle football. Each team was comprised of roughly a half dozen players and would play both home and away games, sometimes travelling as far as the Westown neighborhood. Other notable teams in the CFL were the Joan De Arc Vikings (Gene’s team), the 33rd Avenue Rams, and the Westown Dolphins. The season would culminate in a championship game at the home field of the team with the best regular season record. We even held an awards ceremony at the conclusion of each season.
     As we all got a bit older, Gene’s interest in the CFL began to wane and I pretty much took over the league administration duties by devising the schedules, compiling statistics, recording results and organizing the games. I didn’t want the thing to end and my enthusiasm probably kept it going for another year or so beyond its shelf life.
     The Joan De Arc Cowboys team naturally played their home games exclusively in the Bueker backyard, which I of course christened Bueker Stadium. I seem to recall designating a tree on the east end of the yard and the old clothesline on the west as the markers for each goal line, and my brother and I both experimented with creating scoreboards for the stadium. The Cowboys team featured some stellar street football talent of the day including Chris Dickey, Thom Neff and Glen Eide, and we quickly became the dominant team in the league.
     The final CFL game was played in January 1972, as the Cowboys secured their third and final championship. At this point, interest in continuing the league was in marked decline and the organization was effectively disbanded as we all wandered off to high school and other interests, but the CFL remains a supreme Joan De Arc memory for me. Truly a golden age on the street.
     While football was my preferred athletic activity, there was a rich assortment of other sports and games played in that backyard over the years including the legendary Bueker family game competitions such as volleyball, badminton, and wiffle ball. At one point my father even acquired a croquet set for the backyard, but I can only remember our family playing this game a couple times, probably because the croquet field was an extraordinary pain to set up, what with all those wickets and posts that had to be carefully arranged and then driven into the ground before play could commence and then removed upon its conclusion. Before long I was the lone remaining Bueker who still wanted to play the game and I wasn’t even particularly good at croquet.
     The ‘60s tetherball craze at Sahuaro School inspired my father to install our very own pole in the backyard which saw fairly regular use for roughly a year or so before being gradually abandoned. The home tetherball experience contrasted noticeably with what we knew on the Sahuaro playground, where the heavy-duty thick metal poles were firmly anchored in a deep rock-solid foundation of cement. The pole at home was a bit too flimsy and unstable to deliver high quality tetherball play and the initial excitement of having one in our own backyard steadily faded.
     The Bueker backyard offered an exceptional view of the night sky, with relatively unobstructed sightlines in all directions save due north, which of course was partially blocked off by the house. Light pollution was far less an issue in 1960s Phoenix than it is today and these characteristics all took on vital importance when my interest in astronomy blossomed in 1967. The backyard suddenly transformed into a scientific outpost, an open-air observatory wherein I spent many an evening conducting astronomical observations of the moon, planets, stars and eclipses with my beloved Sears reflector telescope.
     The Sears scope served me well but sadly was not constructed of the highest quality materials and it started to deteriorate after a few years of use. Once the telescope’s metal tripod finally became unusable, my brother resourcefully attached the scope to the old tetherball pole so my astronomical research could continue on unabated. The old reflector was ultimately upgraded to a Jason refractor a few Christmases later for our remaining years on Joan De Arc. I have continued to carry on with occasional stargazing through the years at various locations, but no backyard since has offered the grand view of the stars we enjoyed at 3219.
     Summertime in the backyard naturally saw somewhat reduced activity due to the oppressive heat, but even the dog days offered up memorable phenomena. The cicada population in Phoenix flourished during this era and I vividly recall our backyard Arizona Ash shade trees being continuously infested with these harmless yet frightful flying insects and their remarkably loud singing throughout the summer months, which provided a sort of grating musical accompaniment to whatever else was going on back there.
     Certainly the prime summer event each year was July the 4th, when the backyard morphed into a somewhat less than dazzling holiday fireworks venue, complete with charcoaled hamburgers, chips, watermelon, toasted marshmallows, and fleeting glimpses of somebody’s fireworks exploding in the distant sky about 20 miles from our neighborhood. It certainly wasn’t a very spectacular event from that distance, but the Independence Day fireworks show at 3219 was possessed of the two most vital possible characteristics in my father’s eyes – we didn’t have to go anywhere and admission was free.
     The backyard plant life naturally evolved steadily over the years and my mother fought a valiant but decisively losing battle installing various rosebushes and other flowering plants around the periphery of the space where we were playing football games and conducting our other various raucous activities. More than a few of her plants fell victim to this ongoing circumstance and Barbara ultimately and reluctantly pared down her ambitions rather steeply in this regard.
     One of the more notable botanical constituents of the yard was a large cluster of incredibly robust agave plants that was inadvisably planted against the back wall of the master bedroom at some point and ultimately became a decidedly hazardous nuisance as they grew to maturity. These things were formidably armed with hooked thorns along the edge of every leaf and a large sharp terminal spine at their end, all of which proved quite problematic when an object, typically a ball, became lodged inside one of them. I suffered more than a few puncture wounds retrieving baseballs, tennis balls, golf balls, and footballs from the agaves and we all learned to avoid the things as much as humanly possible.
     When my father one day casually suggested that he might pay me a tidy sum to remove the menacing agaves from the backyard once and for all, I readily agreed; however, the man just chuckled, knowing full well the job was a far too Herculean task for me (or probably even him) to even attempt. That Little Shop of Horrors was still thriving in the backyard when we departed Joan De Arc in 1977 and I would not be the least bit surprised to learn they live there still.
     The routine backyard maintenance tasks of watering and mowing were a responsibility my father originally looked after during the early years until his two sons were deemed old enough to assist with and ultimately assume said duties. Carl initially used simple but inefficient oscillating and rotary sprinklers to water the backyard grass but soon came to favor the flat sprinkler hoses that emit water upward and outward in a fine spray, providing much more water coverage over a wider surface. These sprinklers did a stellar job as our backyard always had a consistently healthy covering of Bermuda grass, even during the colder months when it all turned an attractive shade of beige.
     The lawn mowers at 3219 became increasingly technologically sophisticated as the years passed and I seem to recall three different types being put to use: an old-fashioned manual reel mower, a gasoline-powered mower, and lastly a newfangled electric mower. Soon after I had achieved my rite of passage into the joys of lawn-mowing duty, my father acquired the fancy new electric mower with his work “points” and the contraption would immediately prove to present some rather formidable challenges.
     Of paramount importance was the vital necessity of avoiding running the mower over its own electric cord, which could obviously lead to catastrophic consequences. My dad solemnly warned me about this grave danger and then went back in the house and left me to my fate. To my credit, I never did electrocute myself in this manner, but the cord was attached to the mower in such a fashion that it made simple up and down mowing of the backyard virtually impossible: the old back-and-forth 180’s were simply no longer achievable. I was obliged to constantly manipulate the cord, pick it up, move it out of the way, walk under it, etc., to prevent it from becoming tangled and falling into my mowing path. I did become reasonably adept at this process but only after a couple years of nerve-racking trial and error.
     One of my final memories of the old backyard is one of simply sitting there quietly with my mother on a sleepy fall afternoon in 1976, some months before we left the street. I spent a few wistful moments musing over the countless childhood spectacles and dramas that had unfolded within the confines of that twelve-hundred-square-foot parcel of sacred soil and concrete: the endless summer days spent playing “Lost in Space” and “Time Tunnel,” the crisp autumn afternoons of CFL backyard football competition, the family cookouts and gaming events, the glorious moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn -- all those immortal moments that had somehow slipped away quietly into the past. I was struck by the realization that much of my fondly-recalled youth had actually played out right here on this grassy little patch of desert soil mere steps away from my own back door.
     Childhood was a starkly different experience back in that day of course; there were no cell phones, video games, computers or social media, and but a tiny handful of TV channels from which to choose. The great preponderance of our time as kids was therefore spent rollicking about in the great outdoors and the backyard at 3219 was in essence an indispensable recreational amenity whose utility was limited only by that which our youthful imaginations could conjure on any given day. Through the miracle of human memory, I can still enter that backyard at any time of my choosing, and my innumerable recollections of the space are possessed of a peculiarly timeless quality that transcends the daunting reality of impermanence itself.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________JDA

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