"I'm telling you, that boy just doesn't listen," an exasperated Marie Martin told reporters gathered in front of the family's apartment building on Russo Street, just north of Maple. "The way he swings that stick...," she said before failing to finish the sentence, shaking her head.
Stick ball, a bastardized version of baseball, is played with a large stick, which is swung, baseball-bat style, at a hurled object. In Brian's case, he and his friends have been using a hollow plastic ball they found in the Dumpster behind the Rexall Drugs.
Brian Martin, engaging in another activity that's not "mother approved"
Martin and four area youngsters were engaged in the stick ball game around two o'clock yesterday afternoon when Martin's mother saw them as she took out the trash. Once she saw the haphazard way the boys were swinging the stick -- a broken branch from a nearby maple tree -- Marie Martin immediately called a halt to the action, an act which embarrassed Brian "like crazy", according to his friends.
That's when Brian's mother made the inference that someone's eye would be "put out", indicating that the stick would be flung, fly out of the boy's hands, and impale itself into the eye socket of one of his friends, thus robbing the victim of vision in that eye, which would then have to be removed and replaced with a glass eye.
Though no recorded instances of such a thing actually occurring exist, Marie Martin refused to retract her warning when asked by reporters.
"The stick swinging is too dangerous," she said. When pressed as to why, she responded, firmly, "Because I said so."
Speculation arose that Brian Martin may seek an injunction against his mother's stick ball ban by appealing to his father, but Louis Martin is divorced from Brian's mother and thus only sees him every other weekend. So, any hope for an overruling will have to wait until this Saturday, at the earliest.
Louis Martin could not be reached for comment, according to his friend, Misty Summers.
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