A few years back, I got quite a bit of feedback on a column I wrote titled “La jura got there at the right time.” Some readers said they were well able to identify with some of the accounts of an aborted melee.

It dealt with an ambush of a few friends and me as we walked, minding our own business, on North Grand one evening.

We were on the lower side of our mid-teens at the time, and the two Freds, Leroy and I – clad in Levis turned up once at the cuff and a white T-shirt with a pocket – were made to jump even further onto the sidewalk as a passing car deliberately swerved our way.

We thought it was a trick being played by someone we knew, but we soon discovered they were serious. They armed themselves with sticks, bicycle chains and even a radio aerial, as they came toward us.

And like we were used to seeing in Westerns at the SERF, we believed we were about to be rescued by some of our own neighbors, who came running from the north, ripping off fence panels as they prepared for battle. The timing was perfect: Our almost-neighbors had shown up in time to rescue us. We assumed it was a turf war: even though we had no particular kinship with the “rescuers,” we believed they were about to fight the attackers, who were clearly from another side of town.

Just like in West Side Story, turf is important.

We soon discovered that we – Leroy, the two Freds and I – were about to be attacked from both directions. The notion of “puro sport” made the confrontation much more explainable, in that violence in those years, the early ’50s, was indiscriminate.

Well, we skipped the beating of our young lives that September night. Apparently several people who saw the disturbance called the police. As we heard a distant siren, someone yelled, “La jura,” a term that means only one thing: “The cops are coming!” or even the obsolete “Cheese it, the cops!”

One never uses “la jura” (actually, the first vowel is prolonged, and it comes out as “la juuu-ra” to refer to police at the station or even on patrol). No, the term means only that their arrival is imminent.

None of us combatants ever saw the police, our having scattered to the four winds. Safe at home later, we fretted over being visited by police. Maybe a knock on the door, with a policeman asking, “Mrs. Trujillo, I wonder if I could speak to your son for a while.” But none of my buddies ever got such a visit or phone call, nor did any of the others.

Some of us four almost-victims later learned why instead of coming to our defense, the guys who lived north of us on Railroad Avenue tried to join in the pummeling. One of the leaders asked us not to take matters personally; if we’d taken a group of young men completely by surprise with the idea of injuring them, our almost-neighbors would have been just as willing to give us a hand.

We believed then – and still do – that the logic is flawed, but true valor and heroism emanated only from the big screen at the SERF or Coronado theaters.

We grew up in a town with intense rivalries, in which parents commonly warned their children always to “stay on this side of the bridge.” As a born-and-raised eastsider, I assumed we were the only ones discouraged from going across; apparently those west of the Gallinas were similarly warned of the dangers in coming east.

Regardless, I mixed with enough contemporaries to observe some rather bizarre predilections. Why, for example, would so many young men desire to fight? Was it the need to prove supremacy? A couple of upperclassmen at Immaculate Conception School, for example, told us students on a Monday about how they had employed the principle of “puro sport” the previous weekend in order to feel a whole lot better.

“Puro sport,” which translates as “pure sport,” actually means more than that. It’s closer to “puro lunacy,” and it means, “I have such an excess of testosterone in my body that the only way to purge it is to get into a fight.”

Had these two young men engaged in combat with guys from the other side of town, or across the tracks? It’s unlikely they’d have challenged people from Pecos or Commerce streets, as their lights would have been extinguished in minutes, the east-of-the-tracks youths being the meanest of the mean.

So, who were the victims with whom my schoolmates engaged in “puro sport”? Well, it was with one another. These two best-buddies drove to Storrie Lake, punched each other out and came back to town to celebrate with a cigarette and a cheeseburger.

Such has been my perception of the behavior of many youths in Las Vegas more than 50 years ago. As for my friends and me, well, we too would welcome a celebration with cheeseburgers and a girl or two thrown into the mix. For others, apparently, the need to be pugilistic remained the strongest urge.

Or maybe it’s not solely a question of turf but of supremacy: We have the upper hand, and even though we don’t have anything against you personally, here’s our chance to show who’s boss.

The recent euphemistically labeled RHS “hazing” incident somehow comes to mind as I recall the scrape “La Jura” helped us escape so long ago.