PLAYGROUNDS

The hallway in front of the nurse’s office at Alderwood Elementary School was lined with whimpering children and one moaning adult. The principal, Mr. Alan Thon, looked out of his office door and shook his head.

“Well, there are five less than yesterday,” he noted to the school secretary, Mrs. Lingbloom.

My best friend, Chuck, sat third in line on the floor with his head tipped back to try to stop the flow of blood coming from his nostrils. I, sitting next to him, held an ice pack against my rapidly blackening right eye. There were two girls in cotton dresses who had wet paper towels covering their bleeding knees which had the skin torn off them. Lastly, a middle-aged woman in a dress with torn nylons, broken glasses, and a whistle around her neck, lie propped against the wall.

One might think these days that what I am describing was a massive school bus accident or children whose school had been torn up by a hurricane, but no. These were the daily casualties from our 1960s school playground.

The kids these days have no idea of the perils we faced each school day during daily lunchtime recess. Five years of playground activities more than qualified us for jobs with Cirque du Soleil.

Most of the playgrounds of the past can only now be seen in yellowing photographs as every piece of that playground equipment has been banned and dismantled as insurance liabilities.

If you had the privilege of going to elementary school in the 60s and earlier, reminisce with me about the days when recess meant the possibility of bodily damage.

Let’s highlight the equipment that made up the school playground:

The Steel Slide

Rain or shine, this little bun runner could hurt you. Without proper supervision, four or five kids would be climbing the ladder. One would slip, knocking everyone below him to the ground. On a super-hot day, the girls in dresses with bare legs would stick and stop halfway down, searing the skin on their rumps. On rainy days there was usually a puddle at the bottom of the slide. The first to slide on the wet surface would generally hydroplane at the speed of light down to the bottom, butt skip twice across the puddle, and slide on their back across the blacktop or gravel some twenty feet away.

Bars

Unless the boys were trying to do pull-ups, the horizontal bars were mostly used by girls who would hang upside down with the bar on the back side of their knees. They would then swing back and forth until they could complete a full rotation. After a rotation or two, they would release the bar and do what they called a Penny Drop dismount. Done correctly, they landed on their feet. Done incorrectly resulted in a face plant and skinned knees.

The Jungle Gym

This was a mountain shaped climbing structure made of pipe. A slip and a fall from the top meant that your body would ricochet off the pipes all the way to the ground. With the pipes properly tuned, a falling child would actually create a melody like a bamboo wind chime.

Tether Ball

Or as I liked to call it, wrecking ball. An eight-foot vertical galvanized pipe was secured in the ground. A woven rope was tied to the top and hung five feet down where it was tied to an inflated ball, one foot in diameter. Two kids played. It was one kid’s job to hit the ball clockwise and wind the rope up completely on the pole. The other kid tried to hit the ball and wind it counterclockwise. One strategy was to stun your opponent by hitting them in the face with the ball. Hence the broken noses, cracked lips, and the reason I had an icepack on my blackened right eye.

Square Ball or 4 Square

This game is played on the blacktop. A large square is divided into four equal squares numbered one through four. The server stands in square one and using a large inflated ball, bounces it into one of the other squares. That person must then hit it successfully into another square without getting a liner or letting the ball bounce twice. This continues until someone creates an error and is out. The object is to get the server out and to be able to move up into his spot. Frustration from being heckled by the server usually results in someone grabbing the ball, which is a no-no, and slamming it into the face of the server, which was why Chuck was sitting in the hall with a double-gusher nosebleed.

Basketball Hoops

Inappropriate use of the basketball hoop was mostly done after school when the adults had gone home. It was a form of hazing done by the older boys to the little kids and involved removing the tetherball rope from the pole, tying one end through the belt loops of a first grader’s pants and the other end through the Basketball hoop. The little kid was then hoisted into the air and hung like a pinata. This was funny until the older boys were suspended and repeated fifth grade the following year.

See-Saws

These are especially fun if you are planning on trying out as a Cirque Du Soleil acrobat later in life. Standing on one end of the See-Saw, while another, much heavier classmate jumps on the other end will send you to new heights above the playground with the possibility of a mount onto the shoulders of the server in the Square Ball game. The other option with the See-Saw is to jump off when your partner is in the air. This explains the girl sitting on the ice pack in front of the nurse’s office.

The Truck Spring Rocking Horse

This ride is fairly safe until your best friend offers to pull the head down to the ground for you so you can mount up, only to have him let go once you are straddling it. This explains the boy also sitting on a bag of ice in front of the nurse’s office.

Merry-go-round

What better way to learn about the effects of centrifugal force than to put four kindergarteners in the center of a Merry-go-round and spin it. Even if they don’t fly off, they will most likely throw up back in the classroom.

Swings

Lastly, we should consider the swings, the catapults of the playground. It was not uncommon for a child running across the playground to run into the pendulum path of a swinger and get kicked. This had the same effect as using a sand wedge to hit a golf ball. The child would be lofted high into the air albeit only for a short distance.

The swing competition which created the most mayhem was, swing-vaulting for distance. The recess duty teacher had strict rules against this activity. From the stationary position of the swing on the ground, distance, marked for world records, would be made by competitors who would swing in the forward motion as high as they dared and jump free of the seat to the ground.

As you can imagine, having a swing-set with four swings and four boys sailing through the air to the ground caused considerable stress for the duty teacher.

(Whistle blowing) “Stop jumping off those swings or you’re all going to the Principal’s office!” she yelled.

It was at that moment that she inadvertently stepped into the path of the swinging Tether Ball, which upon hitting the back of her head, knocked her glasses off, and sent her face-first onto the ground under the swing drop-zone.

Was it the fault of the boy on the swing who was only trying for a world record vault, as he landed in the center of her back? Perhaps it was unnecessary for him to mark his record by the side of her unconscious body with his heel on the ground.

It wasn’t often that we would see an adult smeared with mud sitting on the floor with an ice pack, in front of the nurse’s office.

It is a running joke nowadays to tell your grandkids how hard life used to be.

“When I was your age, I lived in a cardboard box. I had to get up each morning to milk four cows before I could eat my breakfast of two raw eggs from out of the hen’s nest. Then I walked five miles to school in knee deep snow with no shoes. And you should have seen what our playground was like!”

And the kids these days, they don’t believe you.

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