This weeks “Back in My Day” is a childhood rite of passage, the playground. Growing up, the playground was the source of entertainment for hours. Not just the school playground, but the community playground as well. We would ride our bikes to the park to meet up and have fun. The variety of equipment was limited but made for infinite moments of creativity and attempt to figure out “let’s say” unique ways of playing on the equipment. Translated, how to make it more dangerous.
Starting with everybody’s favorite, the monkey bars. In my days, monkey bars were typically made from welded gas pipe, were tall (In a child’s eyes), symmetrical structures. Sometimes in the shapes of stagecoaches, diamonds, spiders, or just climbing structures. My first broken bone was from losing my footing and playing my own version of plinko through the maze of pipe above the dirt. Today, those same structure will be coated with a soft padding and places above a rubberized surface.
The sliding board was also a chance to display your creativity. The slide was constructed of aluminum with steel frame. Climbing up the ladder and sliding down was the intended use of the equipment. A slide, in shorts, on a lowcountry summer day was always a great chance for burns, so let’s put some sort of lubricant on the slide to make it faster, slicker, and yes, more difficult to safely use. From trying to climb up the slide in the wrong direction, to sliding down headfirst, to sliding down on different homemade mats and other forms mobility. The bottom of the slide was always more fun after a rain, you could cool off the burns. Today slides are short, made of plastic, and attached to outdoor playsets. Again, placed on a soft-landing surface.
The teeter totter/seesaw was a great playground structure, in my day it was just a 2x8 placed on a center pipe and would allow two people the spend hours staring at each other going up and down in repetition. Here is another opportunity for creative play, (How can we make this more dangerous?) Let’s turn it into a homemade catapult, yes put one kid on the A side of the see saw and the jump of something high (If you were lucky the see saw was located near the monkey bars or the sliding board.) and launch your friend into the air. Another rite of passage was getting smacked in the head by the seesaw. Today, the board of the teeter totter is not long enough to get the leverage for a good launch and has a handle to hold onto for stability, and of course the ever-present rubber ground mat gives a good surface to land on if you catch air.
The whirly-gig/merry-go-round was another piece of equipment that you could take to the next level with a little childhood creativity. The equipment was a relatively small piece of equipment made out of steel pipe with a wooden seating arrangement. The fun was spinning until you felt dizzy or got sick, whichever came first. Instead of a self-propelled spin on the structure another way to use it was to have your friends spin the equipment as fast as they could to let centrifugal force fling you from the equipment. Today these are no longer appearing on playgrounds, but this might have been a great opportunity to use the rubber surface as a landing pad.
The swing set was another opportunity for creative play with swinging to figure out if you could go high enough to spin around the bar (not possible). Also swinging side to side in an impromptu game of bumper cars. This made for ample opportunities for bruises and pinched fingers. Also a number of the swings were not secured into the ground, allowing the swing structure to move as it was being used. This made for numerous heart stopping jumps.
The sandbox is a playground stable that is just gross to think of today. A square box filled with sand, made for great opportunities for play and a great litterbox for the neighborhood cats.
A more home oriented opportunity for fun was the tire swing. You could find an old tire in the woods, grab a piece of rope, sling it over a tree limb and here was instant fun. Safety was not an option, the rope was used, the tire was used, steel belts sticking out of the tire hurt, and the standing water was always an opportunity some fairly gross water. These were accidents waiting to happen, you could hit the tree, just fall out, or the rope could pop, and you could take a ride down a hill. They led to hours of fun and maybe the occasional trip to the emergency room.
The playgrounds when I grew up, whether they were at school, near a ballpark, or in the neighborhood, were centers of hundreds of hours of play for children. It got kids outside, sparked imagination and creativity. They were used birthday parties and community activities. Yes, the picnic tables were made of concrete, the structures were made of pipe and wood, and the ground was dirt. There were sprains, the occasional broken bones and splinters. The phrase, “Walk it Off” was often heard. Yes the playgrounds are safer today, but I would not trade the playground experience growing up for anything. So grab some mercurochrome, burn ointment, and a straight pin to extract that splinter. Let’s find a classic 70’s playground.
