Later, We Would Play Unsupervised

I'm not going to say that things were better then. I don't have kids, but if I did, I'd go crazy worrying about where they are, what they're doing, if they're properly screwing up their immune system by using a lot of hand sanitizer while doing it.

But boy I wish someone had told me that the old death-trap playgrounds were nearly extinct.

This topic came up in my online wanderings a few months ago, but I don't think I said anything here then. Then on Monday this MetaFilter thread happened, and anyone who grew up before the era of poured plastic playgrounds needs to read it and smile and high-five everyone in the vicinity with each new memory.

The post starts with a memory of scorching hot metal slides, which cracked me up right away. Why did we go down them? Mike: "Because it was a slide!" Me: "I know! You'd climbed to the top already. DUH!"

We talked about swings. Not just jumping off the high point, but little lost memories like the way someone would send the seat flying around and around until it was coiled up and out of reach. We both remember a lot of concrete. In particular, concrete tunnels, perhaps (but rarely) painted.

I remember the jungle-gym snail at my first elementary school. It was gone a few years after I left (1976), but boy did I aspire to mastering it. (Except I was not sure at all where to begin. Is there some technique here I'm missing?)

(More nice pieces are in Flickr's "Old Playground Furniture" group.)

It's funny that this came up, because just a few days ago I had an urge to start a series of "my personal Google map landmarks, and I wanted to start with Dodge Park, and somewhere in talking about Dodge Park I was going to mention the time my class walked over there and I had to pee SO BADLY, but the Port-a-Potties were too nasty and full of spiders (it's true) for my delicate sensibilities. So, when we lined up to walk back to school (two rows, I remember it well, I was stage left), I had to keep hopping up and down to keep from wetting myself. And then the teacher, in front of everyone, asked if I needed to use the restroom, and I had to unwittingly do an impression of Ben Stiller in every other movie he's in. "Restroom? No! I'm frantically hopping up and down because... I love it! I love hopping! Hopping is my hobby!" (Hophophophophop.)

Either I made it back okay, or I peed my pants and blocked it out and wished we'd stayed on our own playground with the snail (and a few other themey monkey bar items that I can't remember). Here, by the way, was our route:

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My first library is right below the park, in a little ranch house on the grounds of the current library, but I'll save that for a "Great Libraries of My Life" post. We'll use Google Earth for that; libraries are so worth it.

Dodge Park in Google Maps looks like they probably have real restrooms now. I wonder if there is still the felled tree on its side, roots dangling, that we'd delight in going off-path to find. The parking lots are new to me. I seem to remember the picnic tables where we sat for arts and crafts at Girl Scout Day Camp being right by the road where Mom's Dodge station wagon would drive up.

Of course, one thing that made Dodge Park so great is that it had THE playground attraction. The merry-go-round!

(And if right now you're picturing carousels with fiberglass ponies on them, you have to take two GIANT steps back. "Mother may I?" "Yes, you may.")

I never mastered being able to push then hop on. That must've been great - really tempering the drudgery of it being your turn to push. Boy was the merry-go-round the best. Sure, some kids would go flying off now and again, but that's how you learn the valuable life lesson of Holding On, right?

Then someone on MetaFilter showed how sometimes holding on just isn't enough:

And this is why we can't have nice (rusted out, jangling, 40-year-old playground) things. Except I note that this is one of those mini merry-go-rounds and therefore totally lame and non-canonical.

Somewhere in Dad's slide collection are a lot of photos of me playing in parks. Who knew that swingsets and teeter-totters would someday hold so much history? I have a (washed out) photo of one of the (vibrant, I promise) slides here:

(1975ish, so perhaps even at Dodge Park. RIP, rust flakes and conked heads. Or, read a better eulogy here.)