The equipment I really miss is the Fun House. It was a wooden cylinder on rollers, about 5 feet in diameter, enclosed in a fiberglass house. Essentially it was a giant hamster wheel, where kids got inside and all ran in one direction, causing the cylinder to rotate. The taller kids would stand at the end of the tube and grab the top while bracing their legs at the bottom and allow themselves to be rotated completely upside-down. By the time I was tall enough to try it (late 1970s), they had disappeared from both local playgrounds that had one. Lots of pain as you would fall once the cylinder got spinning too fast, and other kids would fall on top of you or step on your fingers as you tried to get up.
Ahh, nostalgia…
As I take my children to the playground, I have noticed I prefer the newer plastic slides to the old metal ones (the local park has both). We get a lot of fog off the ocean, and when the metal ones get damp, you stick. The plastic ones stay slippery when wet.
Oh yeah, here in Southern California, we played “British Bulldog” at Boy Scout meetings. (1977-1980) It was always announced in advance, so we knew to wear jeans and T-shirts instead of our scout uniforms to that week’s troop meeting. We had parental blessing to get messed up! Although we had a no-tackling rule. It was two-handed touch, like in touch football. Of course, a two-handed touch at full speed is really a shove.
Once at a family reunion picnic, my cousins and I improvised by taking a hose, hooking it up the water pump at the picnic grounds, and slinging it over the top of the slide, creating a water slide! Only after a few times going down, it ended up being a mudslide. Damn, that was fun. (And hell, I wasn’t a little kid, I think I was thirteen).
Sandboxes-well, I can see their point. Who wants to play in a sandbox that reeks of cat piss? Yuck.
Agreed that the older steel and concrete/asphalt playgrounds were better.
[Own thread minor hijack] Had lunch with a friend who is a forensic engineer. He reports and testifies in matters of accident reconstruction, and we commiserated about our overly litigious society.
A fairly new-ultra safe park nearby has been sued by an adult, who claims he broke his ankle while walking on wood chips. The wood chips were placed so the kiddies don’t have to deal with falling on earth, asphalt, or concrete. The plaintiff alleges that the wood chips presented “an unstable, hazardous, and inherently dangerous” walking surface. [/Otmh]
Honestly, I’m at a loss. After a playground accident, my greatest concern was the hell Mom would give me for ripping, bleeding on, or grass staining my clothing.
Knorf, I saw that figure, and I think it’s a bit inaccurate. I think a statistical analysis should be done to distinguish accidents caused by the negligence of the district and accidents not caused by district negligence. That is, I think the district should take responsibility for injuries caused by improperly maintained equipment or lack of proper supervision, but shouldn’t be forced to take responsibility for injuries it had no part in. I’d also like to see a breakdown of injuries it paid for. How many fractures, cuts, concussions, etc.? Basically, I’m wondering how many claims were for serious injuries due to its own negligence and how many were for relatively minor injuries that happened because kids just get into accidents.
That said, however, no amount of plastic is going to be safe if it’s not maintained properly. Fasteners need to be tightened, rough edges need to be smoothed, rubber mats need to be replaced. I know schools are strapped for cash, but if they’re going to have playground equipment at all, it needs to be kept up.
That game was for sissies. We actually stayed off the swings and threw them at the kids trying to cross. I earned a nice little scar from that game, right over the eye.
We would also have pinecone fights and had a whole baseball diamond set aside for that and snowball fights in winter. As long as we kept it in the designated area, we were cool with the monitors.
That was always the parental mindset when I was a lad. If we got hurt, it was because we did something stupid.
And I think we’ve hit the nail on the head, right there. In this era of Indigo Children and Everyone’s To Blame Except Me, little Dakottaa and SkylerTorrenceLee’s injuries can’t possibly have been caused by their own stupidity now, could they? It had to have been the archaic, unsafe and horribly DEADLY playground equipment put in place by the council (who hates kids, of course). I know from my own mishaps that kids can injure themselves on the most innocuous of playground surfaces, so I don’t see how doing anything short of wrapping them in rubber bouncy-suits and not letting them climb more than an inch off of the ground is going to prevent some stupid kid from damaging themself.
If we ever have kids, I’m building them a steel-and-asphalt playset out the back. And possibly surrounding it with sharks. And lava. That’ll teach them to be careful.
Taking out swings ferchristsake is crazy. Those are one of the best things to play on! We’d always start swinging really high then jump off when we were ten feet or so above the ground onto the woodchips. I got some nasty splinters landing.
I played Red Rover and Crack the Whip during recess. I grew up mostly during the 90s so my elementary school got rid of the concrete, steel, and wood playground and switched to the plastic ones when I was in third grade, I think. The old wood one had this bridge and we’d play Popcorn on it. One person would sit in the middle of the bridge in a ball and three other people or so would jump on the edges to make the person fall off.
As far as injuries go I ran into a metal pole during a game of tag and hit my head and I believe someone broke their arm during a rather violent game of Red Rover.
I remember tether ball! That is really a fun game, but, I’m sure, much too dangerous for the schools to even consider. :rolleyes: And who here recalls falling off the seesaw just as you reach the high point? I know I do!! But my kids won’t, that’s for sure. Not that I’d want them to fall, of course, but it seems that anything we enjoyed as kids has been deemed too hazardous for our own children. It’s a pity, really.
I’ve been laughing my butt off reading this thread and remembering this stuff. No doubt we’re all lucky to have made it to adulthood!
At my elementary school, Red Rover was about as safe as it got. Most of the time, all of boys would play-fight. The difference between play-fighting and real fightings is that in play fighting, the privates (and I think the face) are off-limits. So, we’d pretty much just beat the shit out of each other for forty minutes, in teams with rapidly shifting alliances. I was the strongest boy in my class, feared even by some boys who were a year ahead of me. It was glorious. In winter, we would (again in teams) built forts and bunkers out of snow and try to conquer them from one another. This made Canadian winters not merely bearable, but flat-out awesome . King of the Hill was one of the few named games we played. The snow plows would clear parts of the school grounds, making hills of snow ten to twenty feet high. The game was simple: Get to the top of the hill and stay there as long as possible. Get the other kids off the hill by any means necessary. Violence ensues.
Now, there is hope for the new generation: An acquaintance of mine has a young son. She once mentioned to me how when he and his friends play (at least away from the schoolyard), they beat the shit out of each other, just like my generation did. If one of the boys gets hurt (not injured, but past the “it doesn’t hurt” barrier), he stops to catch his breath. The mom asks, “Have you had enough?”; invariably, the boy says “No!” and rejoins the fray. The tradition lives on.
Ah, King of the Hill. Best winter game EVER! And of course, our version of Crack the Whip was played on ice skates - imagine how fast the end of that whip gets going. As for getting your lips frozen to something metal outside, that’s just part of your Canadian citizenship. You don’t get to vote here if you’ve never frozen part of you to something metal in winter. Most of us had siblings to help us achieve this citizenship goal.
I’ve long found it hilarious that as the cool old playground equipment has slowly vanished, the one place I did get fairly seriously injured was the last of the metal stuff to be removed from one playground in Stanley Park. The summer I was 4 (so we’re talking 1983) I slipped while climbing a ladder on a climbing thing shaped like a submarine and split my chin wide open. Blood everywhere, many stiches and a scar underneath my chin that’s still quite impressive but luckily not very visible. Of course, the merry-go-round, teeter-totters, and big metal slide in that same playground disappeared years ago, but that submarine was there until quite recently.
Oh, and even though my father’s a lawyer, no one even thought of suing. In fact, I got a little talk about how I might want to avoid going climbing in flip-flops in the future, since that’s what caused me to lose my footing.
We called it “Smear the Queer” too, and I didn’t know what a queer was until I was about 14 or so. I was actually pretty good at that game since I can run really fast for short distances. The crowd often wouldn’t be able to catch me until I got tired. If we were allowing it that day, we’d be able to pass off to someone else when we got tired or too boxed in. Other days, you couldn’t play it “the pussy way” but had to be tackled, immobilized, or have the ball stripped from you.
When I was 6, I opened a gash in my knee that went all the way to the bone while playing tag; no equipment involved. I ripped out a fingernail on my ring finger on the chain-link backstop on the baseball field. I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it matched the ring finger on the other hand that I’d smashed in the door on a windy day. We didn’t have those nice pneumatic door closers and our halls were badly oriented so that the prevailing winds ran right down the halls.
We used to try and make the swings do a loop over the bar. We’d never make it since A) It’s pretty damn close to impossible to get the swing moving that fast just from pumping your legs, and B) The pucker-factor was high and we’d usually chicken out. I still remember that second of weightlessness before the jerk as you came back under the full control of gravity. We never managed to break the chains, though one of the fat kids did manage to bend the triangular hook that holds those super-tough rubber seats on the chains. He fell off and dragged across the sand. I used to savor the sting in my feet when I got some good height/distance by jumping off at the top of the arc.
Speaking of chickens, we used to play a game on the monkey bars called “Chicken Fight” where you tried to wrap your legs around your opponent in an attempt to pull him/her off the bars. Maximum studliness was achieved when you could pull them off and still hold yourself and the other kid on the bars for a second before dropping to the ground. I remember one of us landing flat on his back with the winner on top of him. It’s a wonder he didn’t crack some ribs.
We got into more trouble and had more injuries with just an open field than these poor kids could probably imagine. Even up to high school there were kind of dangerous games we did. We played skins ‘n’ shirts two-hand-touch football in 35-40º F weather with fog so thick you could barely see 10 yards. Everything was so wet that you’d slide like crazy. I remember spraining my index finger so badly I couldn’t bend it fully for a month because I slipped in the mud and grass. I’ve still got an enlarged knuckle from that.
