Posted on 10/13/2005 6:31:00 PM PDT by Clive
I've been hanging around playgrounds. No, not like that -- there's no need to call the police, or keep your children locked indoors.
Maybe what I should say is we've been hanging around playgrounds.
You see, I have my own little girl, so my presence among the slides and swings is perfectly legitimate. Like any dad, I'm a slave to my wee one's thrill-seeking demands.
I push, slide and climb, both to make her happy, and to ensure she's safe.
I've found myself wedged inside playground tubes too tiny to comfortably fit a dachshund, and I've smacked my head on steel bars, while helping her onto slides designed for kids and circus contortionists. I hardly even notice the park gravel anymore, as it trickles into my shoes.
It's all in a day's work for a dad. And my daughter loves playgrounds, or at least the swings. The sheer rush of being a 26-lb. pendulum leaves her giggling and wanting more.
No ride makes her day like a good old-fashioned swing-set, and it's the same story for a lot of kids. Swings are the place to be, while the rest of the playground -- a spaghetti of wood, plastic and old rubber tires -- is usually neglected.
The basic swing, the only ride left over from my childhood (and the childhood of anyone raised before basic safety gave way to parenting paranoia) is now the most popular playground attraction.
It wasn't the case back then: swings were fun, but not like the skyscraper-high monkey bars, or slides that required a serious hike to the top, before shooting you back to the ground so fast your stomach felt a full second behind.
I don't have the heart to tell the truth to my daughter, even if she was old enough to understand.
She can't read, so it's safe to print it here. Modern playgrounds are boring.
Seriously -- they're tedious.
Since my playground knowledge contains a gap of about 20 years, can someone please explain what happened to all the good rides?
At what point, between 1985 and 2005, did someone step in and take the fun equipment away, replacing it with safe-and-dreary designs capable of thrilling no one, except over-protective mothers?
I miss things like merry-go-rounds; those spinning platforms kids would whip into a near-blur, before jumping on, clinging to the bars for dear life. We'd hang off the edge, face-down, playing "dropped-it/picked-it-up" with a twig or popsicle stick. Falling off meant nasty, dirt-filled scrapes, and every child had the scars to prove it.
Monkey bars were works of art: There were rocket ships, airplanes, chuckwagons and abstract towers. They were high, cold and dangerous -- and there was no better place to play tag. If you fell, you returned with a cast, or an angry bruise, ready to climb again.
The slides were impossibly tall, and built to ensure the ladder was only one route to the top. Scaling the actual slide, or the metal scaffolding, was far more daring. Especially in winter, when the steel was coated with ice.
As well as slides, there were fireman's poles, which took strong nerves and stronger ankles -- the landings were hard.
The old parks also had horses. Most hung like swings, but one rare type was the pre-motorized equivalent of a mechanical bull.
Long and low, with a row of seats, such horses would buck wildly, as six kids fought to hang on.
And there were see-saws. Nothing like the feeble plastic designs found on today's parks, these were massive planks of wood, rising six feet in the air.
Woe be the child whose partner jumped off, leaving the weighted end to crash down.
There were others, but my memories are hazy. Suffice to say, the best rides combined fear with immense fun, and kids loved them.
Today's playgrounds are low to the ground, with round edges with safety bars and soft gravel all around. It's no wonder many kids prefer to play video games at home -- broccoli gets the blood pumping faster than most modern parks.
Of course, I'll keep taking my little daughter to her swings, so she can laugh, and tell me to push harder.
And someday, when she asks me what the playgrounds were like when I was little, daddy will pretend he can't remember.
I wouldn't want to make her sad.
Of course litigation is the cause of funless playgrounds. I knew it wasn't a fun world anymore when my new chainsaw instructions suggested 'not to use the chainsaw when angry'.
Good post...brings back some great memories...
Lawyers suck
The playground also had all kinds of equipment that we loved. By today's standards all of it would be considered unsafe. Oddly, no one I know ever died or got seriously injured from playing there. We had the best playground in the area, but I think all that equipment is long gone. Those were the days.
Yep. In Germany the playgrounds are just a blast but you've got to use some common sense.
Our pool has a lifeguard every six feet. Their's, you may see one or two lifeguards all day long.
I always assumed their tort procedure must be very, very different from ours.
Thank you VERY MUCH for the link to visionforum.com! It looks like they have many materials we can use as we raise our children to be future statesmen and leaders.
We used pipe, the powder out of shot gun shells, and ball bearings ........
Nothin like the lawsuit lottery to ruin everyones fun.
You all know what the difference between a dead skunk and a dead lawyer in the middle of the road is right?
Oh, anything I can do to promote Vision Forum. They have the BEST toys for kids. We found them at a homeschool convention, and I buy most of my Christmas gifts there every year.
I went back to visit my old neighborhood pool. No high diving board. How's a kid supposed to stand a chance of clearing the diving well rope?!
Speaking of playgrounds here are a couple of pics of the playground that I built for the grandkids this summer.
I haven't bothered to wax the slide yet as the grandkids are not quire old enough to handle the speed :-) FWIW this is the third, and hopefully last of the playgrounds I've built. The last one had swings that were about 13 feet tall, 'cause I was to lazy to cut the 16 ft 4x4s down :-)
Best wishes & Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Funny, I can relate. My dad who's 80, finally got around to having all of our family's 8mm video tape burned onto DVD. I have 7+ hours of absolute mayhem with myself and three brothers, mom and dad preserved in digital form.
I scare myself watching this stuff. We had toys that would probably be totally illegal to sell in the US now. We had every crazy vomit inducing swing / spinning mechanism known to modern man in our back yard.
I can be seen with no shirt, no shoes, no helmet no pads of any sort racing down the hill at the end of my street doing a handstand on my skateboard.
HA!
To be young again. :)
My son did that.
Scared the crap out of the dog across the street so badly that he had to stop. Thank goodness.
Scared me too.
In the 50's we made cannons out 1 1/2 inch pipe, C batteries and cherry bombs. These were dangerous.
I'm surprised I didn't end up dead or in prison when I think of the things we built as teenagers. Suffice it to say that after lighter fluid and tennis balls we discovered the wonders of smokeless powder and steel pipe and things didn't stop there.
I loved to swim and dive at my old pool, and the same fate of the high board you have described at your pool, seems to be universal.
When I tell my son that I used to do "gainers" and "doubles" off the high board at the pool, he can't even imagine what I am talking about.Seeing how they have removed it. He has never seen a high board, except on TV.
The sad thing is, other than the occasional "belly buster", I can't recall anyone ever getting injured from diving off the high board at our old municipal pool.
I remember those old days, now obliterated by trial lawyers and risk managers.
My Dad was in in the Canadian military. We moved to a small town in Germany in 1959.
Me and the other kids used to play war in real pillboxes and if we rumaged enough in the scrap yard we could find rusted machine guns to use.
Oh sure.. it's all fun & games till someone gets an eye put out!
Lawyers suck. I agree.
Today there would be a hell of an uproar if a teen were to try to buy these chemicals in the same store at the same time.
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