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.
I want one....good work
I could not swim but my technique would be to go to the bottom then push off at an angle so that I broke surface just at the right place to grab the ladder.
That was until my dad came to fetch me one day and arrived just in time to see me going off the tower. He finked to the teen lifeguard that I had not passed any swim badges so I was barred from the tower until I got a Red Cross badge.
It's probably gone now.
I remember when the swing seats were a 1" thick piece of oak bolstered by aluminum or iron mounts to the chain that you AND a friend could sit on, and it would hold you. Of course, I also remember the teacher telling us six times every recess not to go near the swings, and the blood and stitches on a buddy's forehead when he failed to heed that advice. Those swings were still a lot more fun than the limp rubber things that hurt your hip bones when you just sit in them.
I remember that we used to have elaborate handmade slingshots that got more powerful the older you got. Every kid in the neighborhood had one and shot many rocks with them. I don't remember anyone ever shooting one at another kid.
We also had an old stable on our small lot which we called "the Horsey House". We built an elaborate fort in the attic of this small outbuilding as well as multiple escape routes (through windows and the roof, as well as a rope line.
Nice!
Just be sure to build a tall fence around your yard as well, and never let any other children play on it, otherwise you'll be sending some lawyers' kids through college.
Mark
Well, the current idea is to not even have really deep water. Some of the newer pools don't get any deeper than 4-5 feet deep (slides, sprinklers, but no diving boards). I'm speaking from my experience here in Kentucky; I know two of our State Parks have these new pools with no deep water.
When my sons first learned to swim at our city pool, jumping off the board was the ultimate goal. My youngest wanted to try, and so I asked the lifegaurd (who had given him lessons) if he thought it was okay. He promised to watch him, but it was pure torment for me. My little boy jumps off, then proceeds to semi-swim, semi-dogpaddle to the side of the pool, as the lifegaurd and I both watched from the edge (it was only a short distance to the side of the pool, but it took him forever). He made it, and then did it over and over and over again that day. He is now an excellent swimmer, but I don't think a kid could be truly adept at swimming if they didn't have experience in deep water.
She took over.
I know in Toronoto they went around and tore down a whole bunch of perfectly good playgrounds built with pressure-treated lumber, the kind that replaced the oh so "dangerous" metal playground equipment I enjoyed as a child. They decided that since the pressure treated wood contained arsenic (I think it was arsenic, anyways) that it might present some sort of danger to the children. Nevermind that a child would probably have to spend all day every day licking the playground equipment to get enough arsenic or whatever to do any harm, they tore them down. Also a lot of perfectly good equipment was torn down because it didn't meet the new standards - no foot deep layer of rubbery stuff all around, etc. Of course they didn't have money to replace all these playgrounds, so now the kids that live in those areas are SOL. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
You know it's a really sad commentary on the world today when you can look back on the 70s with fondness and nostalgia, but for everything that was bad about the 70s we weren't nearly as screwed up then as we are now.
We couldn't get to the plane but we could swivel the guns on the anti-aircraft guns and sit on the chairs at each side of the gun and have a great time. We could crawl all over the really big tank but the hatch was welded shut. There was a gun barrel about nine inches in diameter which seemed to me to go about fifteen feet or so which we could slither out on as far as we dared. It was a fun time which I guess helped our patriotism? I'm a little hazy on the details of the various war machinery. By the way, I am a girl and I loved it as much as any of my guy friends.
I think you're right... So sad.
That's ok. Most lawyers think their clients suck.
Playgrounds don't stand a chance against Playstations and gameboys.
We have lost a lot, along the way, haven't we?
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