Counting out rhymes,
self-appointment, and argument are all used to begin play activities and
should be studied to see if they correlate with particular places and times.
self-appointment, and argument are all used to begin play activities and
should be studied to see if they correlate with particular places and times.
Childens - Folklore
to maintain its organization .
.
.
.
" A second purpose of equipment was to
save space. "Eighteen boys can be kept busy on a single lot 18 by 20 feet if
it is equipped with the proper apparatus and an instructor is at hand. " Fi-
nally, the climbing apparatus fulfills a biological urge to do "stunts," a be-
lief echoed twenty-four years later by the manufacturers of Junglegym who
advertised their structures as meeting "a deepseated instinct for climbing"
(Mero 1909, 57-59; Playground Equipment Company 1933, 11).
Playground equipment manufacturers were quick to advertise their
products in terms that appealed to purchasing committees. The Fred Medart
Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, for example, advertised in the May
1914 issue of Playground that a "public playground is intended to cultivate
correct physical and moral development, and supervision and the right kind
of equipment are equally important. Apparatus well-planned economizes
in space and affords the best way to provide for a large number of children. "
In the same year, the Narragansett Machine Company of Providence pub-
lished a catalog that emphasized the strength, durability, simplicity, safety,
and compactness of its playground gymnastic equipment. Recognizing that
many cities fell short of the ideal of providing each playground with a full-
time supervisor, the Narragansett catalog noted that "each device should
suggest its own use, even to a child" (Narragansett 1914). The Spaulding
catalog of 1919 contained complete plans for playgrounds of seven to ten
acres divided into areas for boys and girls, children and young adults
(Spaulding 1919).
The increasing size of playgrounds and the use of fences to segregate
the area reflected two other theories of the early play movement. Henry
Curtis advocated fences for schoolyards and playgrounds to keep out row-
dies and to make discipline easier. "The fence also makes of the school yard
an institution and helps to create loyalties. " Within the playground, fences
should be placed between the boys' and girls' play areas. "The reasons for
it are obvious and sufficient, there are often loose girls and always loose boys
coming to the playgrounds, and it is better not to have them together, or
where they can corrupt other children" (Curtis 1913, 16). In 1928 and again
in 1938, this view was expounded by the Playground and Recreation Asso-
ciation:
It is almost universally agreed that a children's playground should be
fenced. . . Perhaps the most important reason for fencing the play-
ground is the safety which the fence provides. It prevents the child
from running needlessly into the street after a batted ball and also
prevents injury to passerby caused by batted balls, for example. Pro-
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? ? tection of property is another factor, and the fence not only protects
the playground from vandalism but also prevents trespassing upon
neighboring property. By putting the playground under complete con-
trol and keeping out mischief makers, the fence greatly simplifies the
problem of maintenance. The fence often provides the solution of the
problem of beautifying the playground. . . . Not the least of the rea-
sons for fencing the playground is that the fence adds to it a degree
of individuality. (Playground and Recreation Association of America
1938, 12-13)
Enlargement of playgrounds came in response to increased use by older chil-
dren and adults. The definition of play was changing from children's games
to community leisure, from creation to recreation. As the definition of play
changed, the fence became a symbol of the old order. An article in the Au-
gust 19, 1925, Evening Star of Washington, D. C. , reported that gangs were
terrorizing playground directors and destroying property. Significantly, the
chief object of their vandalism seems to have been the playground fences.
More than fifty years later, a study of enclosed playgrounds concluded that
enclosed play areas increased the imaginative play of preschool children
(Barnett and Kruidenier 1981, 323-36).
A general reevaluation of the efficacy of playground equipment was
presented in M. W. Johnson's Child Development (1935). Reporting an ex-
periment to determine the effects on behavior of variation in the amount of
play equipment in groups of three-, four-, and five-year-olds at the Univer-
sity of Michigan Elementary School playground, Johnson concluded, "The
more extensively equipped playground for each group is characterized by a
greater combined amount of bodily exercise and play with materials and
fewer social contacts in games and undesirable behavior [teasing, crying,
quarreling, hitting]. The less extensively equipped playground for each group
is characterized by a lesser combined amount of bodily exercise and play
with materials and a greater number of social conflicts" (Johnson 1935, 66).
These rather obvious conclusions are important, however, since they raise
the question of whether too much equipment might interfere with social
development. To encourage social interaction, Johnson suggested the use of
gardens and toy trucks and a return to the use of sand box play. A genera-
tion later, research was being published to show that playground equipment
of specific kinds-wooden pilings, horizontal bars, and geodesic domes-
produced different kinds of movement and spatial awareness in kindergar-
ten children, but the larger questions of the influence of playground appa-
ratus on children's lives and lore have gone unanswered.
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? ? From personal memory, the apparatus that combined swings, slides,
see-saws, rings, horizontal bars, and a sliding pole, in the public park of a
small Western city in the late 1940s, was a focal point for fourth- through
eighth-grade boys' after-school activities. Games of chase, tag, and follow-
the-leader were played on every part of the apparatus including the top sup-
porting bar. The games involved group fantasies, individual heroics, and
occasional injury, all of which stimulated interest and encouraged contin-
ued use of the equipment. Outside laboratory observations, play on play-
ground apparatus takes on a different and often unsanctioned character.
Moreover, traditional playground equipment is very durable, thus allowing
several generations of children to establish and maintain a tradition of use.
In the 1960s and 1970s, manufacturers of playground equipment
began to redesign their products, partly in response to a shift in the market
and partly because new plastics and other synthetic materials made the
manufacture of new kinds of apparatus more profitable. The shift away from
public playgrounds to private backyard playgrounds followed the popula-
tion shift from city to suburb that accelerated after World War II. Although
many real-estate developers made the addition of a community playground
part of their sales promotion, more and more parents bought small replicas
of playground equipment for home use. Both home and public playgrounds
had to compete with movies, television, and commercial theme parks for the
attention and affection of children. The manufacturers responded with
molded plastic animals for riding, pipe outlined rockets, stagecoaches, fire
engines, and "storybook villages" (American Playground Device Company
1974; Miracle Playground Equipment Company 1975). One fascinating ex-
ample of the transformation of a folk playground device to a piece of pub-
lic playground equipment to a backyard apparatus is the revolving see-saw.
In 1938, Lizzie Davis of Marion, South Carolina, recalled her child-
hood as a slave for a Federal Writer's Project interviewer: one of her stron-
gest memories was of cutting a small pine tree to make a "flying mare. "
Boring a hole in the middle of the pine pole and fitting it on a peg fixed on
the stump created a revolving see-saw (Rawick 1972, 2:294). John Champlin
and Arthur Bostwick illustrate what they call "an ancient french see-saw,
called Bascule Double," in their 1890 collection of games and sports. This
device is two see-saws that cross over a pivot, allowing both up and down
and revolving motion (p. 618). A similar ride was illustrated in the July 1913
issue of Popular Mechanics; this version was constructed of steel tubing and
installed on municipal playgrounds. Forty years later, Popular Mechanics
again featured the "seesaw [that] doubles as a merry-go-round," this time
built of scrap steel and auto parts by the home craftsman (Popular Mechan-
244 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? ics, July 1913, 116 and March 1953, 173). In 1957 a company in Birming-
ham, Alabama, advertised a portable "Merri-Go-Whirler" for use indoors
and outdoors (Playthings 1957, 180). A generation later, Mother Earth
News, the Popular Mechanics of the counterculture, told its readers how
to build "an up'n'down merry-go-round (Mother Earth News 1982, 126-
27). Such a history strongly suggests that the folk origins of other playground
equipment need to be investigated.
Beginning in the 1960s, playground designers began to rethink the
uses and form of play areas. Under the influence of Erik Erikson and Jean
Piaget rather than G. Stanley Hall and Joseph Lee, landscape architects de-
fined play as freedom from the requirements of work, as a manifestation of
choice, and as an exercise in imagination (Dattner 1974; 7-15). The designers
were also influenced by Scandinavian and British reformers who advocated
"adventure playgrounds" where children could build their own structures
using borrowed tools and scrap material (Allen 1969; Bengtsson 1974). A
play leader became a combination maintenance man, mediator, and anthro-
pologist (Prince 1972). He was no longer expected to keep order or lead
games. American designers began writing about "loose parts," "ambiguity,"
"flexibility," "diversity," "change," and "open endedness" (Aaron 1965;
Friedberg 1970; Nicholson 1971; Dattner 1974; Hogan 1974; R. C. Moore
1974; Frost and Klein 1979). Concern with safety, variety, physical devel-
opment, and opportunity characterizes playground theory at present.
Drawing on fifty years of research and experience, Lance Wuellner
lists forty guidelines for playground design (Wuellner 1979). In listing the
theoretical and practical implications of each research conclusion, he reveals
many of the assumptions about children currently held by planners and rec-
reation professionals. Some of the assumptions are contradictory, such as
the need to promote both solitary and group play, but there is open acknowl-
edgment of these oxymora. There is general recognition that children need
to be challenged as they grow and that all children want to be "where the
action is. " Traditional climbing structures on enclosed playgrounds are be-
ing replaced or supplemented by stone pyramids, log pilings, and concrete
shells. These objects are often meant to be street sculpture, outdoor art that
can be enjoyed aesthetically by adults and kinesthetically by children. The
contemporary playground is sometimes a sculpture garden, sometimes an
architectural parody. Europeans and Japanese seem to lavish more attention
on design, creating futuristic climbing structures and encouraging children
to "exercise their sense of discovery, individually and communally" (Rouard
and Simon 1977, 13). There is even some evidence that traditional games
are played more frequently on playgrounds of contemporary design than on
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? ? playgrounds equipped with the familiar swings, slides, and climbing appa-
ratus (Hayward, Rothenberg, and Beasley 1974, 150).
USE OF PLAYGROUNDS
Folklorists can help to discover the effect of playground design, location, and
size on traditional games. Carol Wojtowicz offers a model in her study of
changes in play over three generations in Philadelphia (Wojtowicz 1975).
Based on her interviews with persons who grew up in the city before World
War I, during the 1920s and 1930s, and a third group from the 1950s and
1960s, she finds that many games survived from generation to generation,
but many others were abandoned. In the pre-World War I group, there was
no mention of organized playgrounds, despite the fact that the playground
association was active at the time. Children played in the street and on va-
cant lots. The most popular games were tag, dodge ball, volleyball, shad-
ows (in which the pursuer tried to step on the shadow of the pursued), jump
rope, jacks, and marbles. For children of the 1920s and 1930s an elabo-
rate playground with a model village provided a change for a few hours a
week, but many played varieties of stickball and tip cat. Buck-buck, in which
boys pile on each other until the boys on the bottom guess a number, or until
the bottom man collapses, was mentioned in all three groups. The same game
is called Buck T Buck by black boys in Pittsburgh (M. Williams 1981), in-
dicating its migration westward and across racial lines. Wojtowicz's genera-
tion of the 1960s played tag and chase and capture games in playgrounds
that were being revitalized by the city recreation department. Some games
of the earlier periods, such as Peggy (tip cat) and mumblety peg seem to have
vanished.
The discrepancy between what a person remembers playing after
thirty or forty years and the range of games that were available to him in
his childhood also needs to be studied. Playground supervisors in Washing-
ton, D. C. , in 1916 encouraged such games as prisoner's base, fox and chick-
ens, and I spy, but none of the three persons I have interviewed recalled these
games spontaneously. One person mentioned baby-in-the-hat, a ball and
capture game listed by the Department of Playgrounds. ' The same individual
recalled two dozen other activities of his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s,
all independent of the playground system. Highly organized games of foot-
ball were played on any available field. Apparently, the distinctions chil-
dren make between playing on the sidewalk and street and playing in a
municipal playground are based on their folk definition of play. The char-
acteristics of play seem to include the declaration of identity of "player," the
elaboration of that identity by behavior that makes use of mutually accept-
246 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? able actions, and the achievement of a feeling that the identity and behav-
ior are pleasant and fun. Other kinds of activities, including solitary amuse-
ment, may be labeled play on further reflection, but, like playground activi-
ties, they seem defined by other factors, such as equipment or the absence
of other children.
The power of the physical environment to influence and define play
is clearly seen in Hayward, Rothenberg, and Beasley's survey of three types
of playgrounds (1974). Traditional, contemporary, and adventure play-
grounds were used in significantly different ways by quite different popula-
tions. Traditional playgrounds had a population composed of 29. 48 percent
preschool children; 20. 84 percent ages six to thirteen; 9. 8 percent teenag-
ers; and 39. 78 percent adults (nursemaids, parents, and play leaders). Con-
temporary playgrounds had 35. 23 percent preschoolers; 22. 21 percent ages
six to thirteen; 6. 85 percent teenagers; and 35. 71 percent adults. Adventure
playgrounds had only 1. 74 percent preschoolers, but 44. 58 percent ages six
to thirteen; 32. 16 percent teenagers; and 21. 52 percent adults. The figures
indicate, I think, that traditional and contemporary playgrounds lose their
appeal as children grow older and that play in these areas is conducted within
sight of adults. According to Hayward and his associates, the most frequent
activities in traditional playgrounds are swinging, water play, monkey bars
(jungle gym), see-sawing, and what they call "connective," that is going from
one activity to another. Passive activities, eating and drinking, and solitary
play occupied about 10 percent of the time of the observations. "Games"
were observed only three times, for a total of eighteen minutes, out of 1,288
minutes of study.
The most frequently observed activities in contemporary playgrounds
were equipment play, water play, sitting, dressing, and sand play. Games were
observed eight times for a total of 111 minutes. The differences between the
traditional and contemporary seem to be based largely on the kinds of equip-
ment. Given the less differentiated apparatus in contemporary playgrounds,
the children seem to turn to games more readily. In contrast, the most fre-
quently observed activities on adventure playgrounds were "clubhouse,"
building, talking, and "passive activities. " Games are unreported and there
are many more activities like gardening, singing, arguing, play fighting, and
playing with rocks, which were observed only once or twice. How many of
these activities would be labeled play by the children themselves is unknown.
The skills and concerns of the sociologist, anthropologist, psychologist, his-
torian, and folklorist need to be combined to answer this question.
The importance of time as well as place is implied in three studies of
playground language. The Opies have focused on the games used to start
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? ? games, some of which take several minutes (1969).
Counting out rhymes,
self-appointment, and argument are all used to begin play activities and
should be studied to see if they correlate with particular places and times.
The Knapps' study of the terms used to declare a truce or pause during a
game also suggests that external environmental factors shape the content of
children's lore. The decline of the term "Kings X" and the rise of "Time"
or "Times" appears to be due to the growing influence of timed sports
(Knapp and Knapp 1973). A report on the use of the term "Olley, Olley
Oxen Free" by children when they decide to end a game of hide and seek
argues that this variant of "All Outs in Free" is uniquely American both in
form and function, since the shift from a single-person hunt to a contest of
physical skill allows greater participation by all the players (French 1975).
CONCLUSIONS
The implications of the foregoing for folklorists and others are that play-
grounds are defined by both physical characteristics and by use. The site of
play may be supervised or unsupervised, occasional or regular, intended or
unintended, in playgrounds, backyards, schools or streets (Mason 1982).
Each of these factors requires a creative response from children, and each
contributes to children's folklore. Psychologists have long been aware of the
importance of place and peer group on children's behavior (Gump 1975;
Campbell 1964). What was once called "the gang" has been studied for a
century. Most of the students of children's gangs sought to eliminate or to
change them. A few might agree with Jane Addams that "in these social folk-
mores, so to speak, the young citizen learns to act upon his own determina-
tion," but most rejected the possibility of a worthwhile connection between
childhood and adulthood (Campbell 1964, 292). Yet, as James Bennett
(1981) has recently shown, there lies buried in past studies of delinquency
a rich body of material on children's folklore. "I liked the new game of steal-
ing I had learned, and it really was a game and I played it with much zest
and relish," says a boy in one of Shaw's case studies. The reports of Shaw,
Frederic Thrasher, and others remind us that much of children's lore is an-
tisocial and that the child and the discipline of urban life have a long his-
tory of conflict.
The playground and to a certain extent the school are the products
of urbanization and its discontents (R. C. Moore 1986). We need to know
much more about the ways in which our culture deals with the contradic-
tions between freedom and constraint, individualism and conformity. We can
look for answers in the ways children treat each other and the ways adults
have treated children. When the International Playground Association
248 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? changed its name to the International Association for the Child's Right to
Play, it signaled that those rights may need protecting. When we see "No
Playing" signs on streets and dumpsters, when we are urged to remove doors
from old refrigerators and to fill old wells, are we saving children's lives or
merely acknowledging that life is full of hazards? The lure of forbidden play
is a strong element in children's lore. Does it help the adult come to terms
with his own world? How many battles of life are won on the playing fields
of childhood?
These and other questions spring to mind in considering the folklore
of children's play spaces. The schools and traditional playgrounds were
largely successful in confining children and making them perform the tricks
of muscle and mind that adult society demanded, but they failed to suppress
the flow of children's lore that entered and left each day with the boys and
girls. The playground was a kind of zoo in which the keepers were as caged
as the kept (Sutton-Smith 1980b, 4-8). Fences and walls created a false sense
that play was controlled, children safe. On the rare occasions when they
looked closely, adults were bemused to find that children were physically
confined but mentally free. Play on the playground resembled play in the
street. Adventure playgrounds, comprehensive playgrounds, and anarchy
zones are responses to the discovery of children's lore. Whether they will be
any more successful than traditional playgrounds remains to be seen. The
struggle for the control of space between adults and children will continue.
Space and place are important. The study of children's folklore can help to
clarify the nature of the struggle and locate it in place and time.
Note: The author gratefully acknowledges the useful suggestions of
the late Frederick Gutheim.
NOTE TO CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Interviews on their play history were held by the author with the following
persons: Nick Graziano, 1983, Tom Kelly, 1983, and Sylvia Shugrue, 1983.
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? ?
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? ? I2 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE
OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
"One of my favorite toys when I was four years old was a piece of stiff wire
roughly twelve inches long, bent into the shape of a double letter C. It must
have been the piece that holds a thermos bottle firmly in the lid of a metal
lunch box. I found it on the beach in southern California and named it
'gropper,' because, I think, the lower part of the C looked to me like the legs
of a grasshopper. The upper part looked something like the bill of a duck.
In the ensuing months I worked with my mother and grandmother to make
a large wardrobe of bright colored socks to pull over the ends of the wire
legs and a variety of wool, silk, and cotton tubes to slip over the bill and
cover its body. For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my
other toys-cars, Teddy Bear, blocks, and soldiers-but at some point I be-
came self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded
Gropper, bag and baggage. If I had kept Gropper and donated him, together
with the rest of my playthings, to the Smithsonian, what would a curator
do with such a bizarre object? " (Mergen 1982, 121-22).
Children, when left to their own devices, can create elaborate things-
objects, indeed environments, suited to the spirit and imagination of youth.
Yet often such creativity eludes the watchful eye of the parent, no less the
curator or ethnographer. The child commonly keeps the creation private.
Why? Children may feel embarrassed about making playthings themselves
when toys supplied by Mom and Dad sit idly by, or they may be discour-
aged from strange (by adult standards, anyway) flights of fancy. Many par-
ents take the attitude that the child's world springs from adult hands and
tastes. Many folk toys, songs, and games for children, in fact, are really
crafted by adults. But children do think for themselves, and thought sparks
creativity-a small world of their own making.
This chapter offers a guide to basic issues, approaches, and sources
associated with the study of the many material worlds of children. First, I
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? ? offer a historical background to the study itself, and I follow with a survey
of some approaches used today. I make a case for the special study of folk
or traditional objects and processes as a special category of research into
material culture. In doing so, I realize that some distinctions between mass
and folk culture are necessary, although the two cannot easily be separated.
Because an important point of this survey is the way that the traditional
expressions of children vary, not only by regional or ethnic culture, but also
by their very maturation process, I particularly explore developmental ap-
proaches. I suggest ways to combine comparison of texts or objects with
contexts or processes across the life course, and I examine how ethnicity,
gender, region, and class have been especially evident in research on the
material folk culture of children.
I begin by offering an example of an object that is both a text and a
context and suggests the process by which small worlds are created. The
treehouse is an enclosed space that relies greatly on the child's imagination.
Usually built by children's hands, the rough exterior and makeshift furni-
ture inside become transformed. The height and cover of the tree offers chil-
dren, especially, it seems, boys, a certain independence. Engaging in the pro-
cess of gathering materials, construction, and occupation allows for partici-
pation in culture. It responds to, and also establishes, traditions. Children
are discovering their technical capabilities and something about aesthetics
and design. In the American setting, this design emphasizes a square or rect-
angular shape and social separation. Thomas Yukic, for example, recalled
his 1930s childhood in Niagara Falls for New York Folklore. A memory that
stood out was of the things his "gang" built: "Tommy Leshak built a com-
plete hut near the elm tree on the island, bringing every scrap of material
by boat to construct a small eight foot square building. It was a great place
for rainy days and card games. The hut was of corrugated tin roofing and
wood planks; Tom poured a cement floor from the left-over cement drip-
pings which were washed off daily by Empire Builders Supply Company
trucks near Sandocks" (Yukic 1975, 225).
Down in New York City, Fred Ferretti reported returning to the neigh-
borhood where he grew up, only to find that not as much had changed as
he thought. "The empty lot where we built huts out of wood scraps and dis-
carded refrigerator cartons, where we roasted 'Mickies'-the right way to
roast them was to dig a shallow hole in the dirt, line it with bricks, fill it
with wood, start a fire, and drop the raw potatoes into the flames; they were
cooked when their skins were reduced to jet-black powder. To my surprise,
the basketball backboard we built and nailed to the telephone pole a couple
of houses away from mine was still attached, although there was no hoop"
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? ? (Ferretti 1975, 13). He realized upon reflection that adults often believe that
their childhood labors were unique. But he found strong continuities between
the items made in his childhood and what he found when he returned. He
sensed traditions at work.
Manipulating resources and structures to shape things is an everyday
experience for youth (Adler 1981, 8-10; Bronner 1986b). Think back to your
childhood. I know that in mine play typically involved making things.
Stickball bats were made from broom handles, go-carts from skates and
boards, slingshots from clothes hangers. Wadded paper became ammunition
for jerry-built "spit-shooters" loaded with green pellets taken from wild
cherry trees. We made boats out of scrap wood to try out in the park pond.
Children on my block hunted down and altered all manner of smooth sur-
faces for sledding during the winter. We even had a hideout in an isolated
lot where we constructed makeshift shelters and tables. You probably also
recall long hours altering and using the box the Christmas present came in,
long after the gift's attraction passed.
Material folk culture is the term commonly used to describe such tra-
ditional, creative encounters with physical things. It is not simply the exist-
ence of individual items that is significant but their interconnection of con-
cept and design as well as their association with a social system. As to the
folk in material folk culture of children, when recording the traditional be-
havior of children, I look for informal ways children interact and learn. True,
they might consult a book or ask a teacher, but I find that informal, or folk,
learning through word of mouth, demonstration or imitation, and custom-
ary example are still the predominant means by which children acquire
knowledge of technique and form. Out on the beach, children begin digging;
later they consult one another or imitate models elsewhere in their view. As
they build their sand forts, they go through a folk process. To be sure, forms
exist that folklorists call folk because they stand up to the usual test of tra-
dition-whether they repeat and vary over time and space. String figures like
the cat's cradle, carved wooden chains, and, more recently, the "cootie
catcher" made of paper are examples (Boas 1938; Bronner 1981a; Samuelson
1980). Still, my study of "folk" is meant to shed light on the thought and
behavior of people; the lore is only a partial representation of the behavior
involved in creativity (Bronner 1986a). Especially when dealing with chil-
dren, I observe the processes of learning, communicating, and making-the
active and cognitive parts of traditional expression.
The material of material folk culture includes both construction and
decoration. In the study of children's material culture, primary attention has
been given to toys and other objects used in play (Schlereth 1990). Second
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? ? is art and craft (often also discussed as part of play), and occasionally body
ornamentation commonly applied to hair, nails, and face. Other subjects are
neglected, yet could easily be part of the study of children's folk culture.
Foodways, clothing, and ephemeral architecture (treehouses, for example),
indeed the connection between children's labor and play, still await studies
in depth. As material, the objects and environments under study provide
tangible evidence that especially suggests considerations of form and creative
process (see Bronner 1986a, 1986b). As evidence of shared tradition, the
material suggests social interaction and culture in process. Here I am con-
cerned with the ways that the tradition works at a given age, keeping in mind
that influencing factors of gender, ethnicity, and region, to name a few vari-
ables, have a bearing on cultural expression. In the following discussion, my
use of material culture centers on things made or altered by children for their
use.
A primary task taken up in some of the first studies of the material
folk culture of children was to describe through American history the vari-
ety of skills and crafts children have engaged in. In 1898, Alice Morse Earle
wrote a chronicle of Colonial everyday life that covered the rounds of
children's life. Looking through diaries and travelers' accounts she found that
demands were put on boys and girls to be "useful. " A young girl from
Colchester, Connecticut, wrote in her diary in 1775: "Fix'd two gowns for
Welsh's girls,-Carded two,-Spun linen,-Worked on Cheesebasket,-
Hatchel'd flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,-Pleated and ironed,-
Read a Sermon of Dodridge's,-Spooled apiece,-Milked the cows,-Spun
linen, did 50 knots,-Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,-Spun thread
to whiten,-Set a Red dye,-Had two Scholars from Mrs. Taylor's,-I carded
two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly,-Spun harness twine,-
Scoured the pewter" (Earle 1898, 253). Beyond the chores of the house and
farm, girls were expected to indulge in decorative crafts such as embroidery,
paper cutting, and lace making. Many of these activities were taught to chil-
dren by adults. The private world that children made is often harder to un-
cover. Earle implied, however, that the association of children's material cul-
ture almost totally with play is a modern one. She spotlighted material cul-
ture as an important part of American social history of family and commu-
nity life.
The use of a historical outline to describe children's culture persists
to the present. Bernard Mergen's survey of play, for example, included a
chapter on the artifacts of play (see also Heininger 1984; Graff 1987; West
and Petrik 1992). His outline showed a movement from handmade toys
taken from nature to games and toys increasingly mass-produced. To cat-
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? ? egorize the early period, he quoted Dorothy Howard's turn-of-the-century
reminiscence: "A 'plaything'-a stick, for example-was not a stick but
(metaphorically) a horse to ride, a thermometer for playing doctor, a writ-
ing or drawing tool for marking on the ground, a log for building log cab-
ins, a boat to float down a rivulet from a spring shower, play candy, a shot-
gun for hunting, or another person. " "To the bounty of nature," Mergen
wrote, "the Industrial Revolution added a vast toy store of play objects:
washers, tires, clothespins, coat hangers, tin cans, ball point pens, paper
plates, bottle tops, rubber bands, and paper clips" (Mergen 1982, 104).
Modern toys, he claimed, are dominated by the mass culture; factory-made
toys by this reasoning have overshadowed folk toys in the twentieth cen-
tury. His linear model harks back to the notion that progress inevitably
marches forward and eliminates folk culture. It is problematic to assume that
folk culture does not adapt to changing surroundings, or that moderniza-
tion necessarily means that industry replaces the influence of the handmade
object. To be sure, more interaction takes place between folk processes and
mass-produced products today, but then again there has always been an in-
teraction between folk and popular culture. Modern toys have also attracted
more attention since maintaining childhood as a separate generation of lei-
sure through specialized products has been a recent commercial preoccupa-
tion of adults.
Research of artifacts greatly informs the social history of childhood,
but the prevailing scholarship tends to overrepresent popular toys and fur-
nishings associated with middle- and upper-class living because they have
remained in the historical record (Schlereth 1990; Carson 1989). An addi-
tional problem is the tendency to structure history in an exclusively linear
and progressive direction. Folk culture scholarship often portrays simulta-
neous trends toward tradition and change, and examines local worlds for
differences.
save space. "Eighteen boys can be kept busy on a single lot 18 by 20 feet if
it is equipped with the proper apparatus and an instructor is at hand. " Fi-
nally, the climbing apparatus fulfills a biological urge to do "stunts," a be-
lief echoed twenty-four years later by the manufacturers of Junglegym who
advertised their structures as meeting "a deepseated instinct for climbing"
(Mero 1909, 57-59; Playground Equipment Company 1933, 11).
Playground equipment manufacturers were quick to advertise their
products in terms that appealed to purchasing committees. The Fred Medart
Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, for example, advertised in the May
1914 issue of Playground that a "public playground is intended to cultivate
correct physical and moral development, and supervision and the right kind
of equipment are equally important. Apparatus well-planned economizes
in space and affords the best way to provide for a large number of children. "
In the same year, the Narragansett Machine Company of Providence pub-
lished a catalog that emphasized the strength, durability, simplicity, safety,
and compactness of its playground gymnastic equipment. Recognizing that
many cities fell short of the ideal of providing each playground with a full-
time supervisor, the Narragansett catalog noted that "each device should
suggest its own use, even to a child" (Narragansett 1914). The Spaulding
catalog of 1919 contained complete plans for playgrounds of seven to ten
acres divided into areas for boys and girls, children and young adults
(Spaulding 1919).
The increasing size of playgrounds and the use of fences to segregate
the area reflected two other theories of the early play movement. Henry
Curtis advocated fences for schoolyards and playgrounds to keep out row-
dies and to make discipline easier. "The fence also makes of the school yard
an institution and helps to create loyalties. " Within the playground, fences
should be placed between the boys' and girls' play areas. "The reasons for
it are obvious and sufficient, there are often loose girls and always loose boys
coming to the playgrounds, and it is better not to have them together, or
where they can corrupt other children" (Curtis 1913, 16). In 1928 and again
in 1938, this view was expounded by the Playground and Recreation Asso-
ciation:
It is almost universally agreed that a children's playground should be
fenced. . . Perhaps the most important reason for fencing the play-
ground is the safety which the fence provides. It prevents the child
from running needlessly into the street after a batted ball and also
prevents injury to passerby caused by batted balls, for example. Pro-
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? ? tection of property is another factor, and the fence not only protects
the playground from vandalism but also prevents trespassing upon
neighboring property. By putting the playground under complete con-
trol and keeping out mischief makers, the fence greatly simplifies the
problem of maintenance. The fence often provides the solution of the
problem of beautifying the playground. . . . Not the least of the rea-
sons for fencing the playground is that the fence adds to it a degree
of individuality. (Playground and Recreation Association of America
1938, 12-13)
Enlargement of playgrounds came in response to increased use by older chil-
dren and adults. The definition of play was changing from children's games
to community leisure, from creation to recreation. As the definition of play
changed, the fence became a symbol of the old order. An article in the Au-
gust 19, 1925, Evening Star of Washington, D. C. , reported that gangs were
terrorizing playground directors and destroying property. Significantly, the
chief object of their vandalism seems to have been the playground fences.
More than fifty years later, a study of enclosed playgrounds concluded that
enclosed play areas increased the imaginative play of preschool children
(Barnett and Kruidenier 1981, 323-36).
A general reevaluation of the efficacy of playground equipment was
presented in M. W. Johnson's Child Development (1935). Reporting an ex-
periment to determine the effects on behavior of variation in the amount of
play equipment in groups of three-, four-, and five-year-olds at the Univer-
sity of Michigan Elementary School playground, Johnson concluded, "The
more extensively equipped playground for each group is characterized by a
greater combined amount of bodily exercise and play with materials and
fewer social contacts in games and undesirable behavior [teasing, crying,
quarreling, hitting]. The less extensively equipped playground for each group
is characterized by a lesser combined amount of bodily exercise and play
with materials and a greater number of social conflicts" (Johnson 1935, 66).
These rather obvious conclusions are important, however, since they raise
the question of whether too much equipment might interfere with social
development. To encourage social interaction, Johnson suggested the use of
gardens and toy trucks and a return to the use of sand box play. A genera-
tion later, research was being published to show that playground equipment
of specific kinds-wooden pilings, horizontal bars, and geodesic domes-
produced different kinds of movement and spatial awareness in kindergar-
ten children, but the larger questions of the influence of playground appa-
ratus on children's lives and lore have gone unanswered.
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? ? From personal memory, the apparatus that combined swings, slides,
see-saws, rings, horizontal bars, and a sliding pole, in the public park of a
small Western city in the late 1940s, was a focal point for fourth- through
eighth-grade boys' after-school activities. Games of chase, tag, and follow-
the-leader were played on every part of the apparatus including the top sup-
porting bar. The games involved group fantasies, individual heroics, and
occasional injury, all of which stimulated interest and encouraged contin-
ued use of the equipment. Outside laboratory observations, play on play-
ground apparatus takes on a different and often unsanctioned character.
Moreover, traditional playground equipment is very durable, thus allowing
several generations of children to establish and maintain a tradition of use.
In the 1960s and 1970s, manufacturers of playground equipment
began to redesign their products, partly in response to a shift in the market
and partly because new plastics and other synthetic materials made the
manufacture of new kinds of apparatus more profitable. The shift away from
public playgrounds to private backyard playgrounds followed the popula-
tion shift from city to suburb that accelerated after World War II. Although
many real-estate developers made the addition of a community playground
part of their sales promotion, more and more parents bought small replicas
of playground equipment for home use. Both home and public playgrounds
had to compete with movies, television, and commercial theme parks for the
attention and affection of children. The manufacturers responded with
molded plastic animals for riding, pipe outlined rockets, stagecoaches, fire
engines, and "storybook villages" (American Playground Device Company
1974; Miracle Playground Equipment Company 1975). One fascinating ex-
ample of the transformation of a folk playground device to a piece of pub-
lic playground equipment to a backyard apparatus is the revolving see-saw.
In 1938, Lizzie Davis of Marion, South Carolina, recalled her child-
hood as a slave for a Federal Writer's Project interviewer: one of her stron-
gest memories was of cutting a small pine tree to make a "flying mare. "
Boring a hole in the middle of the pine pole and fitting it on a peg fixed on
the stump created a revolving see-saw (Rawick 1972, 2:294). John Champlin
and Arthur Bostwick illustrate what they call "an ancient french see-saw,
called Bascule Double," in their 1890 collection of games and sports. This
device is two see-saws that cross over a pivot, allowing both up and down
and revolving motion (p. 618). A similar ride was illustrated in the July 1913
issue of Popular Mechanics; this version was constructed of steel tubing and
installed on municipal playgrounds. Forty years later, Popular Mechanics
again featured the "seesaw [that] doubles as a merry-go-round," this time
built of scrap steel and auto parts by the home craftsman (Popular Mechan-
244 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? ics, July 1913, 116 and March 1953, 173). In 1957 a company in Birming-
ham, Alabama, advertised a portable "Merri-Go-Whirler" for use indoors
and outdoors (Playthings 1957, 180). A generation later, Mother Earth
News, the Popular Mechanics of the counterculture, told its readers how
to build "an up'n'down merry-go-round (Mother Earth News 1982, 126-
27). Such a history strongly suggests that the folk origins of other playground
equipment need to be investigated.
Beginning in the 1960s, playground designers began to rethink the
uses and form of play areas. Under the influence of Erik Erikson and Jean
Piaget rather than G. Stanley Hall and Joseph Lee, landscape architects de-
fined play as freedom from the requirements of work, as a manifestation of
choice, and as an exercise in imagination (Dattner 1974; 7-15). The designers
were also influenced by Scandinavian and British reformers who advocated
"adventure playgrounds" where children could build their own structures
using borrowed tools and scrap material (Allen 1969; Bengtsson 1974). A
play leader became a combination maintenance man, mediator, and anthro-
pologist (Prince 1972). He was no longer expected to keep order or lead
games. American designers began writing about "loose parts," "ambiguity,"
"flexibility," "diversity," "change," and "open endedness" (Aaron 1965;
Friedberg 1970; Nicholson 1971; Dattner 1974; Hogan 1974; R. C. Moore
1974; Frost and Klein 1979). Concern with safety, variety, physical devel-
opment, and opportunity characterizes playground theory at present.
Drawing on fifty years of research and experience, Lance Wuellner
lists forty guidelines for playground design (Wuellner 1979). In listing the
theoretical and practical implications of each research conclusion, he reveals
many of the assumptions about children currently held by planners and rec-
reation professionals. Some of the assumptions are contradictory, such as
the need to promote both solitary and group play, but there is open acknowl-
edgment of these oxymora. There is general recognition that children need
to be challenged as they grow and that all children want to be "where the
action is. " Traditional climbing structures on enclosed playgrounds are be-
ing replaced or supplemented by stone pyramids, log pilings, and concrete
shells. These objects are often meant to be street sculpture, outdoor art that
can be enjoyed aesthetically by adults and kinesthetically by children. The
contemporary playground is sometimes a sculpture garden, sometimes an
architectural parody. Europeans and Japanese seem to lavish more attention
on design, creating futuristic climbing structures and encouraging children
to "exercise their sense of discovery, individually and communally" (Rouard
and Simon 1977, 13). There is even some evidence that traditional games
are played more frequently on playgrounds of contemporary design than on
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? ? playgrounds equipped with the familiar swings, slides, and climbing appa-
ratus (Hayward, Rothenberg, and Beasley 1974, 150).
USE OF PLAYGROUNDS
Folklorists can help to discover the effect of playground design, location, and
size on traditional games. Carol Wojtowicz offers a model in her study of
changes in play over three generations in Philadelphia (Wojtowicz 1975).
Based on her interviews with persons who grew up in the city before World
War I, during the 1920s and 1930s, and a third group from the 1950s and
1960s, she finds that many games survived from generation to generation,
but many others were abandoned. In the pre-World War I group, there was
no mention of organized playgrounds, despite the fact that the playground
association was active at the time. Children played in the street and on va-
cant lots. The most popular games were tag, dodge ball, volleyball, shad-
ows (in which the pursuer tried to step on the shadow of the pursued), jump
rope, jacks, and marbles. For children of the 1920s and 1930s an elabo-
rate playground with a model village provided a change for a few hours a
week, but many played varieties of stickball and tip cat. Buck-buck, in which
boys pile on each other until the boys on the bottom guess a number, or until
the bottom man collapses, was mentioned in all three groups. The same game
is called Buck T Buck by black boys in Pittsburgh (M. Williams 1981), in-
dicating its migration westward and across racial lines. Wojtowicz's genera-
tion of the 1960s played tag and chase and capture games in playgrounds
that were being revitalized by the city recreation department. Some games
of the earlier periods, such as Peggy (tip cat) and mumblety peg seem to have
vanished.
The discrepancy between what a person remembers playing after
thirty or forty years and the range of games that were available to him in
his childhood also needs to be studied. Playground supervisors in Washing-
ton, D. C. , in 1916 encouraged such games as prisoner's base, fox and chick-
ens, and I spy, but none of the three persons I have interviewed recalled these
games spontaneously. One person mentioned baby-in-the-hat, a ball and
capture game listed by the Department of Playgrounds. ' The same individual
recalled two dozen other activities of his childhood in the 1920s and 1930s,
all independent of the playground system. Highly organized games of foot-
ball were played on any available field. Apparently, the distinctions chil-
dren make between playing on the sidewalk and street and playing in a
municipal playground are based on their folk definition of play. The char-
acteristics of play seem to include the declaration of identity of "player," the
elaboration of that identity by behavior that makes use of mutually accept-
246 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? able actions, and the achievement of a feeling that the identity and behav-
ior are pleasant and fun. Other kinds of activities, including solitary amuse-
ment, may be labeled play on further reflection, but, like playground activi-
ties, they seem defined by other factors, such as equipment or the absence
of other children.
The power of the physical environment to influence and define play
is clearly seen in Hayward, Rothenberg, and Beasley's survey of three types
of playgrounds (1974). Traditional, contemporary, and adventure play-
grounds were used in significantly different ways by quite different popula-
tions. Traditional playgrounds had a population composed of 29. 48 percent
preschool children; 20. 84 percent ages six to thirteen; 9. 8 percent teenag-
ers; and 39. 78 percent adults (nursemaids, parents, and play leaders). Con-
temporary playgrounds had 35. 23 percent preschoolers; 22. 21 percent ages
six to thirteen; 6. 85 percent teenagers; and 35. 71 percent adults. Adventure
playgrounds had only 1. 74 percent preschoolers, but 44. 58 percent ages six
to thirteen; 32. 16 percent teenagers; and 21. 52 percent adults. The figures
indicate, I think, that traditional and contemporary playgrounds lose their
appeal as children grow older and that play in these areas is conducted within
sight of adults. According to Hayward and his associates, the most frequent
activities in traditional playgrounds are swinging, water play, monkey bars
(jungle gym), see-sawing, and what they call "connective," that is going from
one activity to another. Passive activities, eating and drinking, and solitary
play occupied about 10 percent of the time of the observations. "Games"
were observed only three times, for a total of eighteen minutes, out of 1,288
minutes of study.
The most frequently observed activities in contemporary playgrounds
were equipment play, water play, sitting, dressing, and sand play. Games were
observed eight times for a total of 111 minutes. The differences between the
traditional and contemporary seem to be based largely on the kinds of equip-
ment. Given the less differentiated apparatus in contemporary playgrounds,
the children seem to turn to games more readily. In contrast, the most fre-
quently observed activities on adventure playgrounds were "clubhouse,"
building, talking, and "passive activities. " Games are unreported and there
are many more activities like gardening, singing, arguing, play fighting, and
playing with rocks, which were observed only once or twice. How many of
these activities would be labeled play by the children themselves is unknown.
The skills and concerns of the sociologist, anthropologist, psychologist, his-
torian, and folklorist need to be combined to answer this question.
The importance of time as well as place is implied in three studies of
playground language. The Opies have focused on the games used to start
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? ? games, some of which take several minutes (1969).
Counting out rhymes,
self-appointment, and argument are all used to begin play activities and
should be studied to see if they correlate with particular places and times.
The Knapps' study of the terms used to declare a truce or pause during a
game also suggests that external environmental factors shape the content of
children's lore. The decline of the term "Kings X" and the rise of "Time"
or "Times" appears to be due to the growing influence of timed sports
(Knapp and Knapp 1973). A report on the use of the term "Olley, Olley
Oxen Free" by children when they decide to end a game of hide and seek
argues that this variant of "All Outs in Free" is uniquely American both in
form and function, since the shift from a single-person hunt to a contest of
physical skill allows greater participation by all the players (French 1975).
CONCLUSIONS
The implications of the foregoing for folklorists and others are that play-
grounds are defined by both physical characteristics and by use. The site of
play may be supervised or unsupervised, occasional or regular, intended or
unintended, in playgrounds, backyards, schools or streets (Mason 1982).
Each of these factors requires a creative response from children, and each
contributes to children's folklore. Psychologists have long been aware of the
importance of place and peer group on children's behavior (Gump 1975;
Campbell 1964). What was once called "the gang" has been studied for a
century. Most of the students of children's gangs sought to eliminate or to
change them. A few might agree with Jane Addams that "in these social folk-
mores, so to speak, the young citizen learns to act upon his own determina-
tion," but most rejected the possibility of a worthwhile connection between
childhood and adulthood (Campbell 1964, 292). Yet, as James Bennett
(1981) has recently shown, there lies buried in past studies of delinquency
a rich body of material on children's folklore. "I liked the new game of steal-
ing I had learned, and it really was a game and I played it with much zest
and relish," says a boy in one of Shaw's case studies. The reports of Shaw,
Frederic Thrasher, and others remind us that much of children's lore is an-
tisocial and that the child and the discipline of urban life have a long his-
tory of conflict.
The playground and to a certain extent the school are the products
of urbanization and its discontents (R. C. Moore 1986). We need to know
much more about the ways in which our culture deals with the contradic-
tions between freedom and constraint, individualism and conformity. We can
look for answers in the ways children treat each other and the ways adults
have treated children. When the International Playground Association
248 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? changed its name to the International Association for the Child's Right to
Play, it signaled that those rights may need protecting. When we see "No
Playing" signs on streets and dumpsters, when we are urged to remove doors
from old refrigerators and to fill old wells, are we saving children's lives or
merely acknowledging that life is full of hazards? The lure of forbidden play
is a strong element in children's lore. Does it help the adult come to terms
with his own world? How many battles of life are won on the playing fields
of childhood?
These and other questions spring to mind in considering the folklore
of children's play spaces. The schools and traditional playgrounds were
largely successful in confining children and making them perform the tricks
of muscle and mind that adult society demanded, but they failed to suppress
the flow of children's lore that entered and left each day with the boys and
girls. The playground was a kind of zoo in which the keepers were as caged
as the kept (Sutton-Smith 1980b, 4-8). Fences and walls created a false sense
that play was controlled, children safe. On the rare occasions when they
looked closely, adults were bemused to find that children were physically
confined but mentally free. Play on the playground resembled play in the
street. Adventure playgrounds, comprehensive playgrounds, and anarchy
zones are responses to the discovery of children's lore. Whether they will be
any more successful than traditional playgrounds remains to be seen. The
struggle for the control of space between adults and children will continue.
Space and place are important. The study of children's folklore can help to
clarify the nature of the struggle and locate it in place and time.
Note: The author gratefully acknowledges the useful suggestions of
the late Frederick Gutheim.
NOTE TO CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Interviews on their play history were held by the author with the following
persons: Nick Graziano, 1983, Tom Kelly, 1983, and Sylvia Shugrue, 1983.
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? ?
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? ? I2 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE
OF CHILDREN
Simon J. Bronner
"One of my favorite toys when I was four years old was a piece of stiff wire
roughly twelve inches long, bent into the shape of a double letter C. It must
have been the piece that holds a thermos bottle firmly in the lid of a metal
lunch box. I found it on the beach in southern California and named it
'gropper,' because, I think, the lower part of the C looked to me like the legs
of a grasshopper. The upper part looked something like the bill of a duck.
In the ensuing months I worked with my mother and grandmother to make
a large wardrobe of bright colored socks to pull over the ends of the wire
legs and a variety of wool, silk, and cotton tubes to slip over the bill and
cover its body. For several years, Gropper held an honored place among my
other toys-cars, Teddy Bear, blocks, and soldiers-but at some point I be-
came self-conscious and a bit embarrassed about my fantasy and discarded
Gropper, bag and baggage. If I had kept Gropper and donated him, together
with the rest of my playthings, to the Smithsonian, what would a curator
do with such a bizarre object? " (Mergen 1982, 121-22).
Children, when left to their own devices, can create elaborate things-
objects, indeed environments, suited to the spirit and imagination of youth.
Yet often such creativity eludes the watchful eye of the parent, no less the
curator or ethnographer. The child commonly keeps the creation private.
Why? Children may feel embarrassed about making playthings themselves
when toys supplied by Mom and Dad sit idly by, or they may be discour-
aged from strange (by adult standards, anyway) flights of fancy. Many par-
ents take the attitude that the child's world springs from adult hands and
tastes. Many folk toys, songs, and games for children, in fact, are really
crafted by adults. But children do think for themselves, and thought sparks
creativity-a small world of their own making.
This chapter offers a guide to basic issues, approaches, and sources
associated with the study of the many material worlds of children. First, I
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? ? offer a historical background to the study itself, and I follow with a survey
of some approaches used today. I make a case for the special study of folk
or traditional objects and processes as a special category of research into
material culture. In doing so, I realize that some distinctions between mass
and folk culture are necessary, although the two cannot easily be separated.
Because an important point of this survey is the way that the traditional
expressions of children vary, not only by regional or ethnic culture, but also
by their very maturation process, I particularly explore developmental ap-
proaches. I suggest ways to combine comparison of texts or objects with
contexts or processes across the life course, and I examine how ethnicity,
gender, region, and class have been especially evident in research on the
material folk culture of children.
I begin by offering an example of an object that is both a text and a
context and suggests the process by which small worlds are created. The
treehouse is an enclosed space that relies greatly on the child's imagination.
Usually built by children's hands, the rough exterior and makeshift furni-
ture inside become transformed. The height and cover of the tree offers chil-
dren, especially, it seems, boys, a certain independence. Engaging in the pro-
cess of gathering materials, construction, and occupation allows for partici-
pation in culture. It responds to, and also establishes, traditions. Children
are discovering their technical capabilities and something about aesthetics
and design. In the American setting, this design emphasizes a square or rect-
angular shape and social separation. Thomas Yukic, for example, recalled
his 1930s childhood in Niagara Falls for New York Folklore. A memory that
stood out was of the things his "gang" built: "Tommy Leshak built a com-
plete hut near the elm tree on the island, bringing every scrap of material
by boat to construct a small eight foot square building. It was a great place
for rainy days and card games. The hut was of corrugated tin roofing and
wood planks; Tom poured a cement floor from the left-over cement drip-
pings which were washed off daily by Empire Builders Supply Company
trucks near Sandocks" (Yukic 1975, 225).
Down in New York City, Fred Ferretti reported returning to the neigh-
borhood where he grew up, only to find that not as much had changed as
he thought. "The empty lot where we built huts out of wood scraps and dis-
carded refrigerator cartons, where we roasted 'Mickies'-the right way to
roast them was to dig a shallow hole in the dirt, line it with bricks, fill it
with wood, start a fire, and drop the raw potatoes into the flames; they were
cooked when their skins were reduced to jet-black powder. To my surprise,
the basketball backboard we built and nailed to the telephone pole a couple
of houses away from mine was still attached, although there was no hoop"
252 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? (Ferretti 1975, 13). He realized upon reflection that adults often believe that
their childhood labors were unique. But he found strong continuities between
the items made in his childhood and what he found when he returned. He
sensed traditions at work.
Manipulating resources and structures to shape things is an everyday
experience for youth (Adler 1981, 8-10; Bronner 1986b). Think back to your
childhood. I know that in mine play typically involved making things.
Stickball bats were made from broom handles, go-carts from skates and
boards, slingshots from clothes hangers. Wadded paper became ammunition
for jerry-built "spit-shooters" loaded with green pellets taken from wild
cherry trees. We made boats out of scrap wood to try out in the park pond.
Children on my block hunted down and altered all manner of smooth sur-
faces for sledding during the winter. We even had a hideout in an isolated
lot where we constructed makeshift shelters and tables. You probably also
recall long hours altering and using the box the Christmas present came in,
long after the gift's attraction passed.
Material folk culture is the term commonly used to describe such tra-
ditional, creative encounters with physical things. It is not simply the exist-
ence of individual items that is significant but their interconnection of con-
cept and design as well as their association with a social system. As to the
folk in material folk culture of children, when recording the traditional be-
havior of children, I look for informal ways children interact and learn. True,
they might consult a book or ask a teacher, but I find that informal, or folk,
learning through word of mouth, demonstration or imitation, and custom-
ary example are still the predominant means by which children acquire
knowledge of technique and form. Out on the beach, children begin digging;
later they consult one another or imitate models elsewhere in their view. As
they build their sand forts, they go through a folk process. To be sure, forms
exist that folklorists call folk because they stand up to the usual test of tra-
dition-whether they repeat and vary over time and space. String figures like
the cat's cradle, carved wooden chains, and, more recently, the "cootie
catcher" made of paper are examples (Boas 1938; Bronner 1981a; Samuelson
1980). Still, my study of "folk" is meant to shed light on the thought and
behavior of people; the lore is only a partial representation of the behavior
involved in creativity (Bronner 1986a). Especially when dealing with chil-
dren, I observe the processes of learning, communicating, and making-the
active and cognitive parts of traditional expression.
The material of material folk culture includes both construction and
decoration. In the study of children's material culture, primary attention has
been given to toys and other objects used in play (Schlereth 1990). Second
253
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? ? is art and craft (often also discussed as part of play), and occasionally body
ornamentation commonly applied to hair, nails, and face. Other subjects are
neglected, yet could easily be part of the study of children's folk culture.
Foodways, clothing, and ephemeral architecture (treehouses, for example),
indeed the connection between children's labor and play, still await studies
in depth. As material, the objects and environments under study provide
tangible evidence that especially suggests considerations of form and creative
process (see Bronner 1986a, 1986b). As evidence of shared tradition, the
material suggests social interaction and culture in process. Here I am con-
cerned with the ways that the tradition works at a given age, keeping in mind
that influencing factors of gender, ethnicity, and region, to name a few vari-
ables, have a bearing on cultural expression. In the following discussion, my
use of material culture centers on things made or altered by children for their
use.
A primary task taken up in some of the first studies of the material
folk culture of children was to describe through American history the vari-
ety of skills and crafts children have engaged in. In 1898, Alice Morse Earle
wrote a chronicle of Colonial everyday life that covered the rounds of
children's life. Looking through diaries and travelers' accounts she found that
demands were put on boys and girls to be "useful. " A young girl from
Colchester, Connecticut, wrote in her diary in 1775: "Fix'd two gowns for
Welsh's girls,-Carded two,-Spun linen,-Worked on Cheesebasket,-
Hatchel'd flax with Hannah, we did 51 lbs. apiece,-Pleated and ironed,-
Read a Sermon of Dodridge's,-Spooled apiece,-Milked the cows,-Spun
linen, did 50 knots,-Made a Broom of Guinea wheat straw,-Spun thread
to whiten,-Set a Red dye,-Had two Scholars from Mrs. Taylor's,-I carded
two pounds of whole wool and felt Nationly,-Spun harness twine,-
Scoured the pewter" (Earle 1898, 253). Beyond the chores of the house and
farm, girls were expected to indulge in decorative crafts such as embroidery,
paper cutting, and lace making. Many of these activities were taught to chil-
dren by adults. The private world that children made is often harder to un-
cover. Earle implied, however, that the association of children's material cul-
ture almost totally with play is a modern one. She spotlighted material cul-
ture as an important part of American social history of family and commu-
nity life.
The use of a historical outline to describe children's culture persists
to the present. Bernard Mergen's survey of play, for example, included a
chapter on the artifacts of play (see also Heininger 1984; Graff 1987; West
and Petrik 1992). His outline showed a movement from handmade toys
taken from nature to games and toys increasingly mass-produced. To cat-
254 MATERIAL FOLK CULTURE OF CHILDREN
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? ? egorize the early period, he quoted Dorothy Howard's turn-of-the-century
reminiscence: "A 'plaything'-a stick, for example-was not a stick but
(metaphorically) a horse to ride, a thermometer for playing doctor, a writ-
ing or drawing tool for marking on the ground, a log for building log cab-
ins, a boat to float down a rivulet from a spring shower, play candy, a shot-
gun for hunting, or another person. " "To the bounty of nature," Mergen
wrote, "the Industrial Revolution added a vast toy store of play objects:
washers, tires, clothespins, coat hangers, tin cans, ball point pens, paper
plates, bottle tops, rubber bands, and paper clips" (Mergen 1982, 104).
Modern toys, he claimed, are dominated by the mass culture; factory-made
toys by this reasoning have overshadowed folk toys in the twentieth cen-
tury. His linear model harks back to the notion that progress inevitably
marches forward and eliminates folk culture. It is problematic to assume that
folk culture does not adapt to changing surroundings, or that moderniza-
tion necessarily means that industry replaces the influence of the handmade
object. To be sure, more interaction takes place between folk processes and
mass-produced products today, but then again there has always been an in-
teraction between folk and popular culture. Modern toys have also attracted
more attention since maintaining childhood as a separate generation of lei-
sure through specialized products has been a recent commercial preoccupa-
tion of adults.
Research of artifacts greatly informs the social history of childhood,
but the prevailing scholarship tends to overrepresent popular toys and fur-
nishings associated with middle- and upper-class living because they have
remained in the historical record (Schlereth 1990; Carson 1989). An addi-
tional problem is the tendency to structure history in an exclusively linear
and progressive direction. Folk culture scholarship often portrays simulta-
neous trends toward tradition and change, and examines local worlds for
differences.
