The residents of the neighborhoods served
by parks and playgrounds changed rapidly in this period, creating new prob-
lems and possibilities during the last and current period.
by parks and playgrounds changed rapidly in this period, creating new prob-
lems and possibilities during the last and current period.
Childens - Folklore
Williams, describ-
ing a game of hares and hounds, recalls running all Saturday morning
through the cedar swamps and hills outside of town, the landscape giving
fresh dimensions to the game. The interrelation of place and play was rec-
ognized by T. R. Croswell in his 1899 study of "Amusements of Worcester
School Children. " "One reason why shinney is three times as popular in
Worcester as in Brooklyn, and that running games of all kinds appear to be
more popular, is undoubtedly the exceptional inducements offered by the
physical conditions of the former city; the many small ponds suitable for
shinney are a constant invitation to the small boy with a pair of skates, and
the innumerable vacant lots, covered with grass-not yet the dirty dump-
ing places so common in large cities-have furnished Worcester, free of
charge, an excellent system of small parks for playgrounds" (Croswell 1899,
343). Playing ball topped the list of favorite amusements of the boys of both
Brooklyn and Worcester in Croswell's surveys, but the greater urbanization
of Brooklyn had already led to modifications in children's folklore.
Stewart Culin, anthropologist and museum curator, discovered boys on
the streets of Brooklyn in 1890 playing various kinds of tag adapted to the
high stoops and fences of neighborhood buildings, hit the stick and ball games
utilizing street corners, and a variation on penny pitching involving picture
cards from cigarette packs (Culin 1891). Shinney had become a street hockey
game. Stickball was evolving many forms (Silverstein 1965). The many rec-
reation surveys conducted in major cities between 1910 and 1920 show the
same result: The majority of children seen out of doors were on the street, not
in yards, playgrounds, or even vacant lots (Mergen 1982, 71). The catalog of
what these children were doing on the streets is revealing. Some were playing
ball, tag, dolls, and jacks, but more were loitering, stealing, breaking things,
writing on walls, fighting, drinking, gambling, and watching prostitutes.
Clearly children were holding their own on the streets. Even those who played
quietly recall an element of contest: "All these games were, of course, extremely
inconvenient to pedestrians who had to walk around skelly games, or to au-
tomobiles (there weren't very many in those days, remember) that had to drive
slowly through punchball games while enduring catcalls. . . . I have never been
able to work up much sympathy for those who mourn the plight of the city
children crowded into their nasty streets. When I think back on the children
of my childhood, all I can remember is that those nasty streets belonged to us
and that the boisterous competition and the noisy excitement were the very
breath of life to us" (Asimov 1979, 57-58).
Children had institutionalized the streets as playgrounds despite the
opposition of police and recreation reformers. A survey in Buffalo in 1925
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? ? listed five objections to street play: (1) the danger of automobiles; (2) noise
and destruction of property; (3) the unsanitary conditions; (4) the unsuit-
ability of streets for highly organized play; and (5) the moral danger to chil-
dren who are unsupervised (Buffalo Recreation Survey 1925, 60). An op-
posite position is taken by Thomas Yukic who was growing up in Buffalo
in the same years. For Yukic and his brothers, Allen Avenue and the water-
front offered unlimited possibilities for swimming, collecting junk, and boat
building. The dangers of the street and lake merely heightened the enjoy-
ment (Yukic 1975). In the 1930s in Washington, D. C. , boys played highly
organized games of football and baseball in the street and any open space,
such as in the Ellipse behind the White House and on the triangle of grass
in front of Union Station. The availability of ball-bearing roller skates fur-
ther increased the number of children in the streets (Sylvia Shugrue [inter-
view] 1983; Nick Graziano [interview] 1983). Broken skates were reused
on homemade scooters. A study of a neighborhood at the northern tip of
Manhattan Island, based in part on interviews with people who had grown
up there between 1915 and 1970, concluded that children's freedom of ac-
cess to both supervised and unsupervised play sites declined during that pe-
riod, although the variety of professionally supervised activities increased,
from a single summer sports program in the 1920s to more than twenty
teams, clubs, and recreational programs in the 1970s (Gastner 1991). Folk-
lorists and historians should attempt to document changes in street, play-
ground, and school play at the neighborhood and community level in order
to better understand the effects of demographic changes, urban renewal, and
organized recreation (Gastner 1992).
As early as 1909, authorities in New York City recognized that there
were not enough parks and that they could not keep children off the streets,
so they closed off some streets for play. A generation later, play streets were
a recognized alternative to unsupervised play. In Newark, New Jersey, streets
were divided into four areas: circle games for children aged six to nine; red
rover, bull-in-the-ring, and whip tag for ten- to twelve-year-olds; relay races
and circle ball for those thirteen to fifteen; and volley ball, boxing, hand ten-
nis, and baseball for those over sixteen (Norton 1937, 11). Dozens of tag,
ball, and capture games were adapted for the play streets. Yet the organized
and supervised play streets remained the exception. As Colin Ward has
shown in England, the city is too rich in spaces for children's play to be con-
fined to a few streets. In the United States too, the streets remain a "hearth
of play" and the scene of a vast array of children's activities, including many
traditional games (Ferretti 1975; Milberg 1976; M. Williams 1981; Zerner
1977; Lukashok and Lynch 1956; Lynch 1978).
234 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? SCHOOL
The impact of compulsory education was not widely felt in the United States
until after the middle of the nineteenth century, but from their first appear-
ance, in Colonial times, schools have provided an environment for the
development of special kinds of children's lore. Schools segregate children
from adults, subject them to temporary confinement and discipline, and re-
duce their free time. The school's influence on play is twofold. On the one
hand it brings together a larger number of children of various ages than
might otherwise play together, thus promoting the diffusion of games. On
the other hand, not all kinds of play are compatible with the educational
and disciplinary goals of the teachers. Attempts to prohibit and control cer-
tain kinds of children's activities are inevitable. An English book published
in 1812 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1821 describes two dozen games
played at school. One, hockey, was forbidden because it was deemed too
dangerous, and others were restricted to one sex or the other (Book of
Games, 1821).
Isaac Mickle, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in 1838, recorded in his
diary: "I went to school. Some of the boys who 'could not get the hang of
the new school house,' like the boy in the anecdote, 'got the bang of it' un-
der the law which enacts that 'no young gentlemen shall play during the
hours allotted for study. ' A large rod of correction, alias hickory, alias gad,
made its appearance this morning under Domine's desk, indicating that the
'rules were to be exacted to the uttermost farthing' as he says in his adver-
tisement . . . " (Mackey 1977, 22). Mickle goes on to describe a fight be-
tween two of his classmates that resulted in a flogging for both by the teacher.
In Boston, Mickle's contemporary Edward Everett Hale recalled a gentler
but no less restricting experience at an earlier age:
At my own imprudent request, not to say urgency, I was sent to school
with two sisters and a brother, older than I, when I was reckoned as
about two years old. . . . The floor was sanded with clean sand ev-
ery Thursday and Saturday afternoon. This was a matter of practi-
cal importance to us, because with the sand, using our feet as tools,
we made sand pies. You gather the sand with the inside edge of ei-
ther shoe for a greater or less distance, as the size of the pie requires.
As you gain skill, the heap which you make is more and more round.
When it is well rounded you flatten it by a careful pressure of one
foot from above . . . I dwell on this detail at length because it is one
instance as good as a hundred of the way in which we adapted our-
selves to the conditions of our times. (page 9)
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? ? Hale's assertion of autonomy in the classroom was not unique. Nor
was sand play the only form of self-expression. In another passage he de-
scribes his ability to hide behind the hinged top of his desk. "No school-
boy who has ever had the felicity of such a desk, needs to be told what vari-
ous orgies we could carry on under such shelter of protection" (page 25).
But the custom of Boston school boys in Hale's day that most bespeaks the
existence of a folklore of childhood was that of kicking the class water pail
to pieces at the end of the term. The pails were bought by class subscrip-
tions to provide water on hot days, and the boys destroyed them in an an-
nual ritual rather than leave them for the next class (page 31). Hale describes
other school scenes, including the customary conflict between teacher and
students that ultimately created a sense of community and lifelong friend-
ships.
Some historians feel that the feminization of the schools in the late
nineteenth century ended this sense of community, by replacing the school
master with the school marm, toward whom the elder boys showed more
respect. Physical contests with the male teacher and the ritual "barring-out"
of teachers appear to decline after 1850 (Fitts 1979, 152). There is evidence
to suggest that such rituals survived into the twentieth century in rural ar-
eas. Many features of the one-room school encouraged traditional forms of
education and play. As one woman who recalled her years in a country school
in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, put it: "There was the thrill of competi-
tion and the joy of achievement, the hilarity of playtime antics, the embar-
rassment of classroom error, the tenseness of intrigue, the intimacy and the
awakening of youthful romance" (Fuller 1982, 2).
The small number of children of mixed ages, the educational emphasis
on memorization and recitation, the standardized simplicity of the school
building itself, made the transition from home to school easier in the coun-
try than in the city. Books of schoolhouse plans and designs were published
as early as 1858, prescribing the locations of windows, doors, and the stove.
The building was small enough to permit children to play Andy-over (Anty
over, Haley over, etc. : Gulliford 1984, 1992), and many of the sources cited
in Wayne Fuller's Old Country School recall playing it and crack-the-whip,
hide-and-seek, and, in the snow, fox-and-geese. In short, the children's tra-
ditions of school grounds, especially the rural school, closely resemble those
of New Zealand in the nineteenth century as described by Brian Sutton-Smith
(1981a). As educational theories changed and consolidation took place, chil-
dren found themselves in a much different setting. Larger schools meant
longer journeys to and from school for some, often by bus or car. School
playgrounds became larger and more fully equipped. Segregated by age, chil-
236 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? dren were less able to learn from each other. Still, some traditions were main-
tained and children continue to mold their environment within the school
and without (Yoffie 1947; Knapp and Knapp 1973; R. Moore 1974; Parrott
1976; M. Williams 1981; Mergen 1982).
A recent study of elementary-school students in an urban area in the
eastern United States argues that there are at least two "hidden" curricula
in the classroom, in addition to academic subjects. One is gender-role so-
cialization, the other self-taught sex education (Best 1983). The author, a
reading specialist who spent four years with one class trying to find out why
boys had a higher rate of reading disability, believes that the boys absorbed
a "macho" code from the media, textbooks, and adult models that made
them reject reading and academic excellence. Since most of the teachers were
women, the boys used the lavatory to escape and to defy the teachers. Boys
and girls challenged adult authority by playing sex games and by talking
obscenely about their sexual activities. In the space of six years, the boys of
one school went from chasing and hitting girls to kissing and playing "look
and see. " Also, by the sixth grade the nightly telephone call to a friend had
become a ritual. In contemporary children's culture, traditional lore may be
preserved in nontraditional ways.
The work of Ann Richman Beresin (1993), Linda Hughes (1983,
1989) and Christine von Glascoe (1980) suggests that schools are an excel-
lent place to study play. Contrary to earlier belief, children manage to ini-
tiate and play their own games apart from adult intrusion. Von Glascoe, and
in this Source book Beresin and Hughes, show that children spend a great
deal of their play time negotiating rules and that playing is a dynamic and
complex process in which verbal skills are as important as physical. Girls
seem to adjust to the rougher play of boys in the game of foursquare by play-
ing their own game within the framework of the boys' game and by keep-
ing up a continuous oral review of the rules. Thus the real game is played
in approximation of the ideal game, and players derive satisfaction from their
performance in both the real and the imaginary games (Hughes 1983). Stuart
Reifel's study of an elementary-school cafeteria in Texas demonstrates that
a wide range of verbal and pretend play goes on unobserved by adults. Jokes
and pranks predominate, but some children manage to engage in elaborate
fantasy play, using bananas as telephones, imitating other children, and pre-
tending to be animals. Food was used in novel ways. For example, graham
crackers were nibbled into the shape of guns and used in mock battles (Reifel
1986). Playing at school must be studied in a variety of specific settings, such
as the schoolyard, classroom, cafeteria, lavatory, and hall. Transitions from
one scene to another may be important too. Field trips by bus have always
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? ? provided opportunities for playing in defiance of teachers and chaperons.
Many studies of the use of school spaces need to be done.
PLAYGROUNDS
The children's playground movement is generally acknowledged to have
begun in Boston in 1885, with sand gardens modeled on ones seen in Ber-
lin by Dr. Marie Zakrewska (Rainwater 1922, 22-43). Before the end of the
century, dozens of American cities had playgrounds with sand boxes, see-
saws, and swings. Some of these playgrounds were established and main-
tained by private philanthropy, some by municipal funds, some by both.
Settlement houses and settlement-house workers were in the forefront of the
movement to establish playgrounds in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia,
Chicago, Washington, D. C. , and other cities. The playground movement was
related to, but distinct from, the park reform efforts of the same time. In
both cases, the reformers were concerned with overcrowding in immigrant
neighborhoods and sought to provide an organized alternative to informal
street life and recreation. Galen Cranz, in her study of park design, identi-
fies four stages in the history of urban parks, in contrast to Clarence Rain-
water, whose 1922 review of the play movement was divided into seven
stages.
Cranz (1982) labels the first urban parks, such as Central Park in New
York City, as "pleasure grounds," intended for aesthetic effect and renewal.
The "reform park" of the period 1900 to 1930 was the second stage. Re-
form parks and playgrounds were intended to teach good citizenship and
useful habits. Where the ideal of the pleasure parks was freedom of choice
within industrial order, the ideal of the reform-park advocates was orderly
socialization within the chaotic city. That is essentially the distinction drawn
by the superintendent of playgrounds in the District of Columbia in 1907:
There are two prevalent ideals of a playground: one, the park ideal,
which regards the playground as primarily a "place to play"; it seeks
to provide amusement for children and adults; the other is the school
ideal which regards the play leader as the most essential element in
the playground, and the playgrounds as a means to a fuller and higher
education. The park playground ideal has developed naturally from
the idea of the park. The park is primarily a place for recreation. All
parks are playgrounds, but the old time park was the playground of
the leisured and well-to-do citizen of middle or old age who was
blessed with a carriage and artistic appreciation. Play is recreation for
adults, but for children, as everyone knows, play is not recreation,
? 38 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? and is ofttimes the most serious thing which the child does. (Curtis
1907, 27)
As Curtis makes clear, the reform playground ideal was based firmly on an
emerging theory of child development that emphasized play. Belief in the
seriousness of play for children also came from Prussia. In the 1870s Froebel-
inspired kindergartens were introduced in several Eastern and Midwestern
states, and in the 1880s the German-educated psychologist G. Stanley Hall
began publishing his research on the behavior of children. Hall trained the
first generation of playground leaders at Clark University, where he taught
that children recapitulate the stages of human evolution as they mature and
that play serves to teach them physical and mental skills and to develop moral
character.
Rainwater's summary of the growth of the play movement reflects
Hall's influence: The years 1885 to 1895 were the sand garden stage, focusing
on the needs of young children; 1895-1900 saw the development of the play-
ground with swings and other equipment for older children; 1900-05 were
the years of the small park, with an emphasis on landscaping; 1905-12 was
marked by recreation centers, with buildings for indoor activities; the years
1912-15 saw an added concern for civic art, music festivals, theater, and
pageants, and children's play was organized on the playgrounds; in 1915-
18, neighborhood organization encouraged residents to participate in the
management of the centers; and, finally, in 1918-22 a recreation profession
emerged that coordinated community services such as schools and philan-
thropies (Rainwater 1922). A decade later this phase was still characteristic
of playgrounds, as defined by the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: "The
playground movement is a broader term and refers not so much to the al-
lotment of space or the acquisition of land as to the organization of com-
munity resources for recreation or leisure time activities" (Nash 1934, 161).
Cranz's third stage of park design follows this pattern, and what she calls
the "recreation facility" lasts from 1930 to 1965. In this period parks be-
come an expected feature of the environment although no one expects them
to have much effect on their users.
The residents of the neighborhoods served
by parks and playgrounds changed rapidly in this period, creating new prob-
lems and possibilities during the last and current period. She calls park de-
sign since about 1965 "the open space system," which seeks to create vital-
ity in the context of urban decay by encouraging community participation,
street fairs, and diversity (Cranz 1982).
Since neither Rainwater nor Cranz is concerned with how children
reacted to these changes in theory and design, it is difficult to gauge the ef-
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? ? fect of the parks on traditional behavior. Gary Goodman and Dominick
Cavallo have attempted critical assessments of the playground movement.
Both are rich in detail, but neither deals with the perspective of the child.
Goodman argues that Jewish immigrant streetlife declined as a result of the
success of the middle-class reformers in organizing leisure activities on the
Lower East Side in New York City (C. Goodman 1979). Playground orga-
nizers, Goodman feels, taught respect for property, the discipline appropri-
ate to factory work, and obedience. "Through the establishment of play-
grounds where trained directors formalized play, institutionalized hierarchy,
legitimized external control and rewards, and mandated repressed sexual-
ity, the elite was able to 'Americanize' immigrants and teach them such at-
titudes as would be beneficial toward maintaining the status quo. The shtetl
and Lower East Side games of low organization and minimum role differ-
entiation, which were sometimes coed and within which action had not be-
come reified into positions but was rather a part of style form and skill-
these games gave way to playground games which were to be vehicles for
and symbols of the American Way of Life" (Goodman 1979, 165).
Cavallo too believes that playground training was intended to sub-
vert the authority of immigrant parents and Americanize their children, but
he is more aware of the complexities and contradictions in the playground
movement than Goodman. The principal intellectual problem of the play-
ground reformers was to reconcile a number of polarities in nineteenth-cen-
tury American values: "individualism versus social cooperation, private ver-
sus public, selfishness versus loyalty, masculine versus feminine, guilt ver-
sus shame" (Cavallo 1981, 147). Their solution was to use team games to
limit individualism and encourage cooperation and to substitute public ap-
probation for private satisfactions. "Team games symbolized the key goals
of modern liberalism: harmony between classes, orderly competition between
interest groups, and individual achievement within frameworks of group and
social progress" (p. 155). The extent to which the reformers were success-
ful is difficult if not impossible to measure, of course, and neither Goodman
nor Cavallo can do more than point to a general similarity between the ide-
als of the playground reformers and twentieth-century corporate liberalism.
Perhaps a closer study by folklorists of what children actually played and
what effect that play has had on their values and behavior might illuminate
this point.
Clearly, the playground movement did not succeed in getting all chil-
dren off the street, nor in eliminating traditional forms of play. Various evi-
dence suggests that even as late as the 1930s, a majority of children spent
little time on organized playgrounds (Wojtowicz 1975; Asimov 1979;
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? ? Borchert 1980; Yukic 1975). What the playgrounds did provide was an al-
ternative to the worst features of street life and the expense of commercial
amusements. Jacob Riis's description of the Poverty Gap playground on West
Twenty-eighth Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues in New York City
notes simply that the murder rate had decreased and that children now
played in sand boxes instead of pelting strangers with mud (Riis 1892, 185).
At the founding meeting of the Playground Association of America in 1906,
Jane Addams called upon the delegates to find ways of linking the "play"
inherent in traditional drama with the transient amusements of youth. "We
might illustrate by the 'wild west show' in which the onlooking boy imag-
ines himself an active participant. The scouts, the Indians, the bucking po-
nies are his real, intimate companions and occupy his entire mind. In con-
trast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag, which is, doubtless,
also founded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise and momentary ech-
oes of the old excitement, but it is barren of suggestion and quickly degen-
erates into lawless horse-play" (Addams 1907, 23). As an alternative to the
wild west show, the movies, and the commercial amusement parks, the play-
grounds simply provided space and equipment. Even the frequent surveys
of "What Cities Played Last Year and How," published in the Playground
from its inception in 1907, implied that there were too few play leaders to
supervise the growing number of playgrounds. The best the reformers could
hope for was to plant ideas of discipline and cooperation that would be car-
ried over into streets and amusement parks (Curtis 1907, 28).
PLAYGROUND DESIGN
As a substitute for constant supervision and to compete with amusement-
park rides, most playgrounds relied on equipment. When playgrounds were
established in Washington, D. C. , in 1902, they contained see-saws, slides,
and traveling rings. Within two years, the Public Playgrounds Committee
owned "73 swings, 18 see-saws, 7 chutes, 10 sand boxes, 5 awnings for sand
boxes, 2 sets of parallel bars, 8 sets of traveling rings, 3 sets of flying rings,
2 trapezes, 2 climbing poles, 5 horizontal ladders, 6 incline ladders, 13 slid-
ing poles, 6 sets of basketball goals and posts, 4 sets of volley-ball posts and
nets, 2 jumping pits, 5 sets of quoits, 4 giant strides, 2 baseball sets, 8 In-
dian clubs, 1 storage box and ground tools, 5 horizontal bars, 2 striking bags
and frames, and apparatus frames for playground development" (Martin
1912, 10). The purposes of playground equipment were succinctly stated by
an early advocate, Everett Mero. Believing that individual gang members are
usually well behaved by themselves, Mero proposed scattering equipment
in different parts of the playground so "that the gang is put to inconvenience
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? ? 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-
242 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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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.
ing a game of hares and hounds, recalls running all Saturday morning
through the cedar swamps and hills outside of town, the landscape giving
fresh dimensions to the game. The interrelation of place and play was rec-
ognized by T. R. Croswell in his 1899 study of "Amusements of Worcester
School Children. " "One reason why shinney is three times as popular in
Worcester as in Brooklyn, and that running games of all kinds appear to be
more popular, is undoubtedly the exceptional inducements offered by the
physical conditions of the former city; the many small ponds suitable for
shinney are a constant invitation to the small boy with a pair of skates, and
the innumerable vacant lots, covered with grass-not yet the dirty dump-
ing places so common in large cities-have furnished Worcester, free of
charge, an excellent system of small parks for playgrounds" (Croswell 1899,
343). Playing ball topped the list of favorite amusements of the boys of both
Brooklyn and Worcester in Croswell's surveys, but the greater urbanization
of Brooklyn had already led to modifications in children's folklore.
Stewart Culin, anthropologist and museum curator, discovered boys on
the streets of Brooklyn in 1890 playing various kinds of tag adapted to the
high stoops and fences of neighborhood buildings, hit the stick and ball games
utilizing street corners, and a variation on penny pitching involving picture
cards from cigarette packs (Culin 1891). Shinney had become a street hockey
game. Stickball was evolving many forms (Silverstein 1965). The many rec-
reation surveys conducted in major cities between 1910 and 1920 show the
same result: The majority of children seen out of doors were on the street, not
in yards, playgrounds, or even vacant lots (Mergen 1982, 71). The catalog of
what these children were doing on the streets is revealing. Some were playing
ball, tag, dolls, and jacks, but more were loitering, stealing, breaking things,
writing on walls, fighting, drinking, gambling, and watching prostitutes.
Clearly children were holding their own on the streets. Even those who played
quietly recall an element of contest: "All these games were, of course, extremely
inconvenient to pedestrians who had to walk around skelly games, or to au-
tomobiles (there weren't very many in those days, remember) that had to drive
slowly through punchball games while enduring catcalls. . . . I have never been
able to work up much sympathy for those who mourn the plight of the city
children crowded into their nasty streets. When I think back on the children
of my childhood, all I can remember is that those nasty streets belonged to us
and that the boisterous competition and the noisy excitement were the very
breath of life to us" (Asimov 1979, 57-58).
Children had institutionalized the streets as playgrounds despite the
opposition of police and recreation reformers. A survey in Buffalo in 1925
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? ? listed five objections to street play: (1) the danger of automobiles; (2) noise
and destruction of property; (3) the unsanitary conditions; (4) the unsuit-
ability of streets for highly organized play; and (5) the moral danger to chil-
dren who are unsupervised (Buffalo Recreation Survey 1925, 60). An op-
posite position is taken by Thomas Yukic who was growing up in Buffalo
in the same years. For Yukic and his brothers, Allen Avenue and the water-
front offered unlimited possibilities for swimming, collecting junk, and boat
building. The dangers of the street and lake merely heightened the enjoy-
ment (Yukic 1975). In the 1930s in Washington, D. C. , boys played highly
organized games of football and baseball in the street and any open space,
such as in the Ellipse behind the White House and on the triangle of grass
in front of Union Station. The availability of ball-bearing roller skates fur-
ther increased the number of children in the streets (Sylvia Shugrue [inter-
view] 1983; Nick Graziano [interview] 1983). Broken skates were reused
on homemade scooters. A study of a neighborhood at the northern tip of
Manhattan Island, based in part on interviews with people who had grown
up there between 1915 and 1970, concluded that children's freedom of ac-
cess to both supervised and unsupervised play sites declined during that pe-
riod, although the variety of professionally supervised activities increased,
from a single summer sports program in the 1920s to more than twenty
teams, clubs, and recreational programs in the 1970s (Gastner 1991). Folk-
lorists and historians should attempt to document changes in street, play-
ground, and school play at the neighborhood and community level in order
to better understand the effects of demographic changes, urban renewal, and
organized recreation (Gastner 1992).
As early as 1909, authorities in New York City recognized that there
were not enough parks and that they could not keep children off the streets,
so they closed off some streets for play. A generation later, play streets were
a recognized alternative to unsupervised play. In Newark, New Jersey, streets
were divided into four areas: circle games for children aged six to nine; red
rover, bull-in-the-ring, and whip tag for ten- to twelve-year-olds; relay races
and circle ball for those thirteen to fifteen; and volley ball, boxing, hand ten-
nis, and baseball for those over sixteen (Norton 1937, 11). Dozens of tag,
ball, and capture games were adapted for the play streets. Yet the organized
and supervised play streets remained the exception. As Colin Ward has
shown in England, the city is too rich in spaces for children's play to be con-
fined to a few streets. In the United States too, the streets remain a "hearth
of play" and the scene of a vast array of children's activities, including many
traditional games (Ferretti 1975; Milberg 1976; M. Williams 1981; Zerner
1977; Lukashok and Lynch 1956; Lynch 1978).
234 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? SCHOOL
The impact of compulsory education was not widely felt in the United States
until after the middle of the nineteenth century, but from their first appear-
ance, in Colonial times, schools have provided an environment for the
development of special kinds of children's lore. Schools segregate children
from adults, subject them to temporary confinement and discipline, and re-
duce their free time. The school's influence on play is twofold. On the one
hand it brings together a larger number of children of various ages than
might otherwise play together, thus promoting the diffusion of games. On
the other hand, not all kinds of play are compatible with the educational
and disciplinary goals of the teachers. Attempts to prohibit and control cer-
tain kinds of children's activities are inevitable. An English book published
in 1812 and reprinted in Philadelphia in 1821 describes two dozen games
played at school. One, hockey, was forbidden because it was deemed too
dangerous, and others were restricted to one sex or the other (Book of
Games, 1821).
Isaac Mickle, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in 1838, recorded in his
diary: "I went to school. Some of the boys who 'could not get the hang of
the new school house,' like the boy in the anecdote, 'got the bang of it' un-
der the law which enacts that 'no young gentlemen shall play during the
hours allotted for study. ' A large rod of correction, alias hickory, alias gad,
made its appearance this morning under Domine's desk, indicating that the
'rules were to be exacted to the uttermost farthing' as he says in his adver-
tisement . . . " (Mackey 1977, 22). Mickle goes on to describe a fight be-
tween two of his classmates that resulted in a flogging for both by the teacher.
In Boston, Mickle's contemporary Edward Everett Hale recalled a gentler
but no less restricting experience at an earlier age:
At my own imprudent request, not to say urgency, I was sent to school
with two sisters and a brother, older than I, when I was reckoned as
about two years old. . . . The floor was sanded with clean sand ev-
ery Thursday and Saturday afternoon. This was a matter of practi-
cal importance to us, because with the sand, using our feet as tools,
we made sand pies. You gather the sand with the inside edge of ei-
ther shoe for a greater or less distance, as the size of the pie requires.
As you gain skill, the heap which you make is more and more round.
When it is well rounded you flatten it by a careful pressure of one
foot from above . . . I dwell on this detail at length because it is one
instance as good as a hundred of the way in which we adapted our-
selves to the conditions of our times. (page 9)
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? ? Hale's assertion of autonomy in the classroom was not unique. Nor
was sand play the only form of self-expression. In another passage he de-
scribes his ability to hide behind the hinged top of his desk. "No school-
boy who has ever had the felicity of such a desk, needs to be told what vari-
ous orgies we could carry on under such shelter of protection" (page 25).
But the custom of Boston school boys in Hale's day that most bespeaks the
existence of a folklore of childhood was that of kicking the class water pail
to pieces at the end of the term. The pails were bought by class subscrip-
tions to provide water on hot days, and the boys destroyed them in an an-
nual ritual rather than leave them for the next class (page 31). Hale describes
other school scenes, including the customary conflict between teacher and
students that ultimately created a sense of community and lifelong friend-
ships.
Some historians feel that the feminization of the schools in the late
nineteenth century ended this sense of community, by replacing the school
master with the school marm, toward whom the elder boys showed more
respect. Physical contests with the male teacher and the ritual "barring-out"
of teachers appear to decline after 1850 (Fitts 1979, 152). There is evidence
to suggest that such rituals survived into the twentieth century in rural ar-
eas. Many features of the one-room school encouraged traditional forms of
education and play. As one woman who recalled her years in a country school
in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, put it: "There was the thrill of competi-
tion and the joy of achievement, the hilarity of playtime antics, the embar-
rassment of classroom error, the tenseness of intrigue, the intimacy and the
awakening of youthful romance" (Fuller 1982, 2).
The small number of children of mixed ages, the educational emphasis
on memorization and recitation, the standardized simplicity of the school
building itself, made the transition from home to school easier in the coun-
try than in the city. Books of schoolhouse plans and designs were published
as early as 1858, prescribing the locations of windows, doors, and the stove.
The building was small enough to permit children to play Andy-over (Anty
over, Haley over, etc. : Gulliford 1984, 1992), and many of the sources cited
in Wayne Fuller's Old Country School recall playing it and crack-the-whip,
hide-and-seek, and, in the snow, fox-and-geese. In short, the children's tra-
ditions of school grounds, especially the rural school, closely resemble those
of New Zealand in the nineteenth century as described by Brian Sutton-Smith
(1981a). As educational theories changed and consolidation took place, chil-
dren found themselves in a much different setting. Larger schools meant
longer journeys to and from school for some, often by bus or car. School
playgrounds became larger and more fully equipped. Segregated by age, chil-
236 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? dren were less able to learn from each other. Still, some traditions were main-
tained and children continue to mold their environment within the school
and without (Yoffie 1947; Knapp and Knapp 1973; R. Moore 1974; Parrott
1976; M. Williams 1981; Mergen 1982).
A recent study of elementary-school students in an urban area in the
eastern United States argues that there are at least two "hidden" curricula
in the classroom, in addition to academic subjects. One is gender-role so-
cialization, the other self-taught sex education (Best 1983). The author, a
reading specialist who spent four years with one class trying to find out why
boys had a higher rate of reading disability, believes that the boys absorbed
a "macho" code from the media, textbooks, and adult models that made
them reject reading and academic excellence. Since most of the teachers were
women, the boys used the lavatory to escape and to defy the teachers. Boys
and girls challenged adult authority by playing sex games and by talking
obscenely about their sexual activities. In the space of six years, the boys of
one school went from chasing and hitting girls to kissing and playing "look
and see. " Also, by the sixth grade the nightly telephone call to a friend had
become a ritual. In contemporary children's culture, traditional lore may be
preserved in nontraditional ways.
The work of Ann Richman Beresin (1993), Linda Hughes (1983,
1989) and Christine von Glascoe (1980) suggests that schools are an excel-
lent place to study play. Contrary to earlier belief, children manage to ini-
tiate and play their own games apart from adult intrusion. Von Glascoe, and
in this Source book Beresin and Hughes, show that children spend a great
deal of their play time negotiating rules and that playing is a dynamic and
complex process in which verbal skills are as important as physical. Girls
seem to adjust to the rougher play of boys in the game of foursquare by play-
ing their own game within the framework of the boys' game and by keep-
ing up a continuous oral review of the rules. Thus the real game is played
in approximation of the ideal game, and players derive satisfaction from their
performance in both the real and the imaginary games (Hughes 1983). Stuart
Reifel's study of an elementary-school cafeteria in Texas demonstrates that
a wide range of verbal and pretend play goes on unobserved by adults. Jokes
and pranks predominate, but some children manage to engage in elaborate
fantasy play, using bananas as telephones, imitating other children, and pre-
tending to be animals. Food was used in novel ways. For example, graham
crackers were nibbled into the shape of guns and used in mock battles (Reifel
1986). Playing at school must be studied in a variety of specific settings, such
as the schoolyard, classroom, cafeteria, lavatory, and hall. Transitions from
one scene to another may be important too. Field trips by bus have always
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? ? provided opportunities for playing in defiance of teachers and chaperons.
Many studies of the use of school spaces need to be done.
PLAYGROUNDS
The children's playground movement is generally acknowledged to have
begun in Boston in 1885, with sand gardens modeled on ones seen in Ber-
lin by Dr. Marie Zakrewska (Rainwater 1922, 22-43). Before the end of the
century, dozens of American cities had playgrounds with sand boxes, see-
saws, and swings. Some of these playgrounds were established and main-
tained by private philanthropy, some by municipal funds, some by both.
Settlement houses and settlement-house workers were in the forefront of the
movement to establish playgrounds in Boston, New York City, Philadelphia,
Chicago, Washington, D. C. , and other cities. The playground movement was
related to, but distinct from, the park reform efforts of the same time. In
both cases, the reformers were concerned with overcrowding in immigrant
neighborhoods and sought to provide an organized alternative to informal
street life and recreation. Galen Cranz, in her study of park design, identi-
fies four stages in the history of urban parks, in contrast to Clarence Rain-
water, whose 1922 review of the play movement was divided into seven
stages.
Cranz (1982) labels the first urban parks, such as Central Park in New
York City, as "pleasure grounds," intended for aesthetic effect and renewal.
The "reform park" of the period 1900 to 1930 was the second stage. Re-
form parks and playgrounds were intended to teach good citizenship and
useful habits. Where the ideal of the pleasure parks was freedom of choice
within industrial order, the ideal of the reform-park advocates was orderly
socialization within the chaotic city. That is essentially the distinction drawn
by the superintendent of playgrounds in the District of Columbia in 1907:
There are two prevalent ideals of a playground: one, the park ideal,
which regards the playground as primarily a "place to play"; it seeks
to provide amusement for children and adults; the other is the school
ideal which regards the play leader as the most essential element in
the playground, and the playgrounds as a means to a fuller and higher
education. The park playground ideal has developed naturally from
the idea of the park. The park is primarily a place for recreation. All
parks are playgrounds, but the old time park was the playground of
the leisured and well-to-do citizen of middle or old age who was
blessed with a carriage and artistic appreciation. Play is recreation for
adults, but for children, as everyone knows, play is not recreation,
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? ? and is ofttimes the most serious thing which the child does. (Curtis
1907, 27)
As Curtis makes clear, the reform playground ideal was based firmly on an
emerging theory of child development that emphasized play. Belief in the
seriousness of play for children also came from Prussia. In the 1870s Froebel-
inspired kindergartens were introduced in several Eastern and Midwestern
states, and in the 1880s the German-educated psychologist G. Stanley Hall
began publishing his research on the behavior of children. Hall trained the
first generation of playground leaders at Clark University, where he taught
that children recapitulate the stages of human evolution as they mature and
that play serves to teach them physical and mental skills and to develop moral
character.
Rainwater's summary of the growth of the play movement reflects
Hall's influence: The years 1885 to 1895 were the sand garden stage, focusing
on the needs of young children; 1895-1900 saw the development of the play-
ground with swings and other equipment for older children; 1900-05 were
the years of the small park, with an emphasis on landscaping; 1905-12 was
marked by recreation centers, with buildings for indoor activities; the years
1912-15 saw an added concern for civic art, music festivals, theater, and
pageants, and children's play was organized on the playgrounds; in 1915-
18, neighborhood organization encouraged residents to participate in the
management of the centers; and, finally, in 1918-22 a recreation profession
emerged that coordinated community services such as schools and philan-
thropies (Rainwater 1922). A decade later this phase was still characteristic
of playgrounds, as defined by the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: "The
playground movement is a broader term and refers not so much to the al-
lotment of space or the acquisition of land as to the organization of com-
munity resources for recreation or leisure time activities" (Nash 1934, 161).
Cranz's third stage of park design follows this pattern, and what she calls
the "recreation facility" lasts from 1930 to 1965. In this period parks be-
come an expected feature of the environment although no one expects them
to have much effect on their users.
The residents of the neighborhoods served
by parks and playgrounds changed rapidly in this period, creating new prob-
lems and possibilities during the last and current period. She calls park de-
sign since about 1965 "the open space system," which seeks to create vital-
ity in the context of urban decay by encouraging community participation,
street fairs, and diversity (Cranz 1982).
Since neither Rainwater nor Cranz is concerned with how children
reacted to these changes in theory and design, it is difficult to gauge the ef-
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? ? fect of the parks on traditional behavior. Gary Goodman and Dominick
Cavallo have attempted critical assessments of the playground movement.
Both are rich in detail, but neither deals with the perspective of the child.
Goodman argues that Jewish immigrant streetlife declined as a result of the
success of the middle-class reformers in organizing leisure activities on the
Lower East Side in New York City (C. Goodman 1979). Playground orga-
nizers, Goodman feels, taught respect for property, the discipline appropri-
ate to factory work, and obedience. "Through the establishment of play-
grounds where trained directors formalized play, institutionalized hierarchy,
legitimized external control and rewards, and mandated repressed sexual-
ity, the elite was able to 'Americanize' immigrants and teach them such at-
titudes as would be beneficial toward maintaining the status quo. The shtetl
and Lower East Side games of low organization and minimum role differ-
entiation, which were sometimes coed and within which action had not be-
come reified into positions but was rather a part of style form and skill-
these games gave way to playground games which were to be vehicles for
and symbols of the American Way of Life" (Goodman 1979, 165).
Cavallo too believes that playground training was intended to sub-
vert the authority of immigrant parents and Americanize their children, but
he is more aware of the complexities and contradictions in the playground
movement than Goodman. The principal intellectual problem of the play-
ground reformers was to reconcile a number of polarities in nineteenth-cen-
tury American values: "individualism versus social cooperation, private ver-
sus public, selfishness versus loyalty, masculine versus feminine, guilt ver-
sus shame" (Cavallo 1981, 147). Their solution was to use team games to
limit individualism and encourage cooperation and to substitute public ap-
probation for private satisfactions. "Team games symbolized the key goals
of modern liberalism: harmony between classes, orderly competition between
interest groups, and individual achievement within frameworks of group and
social progress" (p. 155). The extent to which the reformers were success-
ful is difficult if not impossible to measure, of course, and neither Goodman
nor Cavallo can do more than point to a general similarity between the ide-
als of the playground reformers and twentieth-century corporate liberalism.
Perhaps a closer study by folklorists of what children actually played and
what effect that play has had on their values and behavior might illuminate
this point.
Clearly, the playground movement did not succeed in getting all chil-
dren off the street, nor in eliminating traditional forms of play. Various evi-
dence suggests that even as late as the 1930s, a majority of children spent
little time on organized playgrounds (Wojtowicz 1975; Asimov 1979;
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? ? Borchert 1980; Yukic 1975). What the playgrounds did provide was an al-
ternative to the worst features of street life and the expense of commercial
amusements. Jacob Riis's description of the Poverty Gap playground on West
Twenty-eighth Street between Tenth and Eleventh avenues in New York City
notes simply that the murder rate had decreased and that children now
played in sand boxes instead of pelting strangers with mud (Riis 1892, 185).
At the founding meeting of the Playground Association of America in 1906,
Jane Addams called upon the delegates to find ways of linking the "play"
inherent in traditional drama with the transient amusements of youth. "We
might illustrate by the 'wild west show' in which the onlooking boy imag-
ines himself an active participant. The scouts, the Indians, the bucking po-
nies are his real, intimate companions and occupy his entire mind. In con-
trast with this we have the omnipresent game of tag, which is, doubtless,
also founded upon the chase. It gives the boy exercise and momentary ech-
oes of the old excitement, but it is barren of suggestion and quickly degen-
erates into lawless horse-play" (Addams 1907, 23). As an alternative to the
wild west show, the movies, and the commercial amusement parks, the play-
grounds simply provided space and equipment. Even the frequent surveys
of "What Cities Played Last Year and How," published in the Playground
from its inception in 1907, implied that there were too few play leaders to
supervise the growing number of playgrounds. The best the reformers could
hope for was to plant ideas of discipline and cooperation that would be car-
ried over into streets and amusement parks (Curtis 1907, 28).
PLAYGROUND DESIGN
As a substitute for constant supervision and to compete with amusement-
park rides, most playgrounds relied on equipment. When playgrounds were
established in Washington, D. C. , in 1902, they contained see-saws, slides,
and traveling rings. Within two years, the Public Playgrounds Committee
owned "73 swings, 18 see-saws, 7 chutes, 10 sand boxes, 5 awnings for sand
boxes, 2 sets of parallel bars, 8 sets of traveling rings, 3 sets of flying rings,
2 trapezes, 2 climbing poles, 5 horizontal ladders, 6 incline ladders, 13 slid-
ing poles, 6 sets of basketball goals and posts, 4 sets of volley-ball posts and
nets, 2 jumping pits, 5 sets of quoits, 4 giant strides, 2 baseball sets, 8 In-
dian clubs, 1 storage box and ground tools, 5 horizontal bars, 2 striking bags
and frames, and apparatus frames for playground development" (Martin
1912, 10). The purposes of playground equipment were succinctly stated by
an early advocate, Everett Mero. Believing that individual gang members are
usually well behaved by themselves, Mero proposed scattering equipment
in different parts of the playground so "that the gang is put to inconvenience
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? ? 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-
242 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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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.
