The dangers of the street and lake merely
heightened
the enjoy-
ment (Yukic 1975).
ment (Yukic 1975).
Childens - Folklore
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? ? ral areas of the world. Typical modern play involves a child toying with a
television-advertised object while solitarily watching a television program.
The array of handmade objects and equipment that was once a central part
of the child's play world, and which is described by Bronner in a subsequent
chapter, has been largely replaced by the multimillion-dollar toy industry and
the manufacture of mass-produced toys, board games, and video games. The
"Kiddie City" and "Toys R Us" emporia, are, for example, embodiments
of this change.
The story of this change even in the past hundred years waits to be
told, although we have a general picture of the shift in Sutton-Smith's His-
tory of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950 (1981a),
Mergen's Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (1982), and, most recently,
Karin Calvert's Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Child-
hood, 1600-1900 (1992). One senses from such work that in the last century,
although the children were encouraged to be outdoors more than they are
today, there was nevertheless much home play. Available accounts of such play
in homes suggest that the relatively private, even free spaces such as bed-
rooms, attics, and basements in the home, and the higher chance of uninter-
rupted activity there made the home a rich and attractive place for many
middle-class children's expressive and symbolic activities (see Mergen 1982
for details from play autobiographies). Further, Dorothy Howard, in her
folklore autobiography of the 1902-10 period, Dorothy's World: Child-
hood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910 (1977), suggests that at least the rural
home of the last century was, to a great extent, a base for constructing origi-
nal playthings and "play pritties," as she calls them. The knife was the cen-
tral play object then, just as the ball was to be popular between the world
wars and as the board game has since become. With the knife, the boys in
their yards carved and whittled, made pea shooters, catapaults, whistles,
slings, bows, popguns, kites, whips, sledges, tree huts, and forts. Although
girls were seldom so free with pocketknives, they, for their part, engaged in
yard play with flowers, beads, berries, grass, plants, fruit, coins, buttons,
matches, eggs, shells, pets, and string figures. By the turn of the century,
with the encroachment of commercial materials for childhood, there were
scrapbooks of pictures, transfers, and fairy gardens, in contrast to the "play
pritties" of Dorothy Howard's world. In the homes of upper-class parents,
there were often parties or parlor games involving musical chairs, charades,
pretend tea parties, blindman's bluff, and much more (Sutton-Smith 1981a).
In today's urban and suburban apartment worlds, many children who have
virtually retired from the streets have, in many cases, shifted from dominantly
motor, physical and manual concerns to verbal and symbolic ones. Of course,
22zz7
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? ? this is not to deny that hopscotch, jump rope and jacks, which have been
central to girls' games for over fifty years, continue to be played in the back-
yard, as do various chasing and hide-and-seek games, as well as Mother may
I, old witch, redlight, statues, ball-bouncing, and hand-clapping games. Girls
still play these games, both at home and school, although only at home if
there are enough playmates present. Likewise, boys' concern with sports
continues-although it is confined to yards at home. They catch ball, shoot
baskets, trap soccer balls and hit pucks, but these games really require the
street or the playground. Adaptations to the backyard can be made but may
be dangerous to shrubs, lawns, and flower gardens. Although today the home
and yard are still the places where children prepare and practice for the out-
side world, the world being prepared for is rather different from the world
of yesteryear.
2zz8 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
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? ? II CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL
AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Schools and playgrounds are virtually synonymous with childhood in con-
temporary America, but their importance to children's folklore is of relatively
recent origin. Only after the middle of the nineteenth century did the ma-
jority of children attend school, and those that did rarely went for more than
a few years. Planned parks and playgrounds are even more recent. Never-
theless, the years of childhood are brief, and many generations of children
have passed through schools and playgrounds in the past century. The in-
teraction between children and the physical environment of schools and play-
grounds is the focus of this chapter. The fact that less is known about the
actual behavior of children in these settings than about the settings them-
selves is a major limitation, but the growing literature on play, children's
folklore, the history of childhood, and the cultural meanings of space makes
clear that the scene of a child's play helps to shape the content.
Interest in the relationships between children's lore and their environ-
ment, what Gary Fine has called the "ecotypic" approach to folklore, need
not exclude other approaches (Fine 1980d, 180). Indeed, as the literature
illustrates, we must be ready to ask a broad range of questions about
children's cognitive and physiological development, about their concepts of
space and place, about the influence of adults and peers, about the games
and traditions children bring to the school and playground, and about the
uses they make of their physical environment. Yi-Fu Tuan, drawing on the
insights of Piaget and others, speculates that "place, to the child, is a large
and somewhat immobile type of object" (1977, 29). Later, as their geographi-
cal horizons expand, children interact with objects and places with imagi-
nation, transforming physical reality through fantasy, active play, or simply
by ignoring it.
This ability to transform, or even transcend, physical space is prob-
ably functional in the child's development. As Gaston Bachelard argues in
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? ? his stimulating reflections on the phenomenology of space, imagination sepa-
rates a person from the past, as well as from reality, causing him to face the
future (1964, xxx). A child's ability to imagine, to create, to anticipate the
future is clearly part of the learning process. In part, the child uses his imagi-
nation in an attempt to control the scene in which he finds himself. In school
and schoolyard the struggle is between children and adults as well as among
children themselves, while in streets, parks, and playgrounds the interaction
is largely among peers. Melvin Williams, describing a black, inner-city jun-
ior high school in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, concludes:
I have never seen students more adept and skillful at manipulating
the behavioral dynamics of their classrooms. . . . Each one attempted
to outperform the others in acts that denied, defiled, and defied the
classroom setting. The student audience encouraged the behavior and
reinforced it whenever possible. In such frenzies, chairs were thrown
across the classroom, ostensibly to strike another student but not in-
tended to make contact. Boys participated in animated wrestling, lift-
ing one another and pretending to slam each other to the floor with
a ferociousness that equalled a staged television fight. Other boys
threw one another against walls, making sounds that gave impres-
sions of crushing one's opponent . . . . Most of the students realized
that this was a staged drama, but they acted as if it was actually oc-
curring. (1981, 101)
On the unsupervised playground, evidence suggests that children negotiate
their own uses of space (Opie and Opie 1969; Hayward, Rothenberg, and
Beasley 1974; Sutton-Smith 1981a; L. Hughes 1983; and Beresin 1993).
School, playground, even the streets may be scenes of contention, but
this is not always the case. Moreover, for children, play space is a continuum.
The journey from home and yard to school and playground is made by way
of steps, trees, curbs, alleys, shops, lots, and dozens of other places useful
for play (Ward 1978). Roger Hart's pioneering study Children's Experience
of Place (1979) established a number of useful working hypotheses. For ex-
ample, he found that parentally defined "free range" for children increased
in three steps. Children in the first and second grade in the small New En-
gland town where he conducted his research were not permitted to go be-
yond seeing and calling distance. In grades 3 and 4 the increased frequency
of group play allowed the children to go as far as three hundred yards from
home. Fifth and sixth graders, particularly boys who had acquired bicycles,
were given a wide range, "with permission," or the distance was defined by
230 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? the time it took to get there. In the upper grades the differences between boys
and girls increased, since boys were permitted greater freedom. Moreover,
Hart found that children used and valued various places differently at dif-
ferent times. Places were valued because of what could be done there (ball
fields, hills, trees, brooks), because of a person who lived or worked there
(homes, stores, streets), because of what could be bought there (supermar-
ket, service stations), because of how the place looked or felt (traffic lights,
library grounds), and by the lure of danger (streets, quarries, abandoned
buildings, graveyards). Although limited in many ways, Hart's study estab-
lishes a model for approaching the scenes of children's lore. What is the
scene? Who are the characters? What is the play?
CHILDREN'S ENVIRONMENTS IN THE PAST
Our evidence for children's lore before compulsory public education and the
playground movement comes chiefly from autobiographies and reminis-
cences, sometimes touched with a note of nostalgia. Linda Pollock's exhaus-
tive study of 496 published diaries and autobiographies (144 of them Ameri-
can), covering the years 1500 to 1900, asserts that play "does not appear
very often in the texts" and goes on to quote from several, including those
of Cotton Mather and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1983, 236). When
Edward Everett Hale describes Boston Common in the 1830s as "a play-
ground for children . . . ours to work our own sweet will upon," we get a
glimpse of the play spaces of a less organized era (Hale 1883, 65-66). Hale
played marbles, flew kites, rolled hoops, and played an elaborate game in-
volving the delivery and hiding of imaginary mail. A large stone on the Com-
mon gave rise to the superstition that if a person went around it backward
nine times saying the Lord's Prayer backward, his wish would come true.
Hale's playmates also believed that law did not extend onto the mud flats
beyond the high water mark, so it was there that they played props (a game
in which the tops of small sea shells are cut off and the shells filled with red
sealing wax, the player betting that he can throw odd or even numbers of
red spots) and other gambling games. The boys of Hale's generation had
already adapted to new urban institutions like the volunteer fire department:
"Of course we boys supposed that ours was the best in the world," Hale
writes. "Each boy in Boston supposed that the engine nearest his house was
the best engine in the world, and that, on occasion, it could throw water
higher than any other engine" (page 133).
Hale's contemporaries, Lucy Larcom, Henry Adams, William Dean
Howells, and William Gordon, report a variety of similar children's lore in
their autobiographical writing. Larcom turned a rock quarry near her home
231
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? ? in Beverly, Massachusetts, into a play house, while Howells roamed the
riverbanks and fields near Hamilton, Ohio. Gordon, growing up in the 1840s
in the Georgetown section of the District of Columbia, met his friends in
tanneries, bakeries, and carpentry shops, and hung around taverns, stage
stops, and steamboat landings to watch people. For boys, the predominant
ritual was fighting. Gangs of different ethnic groups and from different neigh-
borhoods fought regularly in Boston and Washington. Adams's depiction of
a snowball and rock fight between boys from the Boston Latin School and
the poorer boys from the South End is bloody and violent, though acknowl-
edging honor on both sides (1918, 41-42). New boys had to fight for ac-
ceptance into a group. Howells describes several cruel tricks, such as blow-
ing pencil dust in someone's eyes, or getting an "unsuspecting child to close
the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb, and look hard at you, while
you showed him Germany. You did this by pulling a string below the tube,
and running a needle into his thumb" (Howells 1890, 71).
Children's lives were shaped by their environments, especially in cit-
ies and towns where the places for work and play were differentiated. Elliott
West's study of children in Rocky Mountain mining camps suggests that boys
and girls as young as eight created a juvenile replica of frontier lawlessness.
"Ragged urchins" roamed the streets of Western towns, drinking, gambling,
destroying property and harassing adults, particularly ethnic minorities.
"Several New Mexican boys showered their town with rocks shot from an
old cannon barrel, and on another occasion they set off a keg of black pow-
der under the wagon of a man who had thrown them out of his skating rink"
(West 1983, 152). Similar conditions existed in the oil boom towns of Okla-
homa after World War I, according to Woody Guthrie (Guthrie 1943). Even
when children are successful in playing in public spaces, they also create
private, secret spaces. Guthrie recalls his gang's clubhouse in loving detail,
and Valerie Quinney has collected information on children's lives in the mill
village of Carrboro, North Carolina, in the years 1905-20 that reveals a
comparable pattern of public violence and private retreat. "Older boys found
a secret cave and fixed it up as a club house where they could play poker.
They had to crawl through a barrel to get in. To protect the spot further
from preachers and parents, they disguised the barrel opening by putting tim-
ber and trash in front of it" (Quinney 1982, 169).
The establishment of schools and playgrounds did not, of course,
mean the end of country, vacant lot, and street play. Rural children like
Dorothy Howard established special places for play near home, while those
living in small towns, like William Allen White in Eldorado, Kansas, and
William Carlos Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey, played in surrounding
232 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? areas (Howard 1977; White 1946; W. C. Williams 1951). 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
233
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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)
235
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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;
2. 40 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? ral areas of the world. Typical modern play involves a child toying with a
television-advertised object while solitarily watching a television program.
The array of handmade objects and equipment that was once a central part
of the child's play world, and which is described by Bronner in a subsequent
chapter, has been largely replaced by the multimillion-dollar toy industry and
the manufacture of mass-produced toys, board games, and video games. The
"Kiddie City" and "Toys R Us" emporia, are, for example, embodiments
of this change.
The story of this change even in the past hundred years waits to be
told, although we have a general picture of the shift in Sutton-Smith's His-
tory of Children's Play: The New Zealand Playground, 1840-1950 (1981a),
Mergen's Play and Playthings: A Reference Guide (1982), and, most recently,
Karin Calvert's Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Child-
hood, 1600-1900 (1992). One senses from such work that in the last century,
although the children were encouraged to be outdoors more than they are
today, there was nevertheless much home play. Available accounts of such play
in homes suggest that the relatively private, even free spaces such as bed-
rooms, attics, and basements in the home, and the higher chance of uninter-
rupted activity there made the home a rich and attractive place for many
middle-class children's expressive and symbolic activities (see Mergen 1982
for details from play autobiographies). Further, Dorothy Howard, in her
folklore autobiography of the 1902-10 period, Dorothy's World: Child-
hood in Sabine Bottom, 1902-1910 (1977), suggests that at least the rural
home of the last century was, to a great extent, a base for constructing origi-
nal playthings and "play pritties," as she calls them. The knife was the cen-
tral play object then, just as the ball was to be popular between the world
wars and as the board game has since become. With the knife, the boys in
their yards carved and whittled, made pea shooters, catapaults, whistles,
slings, bows, popguns, kites, whips, sledges, tree huts, and forts. Although
girls were seldom so free with pocketknives, they, for their part, engaged in
yard play with flowers, beads, berries, grass, plants, fruit, coins, buttons,
matches, eggs, shells, pets, and string figures. By the turn of the century,
with the encroachment of commercial materials for childhood, there were
scrapbooks of pictures, transfers, and fairy gardens, in contrast to the "play
pritties" of Dorothy Howard's world. In the homes of upper-class parents,
there were often parties or parlor games involving musical chairs, charades,
pretend tea parties, blindman's bluff, and much more (Sutton-Smith 1981a).
In today's urban and suburban apartment worlds, many children who have
virtually retired from the streets have, in many cases, shifted from dominantly
motor, physical and manual concerns to verbal and symbolic ones. Of course,
22zz7
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? ? this is not to deny that hopscotch, jump rope and jacks, which have been
central to girls' games for over fifty years, continue to be played in the back-
yard, as do various chasing and hide-and-seek games, as well as Mother may
I, old witch, redlight, statues, ball-bouncing, and hand-clapping games. Girls
still play these games, both at home and school, although only at home if
there are enough playmates present. Likewise, boys' concern with sports
continues-although it is confined to yards at home. They catch ball, shoot
baskets, trap soccer balls and hit pucks, but these games really require the
street or the playground. Adaptations to the backyard can be made but may
be dangerous to shrubs, lawns, and flower gardens. Although today the home
and yard are still the places where children prepare and practice for the out-
side world, the world being prepared for is rather different from the world
of yesteryear.
2zz8 OVERVIEW: SETTINGS AND ACTIVITIES
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? ? II CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL
AND PLAYGROUNDS
Bernard Mergen
Schools and playgrounds are virtually synonymous with childhood in con-
temporary America, but their importance to children's folklore is of relatively
recent origin. Only after the middle of the nineteenth century did the ma-
jority of children attend school, and those that did rarely went for more than
a few years. Planned parks and playgrounds are even more recent. Never-
theless, the years of childhood are brief, and many generations of children
have passed through schools and playgrounds in the past century. The in-
teraction between children and the physical environment of schools and play-
grounds is the focus of this chapter. The fact that less is known about the
actual behavior of children in these settings than about the settings them-
selves is a major limitation, but the growing literature on play, children's
folklore, the history of childhood, and the cultural meanings of space makes
clear that the scene of a child's play helps to shape the content.
Interest in the relationships between children's lore and their environ-
ment, what Gary Fine has called the "ecotypic" approach to folklore, need
not exclude other approaches (Fine 1980d, 180). Indeed, as the literature
illustrates, we must be ready to ask a broad range of questions about
children's cognitive and physiological development, about their concepts of
space and place, about the influence of adults and peers, about the games
and traditions children bring to the school and playground, and about the
uses they make of their physical environment. Yi-Fu Tuan, drawing on the
insights of Piaget and others, speculates that "place, to the child, is a large
and somewhat immobile type of object" (1977, 29). Later, as their geographi-
cal horizons expand, children interact with objects and places with imagi-
nation, transforming physical reality through fantasy, active play, or simply
by ignoring it.
This ability to transform, or even transcend, physical space is prob-
ably functional in the child's development. As Gaston Bachelard argues in
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? ? his stimulating reflections on the phenomenology of space, imagination sepa-
rates a person from the past, as well as from reality, causing him to face the
future (1964, xxx). A child's ability to imagine, to create, to anticipate the
future is clearly part of the learning process. In part, the child uses his imagi-
nation in an attempt to control the scene in which he finds himself. In school
and schoolyard the struggle is between children and adults as well as among
children themselves, while in streets, parks, and playgrounds the interaction
is largely among peers. Melvin Williams, describing a black, inner-city jun-
ior high school in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, concludes:
I have never seen students more adept and skillful at manipulating
the behavioral dynamics of their classrooms. . . . Each one attempted
to outperform the others in acts that denied, defiled, and defied the
classroom setting. The student audience encouraged the behavior and
reinforced it whenever possible. In such frenzies, chairs were thrown
across the classroom, ostensibly to strike another student but not in-
tended to make contact. Boys participated in animated wrestling, lift-
ing one another and pretending to slam each other to the floor with
a ferociousness that equalled a staged television fight. Other boys
threw one another against walls, making sounds that gave impres-
sions of crushing one's opponent . . . . Most of the students realized
that this was a staged drama, but they acted as if it was actually oc-
curring. (1981, 101)
On the unsupervised playground, evidence suggests that children negotiate
their own uses of space (Opie and Opie 1969; Hayward, Rothenberg, and
Beasley 1974; Sutton-Smith 1981a; L. Hughes 1983; and Beresin 1993).
School, playground, even the streets may be scenes of contention, but
this is not always the case. Moreover, for children, play space is a continuum.
The journey from home and yard to school and playground is made by way
of steps, trees, curbs, alleys, shops, lots, and dozens of other places useful
for play (Ward 1978). Roger Hart's pioneering study Children's Experience
of Place (1979) established a number of useful working hypotheses. For ex-
ample, he found that parentally defined "free range" for children increased
in three steps. Children in the first and second grade in the small New En-
gland town where he conducted his research were not permitted to go be-
yond seeing and calling distance. In grades 3 and 4 the increased frequency
of group play allowed the children to go as far as three hundred yards from
home. Fifth and sixth graders, particularly boys who had acquired bicycles,
were given a wide range, "with permission," or the distance was defined by
230 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? the time it took to get there. In the upper grades the differences between boys
and girls increased, since boys were permitted greater freedom. Moreover,
Hart found that children used and valued various places differently at dif-
ferent times. Places were valued because of what could be done there (ball
fields, hills, trees, brooks), because of a person who lived or worked there
(homes, stores, streets), because of what could be bought there (supermar-
ket, service stations), because of how the place looked or felt (traffic lights,
library grounds), and by the lure of danger (streets, quarries, abandoned
buildings, graveyards). Although limited in many ways, Hart's study estab-
lishes a model for approaching the scenes of children's lore. What is the
scene? Who are the characters? What is the play?
CHILDREN'S ENVIRONMENTS IN THE PAST
Our evidence for children's lore before compulsory public education and the
playground movement comes chiefly from autobiographies and reminis-
cences, sometimes touched with a note of nostalgia. Linda Pollock's exhaus-
tive study of 496 published diaries and autobiographies (144 of them Ameri-
can), covering the years 1500 to 1900, asserts that play "does not appear
very often in the texts" and goes on to quote from several, including those
of Cotton Mather and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1983, 236). When
Edward Everett Hale describes Boston Common in the 1830s as "a play-
ground for children . . . ours to work our own sweet will upon," we get a
glimpse of the play spaces of a less organized era (Hale 1883, 65-66). Hale
played marbles, flew kites, rolled hoops, and played an elaborate game in-
volving the delivery and hiding of imaginary mail. A large stone on the Com-
mon gave rise to the superstition that if a person went around it backward
nine times saying the Lord's Prayer backward, his wish would come true.
Hale's playmates also believed that law did not extend onto the mud flats
beyond the high water mark, so it was there that they played props (a game
in which the tops of small sea shells are cut off and the shells filled with red
sealing wax, the player betting that he can throw odd or even numbers of
red spots) and other gambling games. The boys of Hale's generation had
already adapted to new urban institutions like the volunteer fire department:
"Of course we boys supposed that ours was the best in the world," Hale
writes. "Each boy in Boston supposed that the engine nearest his house was
the best engine in the world, and that, on occasion, it could throw water
higher than any other engine" (page 133).
Hale's contemporaries, Lucy Larcom, Henry Adams, William Dean
Howells, and William Gordon, report a variety of similar children's lore in
their autobiographical writing. Larcom turned a rock quarry near her home
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? ? in Beverly, Massachusetts, into a play house, while Howells roamed the
riverbanks and fields near Hamilton, Ohio. Gordon, growing up in the 1840s
in the Georgetown section of the District of Columbia, met his friends in
tanneries, bakeries, and carpentry shops, and hung around taverns, stage
stops, and steamboat landings to watch people. For boys, the predominant
ritual was fighting. Gangs of different ethnic groups and from different neigh-
borhoods fought regularly in Boston and Washington. Adams's depiction of
a snowball and rock fight between boys from the Boston Latin School and
the poorer boys from the South End is bloody and violent, though acknowl-
edging honor on both sides (1918, 41-42). New boys had to fight for ac-
ceptance into a group. Howells describes several cruel tricks, such as blow-
ing pencil dust in someone's eyes, or getting an "unsuspecting child to close
the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb, and look hard at you, while
you showed him Germany. You did this by pulling a string below the tube,
and running a needle into his thumb" (Howells 1890, 71).
Children's lives were shaped by their environments, especially in cit-
ies and towns where the places for work and play were differentiated. Elliott
West's study of children in Rocky Mountain mining camps suggests that boys
and girls as young as eight created a juvenile replica of frontier lawlessness.
"Ragged urchins" roamed the streets of Western towns, drinking, gambling,
destroying property and harassing adults, particularly ethnic minorities.
"Several New Mexican boys showered their town with rocks shot from an
old cannon barrel, and on another occasion they set off a keg of black pow-
der under the wagon of a man who had thrown them out of his skating rink"
(West 1983, 152). Similar conditions existed in the oil boom towns of Okla-
homa after World War I, according to Woody Guthrie (Guthrie 1943). Even
when children are successful in playing in public spaces, they also create
private, secret spaces. Guthrie recalls his gang's clubhouse in loving detail,
and Valerie Quinney has collected information on children's lives in the mill
village of Carrboro, North Carolina, in the years 1905-20 that reveals a
comparable pattern of public violence and private retreat. "Older boys found
a secret cave and fixed it up as a club house where they could play poker.
They had to crawl through a barrel to get in. To protect the spot further
from preachers and parents, they disguised the barrel opening by putting tim-
ber and trash in front of it" (Quinney 1982, 169).
The establishment of schools and playgrounds did not, of course,
mean the end of country, vacant lot, and street play. Rural children like
Dorothy Howard established special places for play near home, while those
living in small towns, like William Allen White in Eldorado, Kansas, and
William Carlos Williams in Rutherford, New Jersey, played in surrounding
232 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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? ? areas (Howard 1977; White 1946; W. C. Williams 1951). 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
233
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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;
2. 40 CHILDREN'S LORE IN SCHOOL AND PLAYGROUNDS
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