At first I favored the see-saw with my wife-to-be Kathy at the other end. This didn't work out, as Kathy, as gifted as she was, couldn't grasp the fact that if the bell rings when she's at the bottom and she jumps off suddenly to go running in to class, I would come crashing down and probably suffer a new concussion.
The swings didn't work out because of swing bandits. Bigger kids would stop you, before you could get up to speed, and throw you off the swing so they could have it. A similar thing went on at the slide.
The do-it-yourself merry-go-round was only fun until you up-chucked.
So my favorite playground attraction, besides watching girls cartwheel, came to be the jungle gym. We had a lovely heavy-duty triple-decker with a kind of mini jungle gym on top. I'd climb up one side right-side-up, then keep going and climb down the other side up-side-down. There were kids who wanted to hog the jungle gym, like everything else, but they could only control the top of it. It was that big. It was so big, in fact, that it wouldn't be allowed today, because the danger from falling was so great. I'll have more to say about that as we near the end of the school year with these memoirs.
[Above: Ours was round, had thicker pipes, gravel rather than sand at the bottom, no rubber coating, and a pole from the top down the center to slide down Batman-style. Other than that, this is the basic kind of triple-decker with upper mini-gym structure I'm talking about. By the way, in the winter they had to warn us not to lick it.]In addition to recess work our teachers also led us in physically active games. We were taken outside and taught games to do with A Tisket, A Tasket, and Ring Around The Rosie. Indoors we were led to play games like musical chairs that weren't supposed to be very physical but became so when kids got rough.
Anyway, all that sweaty exercise we were getting on the playground and in organized games wasn't enough. Our ignorant child bodies had to also be trained in a course of instruction. So we had PT classes.
There were no grades for PT, but you wouldn't know it for the way the PT teacher acted. The guy would make all of us line up in the gym room. Boys and girls both, wearing their regular clothes, would have to line up together and stand at attention while he instructed us by telling us PT related facts. Then we had to touch our toes, do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, and the like.
One day his instruction was a long discourse on how important it was to obey him because if you horsed around you could end up like one kid he had years ago who got another kid's teeth embedding in his brain. Not only did he have brain damage, the teacher said, but the kid whose teeth they were lost them, and almost bled to death out of his mouth. This was the story he told us toward the end of his lecture, after we'd already been listening to the creep for 20 minutes, at attention.
I passed out and woke up on my back to smelling salts. Kathy was leaning in among a crowd of others bent over me, showing more concern for me than she ever showed on the see-saw, strengthening my love for her.
I was seen by a nurse who tried to get at the cause of the fainting. I told her right away about the long standing at attention and the PT teacher's gruesome lecture, but she wasn't satisfied with that. She kept pressing for another explanation. Finally she asked what I'd had for lunch that day, and I had to tell her I hadn't had any. I didn't tell her that my lunch was stolen, because that would have been snitching.
My parents were called. I was turned over to them to take me home early that day. The official explanation for my fainting spell was that I was not eating enough. The PT teacher's lecture and the standing at attention weren't even mentioned to my parents, who just wanted to know why I wasn't eating the food my Mother sent me to school with.
[Below: A do-it-yourself merry-go-round my Mother might have puked from, in her day.]
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