They do tend to get rid of the best playthings on playgrounds. There used to be this huge rocket thing on a playground back home. Last time I was there it was taken down. Upsetting, and not just because I used to make out in the top level of the rocket when I was a senior in high school.

The first thing to disappear from Australian playgrounds were maypoles, then see-saws, then those metal roundabout thingies that you could get underneath and lie on your back so that you could use your legs and feet to make it spin really fast, thereby (in theory anyway) throwing the other kids off. Ummmm I wonder if that is why they were removed.

There's a fairly newish playground near me that has seesaws. Even has monkey bars.

those metal roundabout thingies that you could get underneath and lie on your back so that you could use your legs and feet to make it spin really fast, thereby (in theory anyway) throwing the other kids off. Ummmm I wonder if that is why they were removed.

Actually, the reason I've always heard for those being removed or modified is kids getting underneath and then getting hit on the head while it was spinning.

They have a wonderful playground in the middle of downtown San Francisco. It's all foamy, don't-hurt-if-you-fall-on-it & it has fun, windy slides and sand for making messes. We took the niece and nephew there & had a ball.

Wow, look what I started!

OK, Red Rover everybody seems to know about. Same with dodgeball, although we never played "prison ball". Old school, no gym. We were playing in the lobby with the building's support pillars wrapped in exercise mats because we always slammed into them. But outside we had a nice big yard with asphalt and absolutely Nothing To Do--no equipment, not even a basketball hoop. So the boys brought baseball stuff and the girls played jumprope. Anybody else have double dutch? It's sort of dancing in and out of two ropes. We also had zillions of different chants for them but that's another thread--Miss Lucy and her steamboat and how much blood would come out of various dead animals are two of them.

Stoopball was a New York thing, although I guess you could do it in Baltimore or something. You had to throw your pink Spaulding (spal-deen) ball against a stoop and make it bounce a certain number of times. You could also take a jumprope and have someone stand in the middle of the street (these were 1-2 lane streets, mostly houses but not suburbia) and whip it around so people had to jump over it.

If we were stuck indoors, we would play Ship, Shore, Wave. One side of the room was a ship, the other side the wave, and one person yelled what side to go to and everybody ran like hell towards it. Of course, they'd change the side halfway over and everybody would skid to a halt like Daffy Duck and then crash into the slower ones still coming the wrong way. If the kid yelled "Wave!" you had to hit the floor. Lots of elbow and knee contact in that one.

In the summer we went out after dinner, too, and caught fireflies and went to the playground, which had heavy metal swings, old wooden seesaws, metal slides, and a sandbox that even in the 70's you avoided. Not because of needles, but because that was before Mayor Koch's leash laws. There's still a classic one left in the park in Sutton Place, of all places.

Wow, my boring childhood killed the thread!

We tried to do double dutch, because we'd seen people doing it on TV, but we weren't able to do it. The ropes would always get twisted in each other.

I thought that, in general, the games we invented ourselves were much more fun than the ones we played in gym. In gym, the rules were always that the same rules applied to everyone. When we played by ourselves, we made the rules that seemed fair to us, which usually gave little kids or kids with physical problems more advantages, and gave older, faster kids handicaps. The games would have gotten boring really quickly if the same kids one all the time, and our sense of fairness wouldn't let the same rules apply to people who obviously weren't the same. (Of course, this was a self-selecting group of kids. We all pretty much agreed on everything because we wanted to play together. We wouldn't have given anything to a kid we didn't want to play with us.)

I can't remember what I played in school--I sucked at games like 4 sq and dodge ball. There was hopscotch and jumprope (which I also sucked at).

However things were better at the beach with my cousins, it's a bay so the waves aren't bad and there's never a riptide plus it's semi private so we could run allover the place unsupervised. 4 boys and me. We had this 2 man (adult) inflatable boat and the five of us would push it out into deeper water and then jump off oc it. One game was called (for reasons lost in time) "I Discovered America. We'd each have a turn at the bow of the boat and then leap into the air and try to do some crazy kind of jump/non dive (it was too shallow) and yell "I discovered America!" and try for a big splash. Then you climbed back in the boat and tried again.

At lowtide there were mud wars, where we made mud balls and slung them at each other.

Also at high tide when we were playing in the water we had to be careful for horseflies. These are big, nasty flies that sting. So whenever any of us saw one we'd yell "Horsefly!" and then we'd all duck under the water and try to stay under until it left. Then it just turned into a game where we'd be playing and someone would randomly yell out "horsefly" and we'd all have to duck under the water.

You know, that sounds kind of boring. There was also lots of adventuring around and when it rained we played Monoply or read comic books.

Wow, my boring childhood killed the thread!

On the contrary Caroma, I love reading your stuff when you go into nostalgia mode.

Private message to Jim: I was only half-kidding the other day when I said I wanted a place to backchannel about UK TT! (There is one, I know, but I've had all kinds of trouble getting my account validated there.) Anyway, I'm absolutely burning with curiosity about something--I'm sure you can guess what--even though I know it's absolutely none of my business...