Responding to my recent post on “Duck & Cover…”, my U-U friend Emily, who has posted several comments on my blog, recalled as a kid living next door to her elementary school and its playground. She recalls fondly having the playground so close, and being able to spend so much time playing there. I had a similar circumstance in my youth…

My mom and dad made a concerted effort when my brother and I were kids to live next to a park, so we had that great close by venue to play. During my early elementary years, we lived in our little house across the street from Almendinger Park in Ann Arbor. Not a big park, but it had a playground, big lilac bushes to hide in and do imagination play, a couple baseball diamonds, a tennis court and picnic tables under a stand of maple trees. The parks and recreation department also had a person on site in the summer to let kids in the neighborhood check out sports equipment – soccer balls, baseballs and bats, tether balls, etc. – and organize some activities.

We moved from there to the east side of town when I was nine, my mom thinking the local junior high (Tappan) in that neighborhood might be a better school for me to go to. Again my mom and dad managed to find a house (renting this time) right across the street from a rather large park, Burns Park, which also included the new elementary school I would be going to for fifth grade. It was quite the place for a kid, with two basketball court, two baseball diamonds, two football/soccer fields, five tennis courts, several playgrounds, a small hill, and a multipurpose room with staff in the summer to check out equipment and organize stuff for kids to do.

Just like Emily, I spent countless hours in the park, playing with the kids in the neighborhood or by myself, joining in pickup games of one sport or the other, hitting a tennis ball against the backboard, and an array of all sorts of other activities. At any given point during a nice weekend or summer afternoon there might be 100 youth in the park, mostly doing various activities not supervised by adults. I would be out there for hours at a time and my mom would ring a cow bell when it was time for me to come home for dinner, for the evening, or for some other reason.

Even on school days the park got quite a workout from the neighborhood kids. Starting fifth grade at the Burns Park Elementary School on the park site, I quickly discovered that every day before school in the morning, and during the lunch hour, there was a standing soccer game between the sixth graders on one team and the fourth and fifth graders on the other. On any given school morning, and then again at lunch, 30 to 50 kids (almost all boys) would gather at the football/soccer fields, some bringing soccer balls and the spontaneous soccer game would begin, as best as I can remember, unsupervised by adults. It was usually a pretty wild and semi-chaotic affair with maybe three or four soccer balls in play at the same time.

These daily games continued through the fall, winter and into the spring, in warm or cold, dry or wet weather, even negotiating winter snow. (Maybe on a really rainy day we all took a pass.) I laugh now to think of how we would come into our school classes after the bell rang completely exhausted, soaked with sweat, and making the place smell like a locker room I’m sure.

For me, in my youth, the world of the park was a major part of my life, where I played and engaged in many activities, unsupervised by adults. But for my kids, growing up in the big city in an age when parents were afraid to let their kids outside the house unsupervised, they had none of this sort of experience. My kids never got to live in house next door to a park or a schoolyard. They might walk, bicycle or drive with me to one of the local parks here in the Valley, but it was for a limited period and always closely supervised by me. And there were never other neighborhood kids there that they new. My kids never had that sort of neighborhood.

When you think about it, so many factors go into the differences, particularly when it comes to play venues for kids, between a mid-size Midwestern town like Ann Arbor in the 1960s versus a megalopolis like Los Angeles in the 1990s, when my kids were growing up. It wasn’t just that Ann Arbor was a much smaller town than Los Angeles. My partner Sally’s folks, Blanche and Reuben, grew up in New York City, in the Bronx, and spent many hours outside the house playing unsupervised by adults. There was a community where they lived in the Bronx, like there was where I lived in Ann Arbor. There just wasn’t that same community thing in the suburban San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles in the 1990s, at least not where my family lived.

Had there been more of a neighborhood connection in my Valley bedroom community in the 1960s? Was thirty years the key factor? I don’t know.