Back in the stone age a boy in Brooklyn could buy a spaldeen (a Spalding rubber ball) for a quarter.\u00a0 If that was too expensive, he could buy the lesser quality pensie pinkie for three nickels.\u00a0 And with such a valuable artifact you could play handball, Chinese handball, hit-the penny, stoopball, punchball, slapball or sewer cover baseball for weeks.\u00a0 Of course, if you used it for stickball, it would only last a matter of days before it split in half but the point is you really got your money\u2019s worth out of this simple toy.<\/p>\n
While looking for some toys for the kids Camera Girl informed me that a spaldeen now costs $7.88.\u00a0 Of course, now it\u2019s called a Spalding High Bounce Ball.\u00a0 So that’s more than a 3,000% increase in about sixty years.\u00a0 That sounds absurd.\u00a0 And yet when I think of the return on investment compared to a gaming system that kids use today, I tend to think that this humble toy from the neolithic is infinitely better.<\/p>\n
When I think of the hours we spent outside playing and fighting and running around and meeting new kids at the playground and thinking up new rules to make the games work better in the far from perfect environment of the street or the sidewalk or the public-school playground I know for a fact that we had much, much more stimulation, exercise and just plain fun than kids today.\u00a0 There were relatively few fat kids back then and real obesity was unheard of.\u00a0 How could you get fat when we were always running?\u00a0 Baseball, softball, basketball, football, even street hockey were played in their proper season.\u00a0 And tag, freeze tag, hide and go seek, ringalevio and a thousand variations that we made up filled the afternoon hours after school.\u00a0 And we were always walking to go everywhere in our environment.\u00a0 We could walk to Manhattan Beach (which is in Brooklyn) or see the fishing boats in Sheepshead Bay or walk down Ocean Parkway to Avenue U or Kings Highway to see a movie.\u00a0 We walked for miles and we rode our bikes everywhere.<\/p>\n
But what can the kids do today.\u00a0 If you live in the suburbs there may not even be any sidewalks and riding a bicycle on country roads is sometimes very hazardous and so the kids have to be brought to organized sports like soccer or maybe baseball but organized sports don\u2019t take up much time and to be honest, organized sports isn\u2019t as much fun.<\/p>\n
I guess what is needed is a common space like a big school yard that can be available to all the kids in a town with only enough adult supervision to keep really bad things like drugs and actual gang activity out but allowing the kids to develop their own hierarchy and split up into whatever groups they see fit.\u00a0 A baseball diamond, a football field, some basketball hoops, a handball court or two and a little pavement would produce an environment that would allow kids to invent some games that could keep them playing and fighting for hours.<\/p>\n
Maybe that would give them so much human interaction that they wouldn\u2019t have the time to stare at TikTok, grow obese and worry whether they were or weren\u2019t transgender.<\/p>\n
Update:<\/strong><\/p>\n War Pig commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n Playing tackle football with 20 kids on a side. Playing baseball with 8 outfielders. Riding bikes to the park. Staying out from breakfast to street lights coming on with a break for lunch and supper. Skinned knees and Bactine. Playing in warm rains. Mud puddles. Drinking water from a garden hose or pumping it out of the well. Soaking watermelons in a net in the well to chill them, then eating them and having seed spitting contests. Hypnotizing chickens on the farm. Fishing in the creek and bringing home the \u201ckeepers\u201d for supper. Gigging frogs for fried frog legs. Hot dog roasts over an open fire and toasting marshmallows on a stick. Climbing trees. Picking wild berries.<\/em><\/p>\n Me and my brother working on our paternal grandparents\u2019 farm. We worked like clydesdales and ate like them, too. Stayed skinny, even on mamaw\u2019s high-fat, high-calorie farm cooking.<\/em><\/p>\n Kids are missing out on a lot now. Fresh air, minor injuries, the odd bee sting, running and laughing just for the heck of it.<\/em><\/p>\n Damn, we had it good.<\/em><\/p>\n Master Diver replied:<\/strong><\/p>\n And yet we lived!<\/em> XXX Commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n God those were the days.One other thing making ramps 5 feet tall and jumping like Evel Knievel, We built one once in Quantico Va. 5 feet tall and put it on the edge of a 6 foot drop off and got the guy every one hated to be the first, liked to have killed him but we had a laugh and moved on. I sometimes wonder if he ever got up, oh well one less momma\u2019s boy.<\/em><\/p>\n TomD commented:<\/strong><\/p>\n We had the woods with the abandoned German POW camp in it, the trees, a rock quarry where the Germans were worked. A bunch of us would be walking up Roswell Rd north of Atlanta carrying our .22\u2019s to sit at the top of the quarry and shoot snakes. 5 or 6 kids with rifles on Roswell Rd now would bring SWAT and CNN.<\/strong><\/p>\n I once lifted a stick of dynamite from a county work truck and worked on ways to set pieces of it off using the real M80\u2019s.<\/strong><\/p>\n Dodge ball and the other games. You\u2019re right, no fat kids then. I can\u2019t remember anyone being fat, young or old. Constantly on the move. Crayfish in the creek. Fistfights where no one was really hurt other than feelings.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the stone age a boy in Brooklyn could buy a spaldeen (a Spalding rubber ball) for a quarter.\u00a0 If that was too expensive,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[4671,4607,4670],"class_list":["post-30364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-childhood","tag-games","tag-play"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n(With the occasional application of Mercurochrome or Merthiolate!)<\/em><\/p>\n