The Windmill
You can hardly find a windmill any more, but in the 1950's almost all farms not only had one but needed one.
When I moved to the farm in Hokah, Minnesota with my mother and her new husband, we were a mere decade into what was called "rural electrification." Prior to that time, farms out in the hills simply did not have electricity. Like Grandma Lill's and Grandpa Lee's parents, people made do without it.
They had lanterns and candles and they limited their activities to the daylight hours as much as possible. They had hand pumps that brought water up to a spigot.
And they had windmills to draw water for the farm animals.
There was a windmill on the side hill above the barn at Al Botcher's farm, but the electric lines had reached out to Pfeffer Valley and it was no longer in use. An electric pump drew water for the house and for the tank in the cow yard.
That didn't mean that I couldn't have a lot of fun with the windmill.
Basically, a windmill is a tower which reaches up a hundred feet or so into the air. At the top, a fan of metal blades is mounted on a wheel. The wind turns the wheel. Think of the pedals of a bicycle mounted on the center of the wheel. As the wheel goes around the pedals go around in a much smaller circle with it, but more importantly they go up and down. Attached to one of the pedals is a long metal rod which hangs all the way down, nearly to the ground. The rod is going up and down when the wind is blowing, and it is simply attached to a pump handle and now the pump handle goes up and down, just as if you were standing there working it.
The well below the windmill is a large pipe which has been driven or drilled deep into the ground until it encounters the water table. Inside the large pipe, a smaller version of the rod continues all the way down into the water far below. Attached to the rod every few inches are "leathers". Think of pliable little unbrellas which are facing down into the well.
When the rod goes down, the water in the pipe pushes the umbrellas closed. As it is being pulled up, they open and pull water with them. The water travels from one umbrella, or leather, to the next until it reaches the top and gushes out a spigot and ultimately into a storage tank.
Because the tank is located up on the side of a hill, gravity then brings the water down a pipe to the house or barn. The pressure of the water at the bottom is dependent upon the size of the tank up on the hill, the amount of water in it, and the diameter of the pipe coming down, but our ancestors weren't pressure-washing their cars. They were darned happy just not to have to carry the water around in pails to make coffee with or water the livestock with.
The rod on Al's decrepit windmill hung about three feet off the ground and there was no pump left to hook it to. The well was capped. But I could hang on to it and have the wind lift me up and down. That was good fun for a little while, but then there is the tower itself. A metal ladder is built right into the tower because once in a while something goes wrong. The rod comes loose, or a storm damages the fan blades, or the bearing on the wheel needs greasing or replacing.
I never could summon the courage to climb more than twenty five or thirty feet up the ladder. The whole thing was creaky and scary, but it was very relaxing to sit in the shade of the windmill and the weeds growing around it and gaze off into Pfeffer Valley stretched out below. If there was a breeze the metal groaned as the ancient machine tried to do its work even though it was not hooked up anymore.
I would lay in the sun-warmed alfalfa and timothy and watch the clouds and the birds, surveying my little empire, the great outdoors.
I remember sitting beneath the windmill when I was a bit older. Some movement caught my eye and an object about a half mile distant appeared from the highest clouds on my left and traced a gliding arc to the topmost edge of the farm fields on the neighbor's farm on my right almost where they met the woods of the ridge.
It was over in a couple of seconds and then everything was normal and still. A UFO, I thought to myself, in alarm!
My mouth fell open as I contemplated that it might be an actual flying saucer that landed way over there and that the inhabitants might be pouring out into the woods. I don't remember mentioning it to anyone, but I refrained from hiking over to that ridge which was actually a short cut through the fields to some friends I knew on a farm in the next valley. By this age I had seen one or two science fiction films like The Blob and there was no way I was going over there!
Since no alien invasion occurred, the whole incident receded into the lower levels of importance in my mind and I eventually chalked it up as just a great unsolved mystery. In retrospect, I think it could have been ice dropping from the wing of a high flying airliner or even the metal door that closes over the landing gear when it is pulled up into the wings or fuselage.
For the first couple summers and autumns, my play was limited to the outbuildings of the farm and the fields that I could easily access, such as the hillside with the windmill, or the little valleys that water ran down in the spring to the neighbors downstream. I needed transportation to go very far and to get into much mischief. The beginnings of that transportation were my bare feet on the gravel road or through the thistles in the fields. But this was going to change shortly.
Friday, April 24, 2020
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
The Old Time Telephone
The Old Time Telephone
It is a common joke nowadays that young people have no clue what a dial telephone looks like. I can go back much, much further than that.
The farm near La Crescent and Hokah, Minnesota had a telephone. This was only because the telephone company had gone to the trouble of sinking telephone pole after telephone pole all the way up Pfeffer Valley so that a telephone wire could be strung to each house that wanted a telephone.
There were no cell phones. There were no wireless phones. There were no dial phones.
Our telephone was like a shoe box screwed to the wall in the kitchen. Protruding from it's front was a metal fork upon which the "receiver" hung. The fork was part of a switch inside the box. When the receiver was lifted from it, it raised up and closed the connection. It was spring loaded.
On the right hand side was a crank. If you lifted the receiver, which connected you to the "line", the wire hanging on all those poles, and turned the crank, it made a grinding sound because a little hammer vibrated between two small bells mounted inside the box.
Everyone's little box vibrated and rang, all the way up and down Pfeffer Valley when you did this.
If you spoke into the receiver anyone holding the receiver to their ear could hear you. All the way up and down Pfeffer Valley.
Everyone had their own ring. Ours was a long ring followed by two shorts. If our box rang three short bursts, we knew it was for someone else and we knew who. Each distinctive ring sequence was actually a phone number. Ours was a long and two shorts.
The phone company had a switchboard somewhere, probably in La Crosse or Houston, Minnesota or someplace like that. If someone outside your line wanted to call you, first of all they were going to have to pay. By the minute!
If you wanted to call someone outside your line, you called the operator, which might have been three longs or something like that. She would then make the call for you and it would cost you by the minute as well.
The funniest part was that when your phone jangled a long and two shorts, you picked up the receiver and put it to your ear and you would hear, "click, click, click, click, click!" Everybody up and down the valley was picking up their receiver and listening in.
Some of the more advanced model phones had a microphone part on the box and you spoke into that and listened with the moveable piece which was about as big as a microphone that a singer uses.
Everything was connected by wires. You didn't walk away from the box.
Now picture this: Al Botcher has just brought home this twenty-eight year old hottie and her snotty nosed kid and the phone jangles a long and two shorts, which is his number. All the little old ladies up and down the valley are just dying to have the latest information and pick up. Sometimes someone would even acknowledge it! They might join in the conversation.
Honest to God, this is what it was like.
Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee got a phone and it was the same thing. She had an advantage. Her mother would call from Westby or her Sister Carrie would call from La Crosse and they would talk in Danish! I can remember sitting in the kitchen and listening to her just rattling away in Danish.
My friends, Larry and Tommy Langen, a mile down the valley, and I developed our own plan. We could see one another's yard lights which were mounted atop one of the power poles in the driveway. and lit it so you could see out there. I had not yet heard of Morse Code, something that I became very proficient in at a later date, but we messaged each other by flipping the switch on and off once for the letter A, twice for the letter B, and so forth.
It was extremely tasky to get even a short message through by this method but it was a lot of fun, until our parents put an end to it. Not only were we wearing out the light switch and making a lot of aggravating noises, but the constant turning on and off of the light up on the pole is not good for it, as it turns out and someone has to come and climb the pole to replace the bulb.
You could have what they called a "private line", one that was dedicated solely to yourself, but it was costly and really only used by doctors or lawyers or anyone whose conversations had to be private, at least on their end. I didn't know anyone who had a private line so the telephone could be quite an irritation because your phone jangled whenever anyone on the line made or received any calls, and secrets or sensitive information was rarely shared in a phone call because everyone was listening in.
Once in a while my mother would be talking to someone and she would get mad because she could hear other people breathing as they listened in to her conversation. Occasionally, if she were in a bad mood, she would blurt out a reprimand, but nobody would own up to being the recipient.
This was one of the ways that everybody knew all about everyone else's business. There was another way, but I will talk about him at a later time.
It is a common joke nowadays that young people have no clue what a dial telephone looks like. I can go back much, much further than that.
The farm near La Crescent and Hokah, Minnesota had a telephone. This was only because the telephone company had gone to the trouble of sinking telephone pole after telephone pole all the way up Pfeffer Valley so that a telephone wire could be strung to each house that wanted a telephone.
There were no cell phones. There were no wireless phones. There were no dial phones.
Our telephone was like a shoe box screwed to the wall in the kitchen. Protruding from it's front was a metal fork upon which the "receiver" hung. The fork was part of a switch inside the box. When the receiver was lifted from it, it raised up and closed the connection. It was spring loaded.
On the right hand side was a crank. If you lifted the receiver, which connected you to the "line", the wire hanging on all those poles, and turned the crank, it made a grinding sound because a little hammer vibrated between two small bells mounted inside the box.
Everyone's little box vibrated and rang, all the way up and down Pfeffer Valley when you did this.
If you spoke into the receiver anyone holding the receiver to their ear could hear you. All the way up and down Pfeffer Valley.
Everyone had their own ring. Ours was a long ring followed by two shorts. If our box rang three short bursts, we knew it was for someone else and we knew who. Each distinctive ring sequence was actually a phone number. Ours was a long and two shorts.
The phone company had a switchboard somewhere, probably in La Crosse or Houston, Minnesota or someplace like that. If someone outside your line wanted to call you, first of all they were going to have to pay. By the minute!
If you wanted to call someone outside your line, you called the operator, which might have been three longs or something like that. She would then make the call for you and it would cost you by the minute as well.
The funniest part was that when your phone jangled a long and two shorts, you picked up the receiver and put it to your ear and you would hear, "click, click, click, click, click!" Everybody up and down the valley was picking up their receiver and listening in.
Some of the more advanced model phones had a microphone part on the box and you spoke into that and listened with the moveable piece which was about as big as a microphone that a singer uses.
Everything was connected by wires. You didn't walk away from the box.
Now picture this: Al Botcher has just brought home this twenty-eight year old hottie and her snotty nosed kid and the phone jangles a long and two shorts, which is his number. All the little old ladies up and down the valley are just dying to have the latest information and pick up. Sometimes someone would even acknowledge it! They might join in the conversation.
Honest to God, this is what it was like.
Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee got a phone and it was the same thing. She had an advantage. Her mother would call from Westby or her Sister Carrie would call from La Crosse and they would talk in Danish! I can remember sitting in the kitchen and listening to her just rattling away in Danish.
My friends, Larry and Tommy Langen, a mile down the valley, and I developed our own plan. We could see one another's yard lights which were mounted atop one of the power poles in the driveway. and lit it so you could see out there. I had not yet heard of Morse Code, something that I became very proficient in at a later date, but we messaged each other by flipping the switch on and off once for the letter A, twice for the letter B, and so forth.
It was extremely tasky to get even a short message through by this method but it was a lot of fun, until our parents put an end to it. Not only were we wearing out the light switch and making a lot of aggravating noises, but the constant turning on and off of the light up on the pole is not good for it, as it turns out and someone has to come and climb the pole to replace the bulb.
You could have what they called a "private line", one that was dedicated solely to yourself, but it was costly and really only used by doctors or lawyers or anyone whose conversations had to be private, at least on their end. I didn't know anyone who had a private line so the telephone could be quite an irritation because your phone jangled whenever anyone on the line made or received any calls, and secrets or sensitive information was rarely shared in a phone call because everyone was listening in.
Once in a while my mother would be talking to someone and she would get mad because she could hear other people breathing as they listened in to her conversation. Occasionally, if she were in a bad mood, she would blurt out a reprimand, but nobody would own up to being the recipient.
This was one of the ways that everybody knew all about everyone else's business. There was another way, but I will talk about him at a later time.
Thursday, April 9, 2020
The Grainery
The Grainery
The combined grainery and machine shed stood across from the barn and was directly across the driveway from the large kitchen window. Therefore an enterprising, seven or eight year old took great precautions for secrecy of movement. It could be entered from the back.
Unlike the similar building at Grandma Lill's and Grandpa Lee's farm, Al Botcher's grainery was positioned side-on as viewed from the house. The grain bins were in the right half of the grey wooden building and the machinery, such as it was, inhabited the left side and back behind the grain bins.
The grain bins were an awesome place to play. They were each about eight feet wide by twelve feet deep and were arranged like a hallway of half a dozen little motel rooms. Boards could be fastened across the little doorways and built up three or four feet if necessary. My stepdad, Al, and his friend Al raised soybeans and would shoot them in the little ventilation windows so that each room had about three feet of them in it.
Sometimes they would raise oats and do the same regimen of storage. In either case, but especially with soybeans, it was great fun to climb right into the bins, lie down, and bury oneself in them. They were cool against the body everywhere they got in and their weight could be felt. Moving about too much created a cloud of dust which scintillated in the sun shining in through the little windows.
The rooms smelled of mice.
The left side of the building had a sliding door, like the barn did, only smaller. It was designed so that a tractor could pull a piece of machinery in the door and it could be unhooked and the tractor driven out the back, which was partly open. Al Thompson had his own operation, so little machinery was needed to be stored in this shed. There were a couple of hay wagons and perhaps a hay rake and an old plow, maybe a drag. These were simple implements used for tilling and breaking up the fields in the spring.
More complicated gadgets like corn planters or hay balers were more expensive items and needed maintenance between growing seasons. Al Thompson kept them where he could work on them all winter in his spare time. Al kept the lawn mower in there as well, but that didn't take up much space.
Immediately inside the sliding door was parked the most wonderful item--a Model T Ford automobile, old and decrepit, just sitting in there on its hard rubber wheels. It didn't belong to Al but was simply stored in there by whomever did own it. No one ever came and did anything with it.
But I did.
I began by just sitting in it and grabbing and turning the steering wheel, pretending that I was driving it. I had had the opportunity to look under the hood of Al's Buick when he checked the oil and had marveled at the grimy, oily motor and all the gadgetry associated with it, which really wasn't all that much as compared to cars nowadays.
But the Model T was totally unlike Al's car when you looked past the basic superficialities. On the left and right sides of the steering wheel were metal sticks that stood out. They weren't the turn signals and the shifter. They both moved up and down, adjusting something, and there were corrugated grooves which kept them in the position that you put them in.
There were a few crude switches, but nothing like a heater or a fan. It had headlights but no battery. I had no clue then why it didn't have a battery, but of course it was because there was no starter motor. There was a crank right in front. I turned this crank around many a time in my sessions playing with the car but nothing ever happened except that the crank would come out of its receptacle very easily.
The Motel T had a flywheel with a "magneto", a coil and magnet arrangement, which generated the voltage necessary to fire the pistons and run the lights when needed, but I had no idea of this at the time. The car probably had a broken crankshaft, which was why I could easily turn the crank with little resistance.
The seats were really, really old fashioned, much like buggy seats and there was a handle to brake the car. It had a windshield but the side and back windows were made of clear, thick, plastic which was yellowed with age, but which could be snapped secure to the frames of the doors.
The hood opened on both sides, revealing the motor within, an aged, dirty benign chunk of metal.
I and my friends played in this car every summer. No one ever came for it.
There was another machine shed of sorts, but smaller, containing all sorts of junk pieces of implements, none of it looking very useful and never used by the two Als to the best of my recollection. A double corn crib stood between the larger shed and the hog barn. This storage bin was for corn which was dried right on the cobs and thrown in. A tractor could drive right between with a small wagon load of corn which had been mechanically picked from the stalks and flung around until the dry husks were torn off. They wound up in the wagon pulled behind the picker.
These bins were made of slats of wood with spaces of about a half inch between them. This allowed the air to dry the corn so that it wouldn't rot. The birds arrived each morning and hung around all day until all the kernels adjacent to these slots had been eaten.
The hog barn was a miniature of the milking parlor without the stanchions. The pigs could enter through small doors in the sides, much like pet doors. Inside they could be fed and watered and could find shelter. There were wider troughs for the manure which accumulated and the entire floor, which was smooth concrete, had to be cleared of excrement with a scoop shovel into the troughs and then they had to be scooped out and the dung thrown outside at the far end. I did it a few times and it was a lot of work.
Farthest away was the chicken coop. Inside were little cubicles, each with a nest. Hens would be on the nests setting on their eggs. If you were sent to gather eggs, you went in there and a general ruckus would erupt. The roosters would start cackling and the hens would start clucking. When things settled down, you simply stuck your hand under the hen and she pecked at your wrist as you removed the eggs and put them in your container.
That was the best part about Al's farm as compared to Grandpa Lee's. Al had a variety of farm animals. I didn't get too familiar with the cattle although I was not afraid to walk around in the cow yard. I made limited sorties into the pig pen because it was so dirty and smelly, but the pigs were kind of fun with all their antics.
I really gravitated to the chickens. The roosters would perch along pegs in the hen house and if you moved slowly you could get close enough to quickly grab one by both legs. Then all heck would break loose!
All the roosters would start screaming and flopping around with their wings pumping and the one that you grabbed would scream the loudest, as if you were torturing him. His body would rotate down, his squawking head would point toward the ground and his wings would pop open wide. All the time he would be carrying on as though you were taking bites out of him. Then he would settle down.
If you could manipulate him to tuck his head under one wing and gently swing him around in circles, he would calm down and you could set him right on the ground and he would stay that way for quite a while until you disturbed him. It was the funniest thing!
Al also had about a dozen bantam chickens roaming around the place. Some of them were pretty tame and could be carefully approached, petted, and even held if you were gentle enough to gain their trust. Unlike the white leghorns the bantys were multi-colored and beautiful, especially the roosters which walked about like they were showing off. I gave a lot of these chickens names and was very fond of them.
With about ten structures of assorted sizes to explore along with all the odd spaces around and between them, I rarely became bored in those first couple of years. I did not really miss my mother during the summer days when she went to work because it really was just a continuation of how it was all my previous life. She came home in the evening and made dinner and I was able to tell her of my adventures during the day.
I missed Grandma Lill the most, but we visited now and then and sometime during the summer I would go and spend a week there.
Marny had the best time of it, earning her money by ironing clothes, doing the dishes, mopping and vacuuming a bit, and making Kool-Aid.
The combined grainery and machine shed stood across from the barn and was directly across the driveway from the large kitchen window. Therefore an enterprising, seven or eight year old took great precautions for secrecy of movement. It could be entered from the back.
Unlike the similar building at Grandma Lill's and Grandpa Lee's farm, Al Botcher's grainery was positioned side-on as viewed from the house. The grain bins were in the right half of the grey wooden building and the machinery, such as it was, inhabited the left side and back behind the grain bins.
The grain bins were an awesome place to play. They were each about eight feet wide by twelve feet deep and were arranged like a hallway of half a dozen little motel rooms. Boards could be fastened across the little doorways and built up three or four feet if necessary. My stepdad, Al, and his friend Al raised soybeans and would shoot them in the little ventilation windows so that each room had about three feet of them in it.
Sometimes they would raise oats and do the same regimen of storage. In either case, but especially with soybeans, it was great fun to climb right into the bins, lie down, and bury oneself in them. They were cool against the body everywhere they got in and their weight could be felt. Moving about too much created a cloud of dust which scintillated in the sun shining in through the little windows.
The rooms smelled of mice.
The left side of the building had a sliding door, like the barn did, only smaller. It was designed so that a tractor could pull a piece of machinery in the door and it could be unhooked and the tractor driven out the back, which was partly open. Al Thompson had his own operation, so little machinery was needed to be stored in this shed. There were a couple of hay wagons and perhaps a hay rake and an old plow, maybe a drag. These were simple implements used for tilling and breaking up the fields in the spring.
More complicated gadgets like corn planters or hay balers were more expensive items and needed maintenance between growing seasons. Al Thompson kept them where he could work on them all winter in his spare time. Al kept the lawn mower in there as well, but that didn't take up much space.
Immediately inside the sliding door was parked the most wonderful item--a Model T Ford automobile, old and decrepit, just sitting in there on its hard rubber wheels. It didn't belong to Al but was simply stored in there by whomever did own it. No one ever came and did anything with it.
But I did.
I began by just sitting in it and grabbing and turning the steering wheel, pretending that I was driving it. I had had the opportunity to look under the hood of Al's Buick when he checked the oil and had marveled at the grimy, oily motor and all the gadgetry associated with it, which really wasn't all that much as compared to cars nowadays.
But the Model T was totally unlike Al's car when you looked past the basic superficialities. On the left and right sides of the steering wheel were metal sticks that stood out. They weren't the turn signals and the shifter. They both moved up and down, adjusting something, and there were corrugated grooves which kept them in the position that you put them in.
There were a few crude switches, but nothing like a heater or a fan. It had headlights but no battery. I had no clue then why it didn't have a battery, but of course it was because there was no starter motor. There was a crank right in front. I turned this crank around many a time in my sessions playing with the car but nothing ever happened except that the crank would come out of its receptacle very easily.
The Motel T had a flywheel with a "magneto", a coil and magnet arrangement, which generated the voltage necessary to fire the pistons and run the lights when needed, but I had no idea of this at the time. The car probably had a broken crankshaft, which was why I could easily turn the crank with little resistance.
The seats were really, really old fashioned, much like buggy seats and there was a handle to brake the car. It had a windshield but the side and back windows were made of clear, thick, plastic which was yellowed with age, but which could be snapped secure to the frames of the doors.
The hood opened on both sides, revealing the motor within, an aged, dirty benign chunk of metal.
I and my friends played in this car every summer. No one ever came for it.
There was another machine shed of sorts, but smaller, containing all sorts of junk pieces of implements, none of it looking very useful and never used by the two Als to the best of my recollection. A double corn crib stood between the larger shed and the hog barn. This storage bin was for corn which was dried right on the cobs and thrown in. A tractor could drive right between with a small wagon load of corn which had been mechanically picked from the stalks and flung around until the dry husks were torn off. They wound up in the wagon pulled behind the picker.
These bins were made of slats of wood with spaces of about a half inch between them. This allowed the air to dry the corn so that it wouldn't rot. The birds arrived each morning and hung around all day until all the kernels adjacent to these slots had been eaten.
The hog barn was a miniature of the milking parlor without the stanchions. The pigs could enter through small doors in the sides, much like pet doors. Inside they could be fed and watered and could find shelter. There were wider troughs for the manure which accumulated and the entire floor, which was smooth concrete, had to be cleared of excrement with a scoop shovel into the troughs and then they had to be scooped out and the dung thrown outside at the far end. I did it a few times and it was a lot of work.
Farthest away was the chicken coop. Inside were little cubicles, each with a nest. Hens would be on the nests setting on their eggs. If you were sent to gather eggs, you went in there and a general ruckus would erupt. The roosters would start cackling and the hens would start clucking. When things settled down, you simply stuck your hand under the hen and she pecked at your wrist as you removed the eggs and put them in your container.
That was the best part about Al's farm as compared to Grandpa Lee's. Al had a variety of farm animals. I didn't get too familiar with the cattle although I was not afraid to walk around in the cow yard. I made limited sorties into the pig pen because it was so dirty and smelly, but the pigs were kind of fun with all their antics.
I really gravitated to the chickens. The roosters would perch along pegs in the hen house and if you moved slowly you could get close enough to quickly grab one by both legs. Then all heck would break loose!
All the roosters would start screaming and flopping around with their wings pumping and the one that you grabbed would scream the loudest, as if you were torturing him. His body would rotate down, his squawking head would point toward the ground and his wings would pop open wide. All the time he would be carrying on as though you were taking bites out of him. Then he would settle down.
If you could manipulate him to tuck his head under one wing and gently swing him around in circles, he would calm down and you could set him right on the ground and he would stay that way for quite a while until you disturbed him. It was the funniest thing!
Al also had about a dozen bantam chickens roaming around the place. Some of them were pretty tame and could be carefully approached, petted, and even held if you were gentle enough to gain their trust. Unlike the white leghorns the bantys were multi-colored and beautiful, especially the roosters which walked about like they were showing off. I gave a lot of these chickens names and was very fond of them.
With about ten structures of assorted sizes to explore along with all the odd spaces around and between them, I rarely became bored in those first couple of years. I did not really miss my mother during the summer days when she went to work because it really was just a continuation of how it was all my previous life. She came home in the evening and made dinner and I was able to tell her of my adventures during the day.
I missed Grandma Lill the most, but we visited now and then and sometime during the summer I would go and spend a week there.
Marny had the best time of it, earning her money by ironing clothes, doing the dishes, mopping and vacuuming a bit, and making Kool-Aid.
Thursday, April 2, 2020
The Playground
The Playground
The school playground in the middle 1950's was quite a different place than those of today. At Hokah Elementary we had only the large swing set, the merry-go-round, and the teeter totter.
I learned a lot about physics from the playground equipment, but I didn't confine my propensity for injury to them. There were lots of creative ways to get hurt.
The teeter-totters we had were quite primitive. They attached to the large pipe in the middle with a metal yoke that was bolted through the plank of the apparatus. Nothing sobers up a daydreaming child like his playmate jumping quickly from his end of the teeter-totter, providing a four foot fall with a hard stop on the tail bone at the bottom. A lesson quickly learned was to keep the legs from being under the board when this happened. It is amusing, but not a good idea to ride the middle where the board hangs on the crosspipe from a metal yoke bolted through it. This yoke would squeak and squawk because it was necessary for it to be loose. If you put your fingers or your buttocks too close to it you would get pinched real hard.
Normal opportunities for injury on the merry-go-round, like being thrown off into the gravel and broken pop bottle glass which littered the playground, were augmented by the irresistible urge to crawl beneath it while other children were spinning it. The underside of the circular tray was reinforced by vertical metal plates. Lift your head slightly and you got clipped as they rotated around.
The seemingly innocuous swing set had lots of potential as well, with its 15-foot high crossbar and swinging chains. One classmate, who was quite athletic, tired of the usual dangers of the swing and declared his ambition to get the swing going so high that he would go up over the crossbar and come around.
A good lesson in physics ensued. He was a very strong boy, but when he got the swing up more than ninety degrees, it became increasingly difficult to go higher. There seemed to be a law of physics working here, but he tried very, very hard. When he got to about 110-degrees it became evident that since the swing was attached to flexible chains, not stiff rods, his return trajectory turned out to be straight down.
He broke an arm and a leg.
A lot of our play was away from the formal devices, which were boring compared to the giant white pine in the back corner of the playground. There could be several of us up there at different levels, climbing among the needles and cones. There was such a conglomeration of limbs on that tree that I don't believe anyone ever took a fall. We were like squirrels.
One game which I particularly didn't like was called something like "Annie, Annie Over." A group of boys would lock arms by grabbing one another's wrists and make a line. They would cry the name of one of the kids on the other side. The selected boy or girl would get up a head of steam and try and crash through the line. They would often strike your forearm rather than the hands. In either case it was very painful and jarring. I don't recall anyone getting a broken arm.
Once I had mastered all the methods of getting injured and learned how to avoid them, it was as if it were necessary to graduate playground skills by finding a novel method of getting hurt, much like the student trying to go up over the swing. It was like your playground thesis.
My mother even experienced this phenomenon. When she was a school girl, one of her classmates decided to ride his bicycle down the Westby, WI ski jump, in summer of course. She reported that he broke both arms and both legs. That was a graduate level dissertation.
I unwittingly chose Mr Wagner's spiral fire escape. The principal was away and we had been getting away with climbing about halfway up the thing, but we needed something novel. We discovered that we could throw items, like a pack of gum or some rolled-up mittens, up at the top of the fire escape and the objects would come rolling down to the bottom where we could fetch them and do it again.
Pretty soon several of us were finding all kinds of things, like small rocks, pennies, and whatever. They would bang around on their way down and sometimes, to our delight, exit the bottom quite quickly, spinning off into the dirt where we could recover them for another go.
I found a small metal spike about the size of a candy bar. It had a little more weight than the junk we had been heaving up there, so I had to throw it up underhanded. I gave it a good lob and waited for it to come banging down the chute.
The difficulty was that it hadn't made it over the top of the fire escape and came down directly upon my curly red head, with a clunk.
My jaw dropped in surprise as I wobbled, then recovered and looked over at my playmates, laughing.
They were not laughing. They were staring at me in mesmerized horror.
"What's wrong?" I asked. My answer came not from my speechless friends, but in the form of a warm stream of blood running out of my hair and down my face.
Needless to say, the teachers had to hold a towel against my head to stop the bleeding and my mother and step-dad had to be called. My mother became hysterical. Al Botcher drove us all the way to La Crosse to the hospital emergency room where they cleaned the wound and put a metal staple in to hold the skin together, rather than stitching it.
For a long, long time I could scratch around in my hair and find the little dent where the staple had held my skin together until it healed.
I guess it was my diploma.
The school playground in the middle 1950's was quite a different place than those of today. At Hokah Elementary we had only the large swing set, the merry-go-round, and the teeter totter.
I learned a lot about physics from the playground equipment, but I didn't confine my propensity for injury to them. There were lots of creative ways to get hurt.
The teeter-totters we had were quite primitive. They attached to the large pipe in the middle with a metal yoke that was bolted through the plank of the apparatus. Nothing sobers up a daydreaming child like his playmate jumping quickly from his end of the teeter-totter, providing a four foot fall with a hard stop on the tail bone at the bottom. A lesson quickly learned was to keep the legs from being under the board when this happened. It is amusing, but not a good idea to ride the middle where the board hangs on the crosspipe from a metal yoke bolted through it. This yoke would squeak and squawk because it was necessary for it to be loose. If you put your fingers or your buttocks too close to it you would get pinched real hard.
Normal opportunities for injury on the merry-go-round, like being thrown off into the gravel and broken pop bottle glass which littered the playground, were augmented by the irresistible urge to crawl beneath it while other children were spinning it. The underside of the circular tray was reinforced by vertical metal plates. Lift your head slightly and you got clipped as they rotated around.
The seemingly innocuous swing set had lots of potential as well, with its 15-foot high crossbar and swinging chains. One classmate, who was quite athletic, tired of the usual dangers of the swing and declared his ambition to get the swing going so high that he would go up over the crossbar and come around.
A good lesson in physics ensued. He was a very strong boy, but when he got the swing up more than ninety degrees, it became increasingly difficult to go higher. There seemed to be a law of physics working here, but he tried very, very hard. When he got to about 110-degrees it became evident that since the swing was attached to flexible chains, not stiff rods, his return trajectory turned out to be straight down.
He broke an arm and a leg.
A lot of our play was away from the formal devices, which were boring compared to the giant white pine in the back corner of the playground. There could be several of us up there at different levels, climbing among the needles and cones. There was such a conglomeration of limbs on that tree that I don't believe anyone ever took a fall. We were like squirrels.
One game which I particularly didn't like was called something like "Annie, Annie Over." A group of boys would lock arms by grabbing one another's wrists and make a line. They would cry the name of one of the kids on the other side. The selected boy or girl would get up a head of steam and try and crash through the line. They would often strike your forearm rather than the hands. In either case it was very painful and jarring. I don't recall anyone getting a broken arm.
Once I had mastered all the methods of getting injured and learned how to avoid them, it was as if it were necessary to graduate playground skills by finding a novel method of getting hurt, much like the student trying to go up over the swing. It was like your playground thesis.
My mother even experienced this phenomenon. When she was a school girl, one of her classmates decided to ride his bicycle down the Westby, WI ski jump, in summer of course. She reported that he broke both arms and both legs. That was a graduate level dissertation.
I unwittingly chose Mr Wagner's spiral fire escape. The principal was away and we had been getting away with climbing about halfway up the thing, but we needed something novel. We discovered that we could throw items, like a pack of gum or some rolled-up mittens, up at the top of the fire escape and the objects would come rolling down to the bottom where we could fetch them and do it again.
Pretty soon several of us were finding all kinds of things, like small rocks, pennies, and whatever. They would bang around on their way down and sometimes, to our delight, exit the bottom quite quickly, spinning off into the dirt where we could recover them for another go.
I found a small metal spike about the size of a candy bar. It had a little more weight than the junk we had been heaving up there, so I had to throw it up underhanded. I gave it a good lob and waited for it to come banging down the chute.
The difficulty was that it hadn't made it over the top of the fire escape and came down directly upon my curly red head, with a clunk.
My jaw dropped in surprise as I wobbled, then recovered and looked over at my playmates, laughing.
They were not laughing. They were staring at me in mesmerized horror.
"What's wrong?" I asked. My answer came not from my speechless friends, but in the form of a warm stream of blood running out of my hair and down my face.
Needless to say, the teachers had to hold a towel against my head to stop the bleeding and my mother and step-dad had to be called. My mother became hysterical. Al Botcher drove us all the way to La Crosse to the hospital emergency room where they cleaned the wound and put a metal staple in to hold the skin together, rather than stitching it.
For a long, long time I could scratch around in my hair and find the little dent where the staple had held my skin together until it healed.
I guess it was my diploma.
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