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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