Playgrounds a breeding ground for creativity and danger
When my two grandsons came to visit with my daughter and her husband, we took the boys to the playground at Lewes Elementary School.
That was impressive.
The synthetic ground cover was soft and springy. The playground included two stories of climbing areas and lots of other activities. A lot of thought went into safety for the children.
It was nothing like what I grew up with.
I went to Sts. Cyril and Methodius School. Apparently, the only thing Catholics fear more than the devil is grass. Every Catholic school playground I ever saw as a kid was a paved parking lot. Even at our school in the suburbs, there was no grass.
Basketball hoops were allowed, but there was never any padding on the poles to prevent serious head injuries, which happened from time to time.
However, there were always public school playgrounds not far from our house, where we could play after school and on the weekends.
The playground equipment there was fairly simple, but at least there was grass.
Sure, there were the metal slides that got so hot in the summer, they burned your skin. But it was still a vast improvement over our school’s playground, which had no slides or other equipment.
In some ways, public school playgrounds were an extension of the educational environment, where you could learn valuable lessons about physics and to never trust your friends.
Since public school playgrounds were fairly safe, the challenge as a kid was finding ways to make them unsafe.
The swings were always the best place to risk injury to yourself or others — which, as a kid, was your main goal in life.
Swings were tall, with a strap of plastic or rubber hanging between two metal chains. There was nothing to hold you in place. So you could sit on the swing and turn around and around as many times as possible until you could no longer keep your feet on the ground. Then you would lift your feet and begin spinning around faster and faster until you almost lost consciousness.
You could also swing as high as you could while someone would run back and forth, trying not to be hit when you came down. If there were multiple swings, it was that much more dangerous for the runner.
It seemed like every playground had a piece of equipment with some variation of a ring of seats suspended around a central pole that the kids could spin – usually as fast as they could. This activity always ended when the combination of centrifugal force and a weakening grip launched one of the kids into the air. Extra points were awarded based on distance.
Teeter-totters were a wonderful place to learn about balance and gravity. It often finished when someone would stop with their end of the board resting on the ground and the other child hanging in the air – until the child on the ground slid off to release the board and let the other kid land with a bang.
I enjoyed watching my grandsons play in the Lewes Elementary School playground.
At the same time, I felt a little sorry for them. They will never know the “Lord of the Flies” dynamic of an old-school playground.
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Working It Out is the reincarnation of a column by the same name that reporter Kevin Conlon wrote weekly for more than six years for the Cortland Standard newspaper, where he worked as city editor before joining the Cape Gazette staff. The Syracuse Press Club, which covers 21 counties in Central New York, in May gave Conlon The Robert Haggart Award for best column of 2024.
Kevin Conlon came to the Cape Gazette with nearly 40 years of newspaper experience since graduating from St. Bonaventure University in New York with a bachelor's degree in mass communication. He reports on Sussex County government and other assignments as needed.
His career spans working as a reporter and editor at daily newspapers in upstate New York, including The Daily Gazette in Schenectady. He comes to the Cape Gazette from the Cortland Standard, where he was an editor for more than 25 years, and in recent years also contributed as a columnist and opinion page writer. He and his staff won regional and state writing awards.
Conlon was relocating to Lewes when he came across an advertisement for a reporter job at the Cape Gazette, and the decision to pursue it paid off. His new position gives him an opportunity to stay in a career that he loves, covering local news for an independently owned newspaper.
Conlon is the father of seven children and grandfather to two young boys. In his spare time, he trains for and competes in triathlons and other races. Now settling into the Cape Region, he is searching out hilly trails and roads with wide shoulders. He is a fan of St. Bonaventure sports, especially rugby and basketball, as well as following the Mets, Steelers and Celtics.
