Playing it safe
Cheryl Unruh
Originally published 02:01 p.m., October 30, 2007
Updated 02:01 p.m., October 30, 2007
At Eastside Memorial Park, the construction continues.
Recently, a large shelter house was installed at this Ninth Avenue and East Street Park. The shelter still needs some finish work, but it’s up and has a pretty red roof.
A chain-link fence now stands between the park and the railroad switch yard, and sturdy green posts are cemented into the ground to hold new swings.
Currently, the park’s main attraction is a playground unit which has numerous platforms and chutes and ladders.
This playground setup is designed for safety. The unit is constructed from hard plastic and smooth metal with no sharp edges. Even the bolts holding it together are rounded so that pieces of clothing won’t get caught and little hands won’t get scraped.
Beneath this large piece of playground equipment, the ground is springy. There’s a deep pile of tiny shreds of rubber — recycled tires. A kid tumbling onto this surface would probably have no injuries. Fewer for sure than if he had fallen onto packed dirt, or say, asphalt.
There’s more attention paid to playground safety now than when I was a kid. Of course, my childhood was a very long time ago, back when kids were expendable.
As infants and toddlers, my generation rode in cars in the early ‘60s without the benefit of child-safety seats. And no one made us wear bicycle helmets — not that we would have.
Live and learn.
At the Pawnee Rock Elementary schoolyard, the jungle gym was a kid-magnet.
This piece of playground equipment was a 10- to 12-foot high structure made of horizontal and vertical steel bars; rows and columns of open cubes. Each section of a cube was about two feet long.
Now, as an adult, when I visualize that jungle gym, I see “concussion” written all over it.
Monkeys that we were, we scurried up the rungs in a race to the top. My classmates and I played tag on the jungle gym, scooting around hastily, sometimes wearing smooth-soled shoes which weren’t particularly good at gripping narrow steel bars. This jungle gym was a definite shin-bruiser.
And we turned flips over the bars. We placed our bellies against them and spun, hopefully remembering to tuck our heads so as not to bang them into the bar below. Taller kids especially risked dented foreheads.
During one summer break, the school district paved the entire playground. Yippee — no more mud.
Asphalt could make a ball bounce so much better than uneven dirt. There were no more puddles beneath the swings and no circular trough of mud at the merry-go-round.
The smooth surface allowed us to dash like running backs past the outstretched arms of classmates during Pom-Pom-Pull-Away, a game of tag.
Yes, the asphalt playground was an incredible asset — unless and until you happened to need a soft landing. But we were tough and gritty kids. And we took our bloody scrapes to the nurse’s office for a dose of Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid.
One day the pavement turned on us. A sixth-grade girl fell from the top of the slippery slide onto the asphalt. We kids gathered around in horror until we were shooed away by the teachers.
That was the first time I saw an ambulance in use. Many of the kids on the playground that day learned the seriousness of play, for her injuries were serious. After a long absence, she returned to school.
Her fall provided a lesson in caution. We became less reckless when we played on the slippery slide and on that jungle gym.
Now you can’t protect kids from everything, but you do what you can. Builders of playgrounds have learned from the injuries of the past — and at Eastside Park, they’ve given kids a soft place to fall.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net.
• Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
Comments
Post a comment
We allow registered users to post comments on this Web site. Our goal with this feature is to encourage thoughtful discussions about the news stories. Using the comment feature to make random attacks on people is not acceptable. Emporiagazette.com neither endorses nor guarantees the accuracy of any user contribution. Responsibility for what is posted or contributed to this site is the sole responsibility of each user. To learn more about our posting policies please read our User Poster Agreement Policy.
(Requires free registration.)