What’s the Point of Safe Playground Equipment?

Playgrounds have changed since my playground days.

I’m sure that’s for the better. I’m also sure orthopedic doctors lobbied against it.

Nowadays, nothing is very high or dangerous, and a nice fluffy bed of rubber mulch is under every piece of equipment.

This is a stark contrast from the playground at my school.

To the best of my recollection, we had two sets of monkey bars, swings, two merry-go-rounds, see-saws and a big slide.

I would be curious to see how your recollection of each of these pieces of equipment compares to mine.

Let’s get the monkey bars out of the way right off the bat.

One set was a cylinder of horizontal, vertical and diagonal bars that had a rounded top. I guess it was 15 feet high.

That one wasn’t too bad. If forced to, I would climb on that one. I just never really saw the point.

The other one was ripped from the pages of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy."

Actually, I’m not even certain the playground In hell has one of these.

The “lower” side, and yes — I put lower in quotation marks — was probably 8 feet off the ground. It was a horizontal ladder that was about 20 feet long. The kids would get up on there and sit or scoot around on it.

I don’t even remember how they got up there. I guess they shimmied up one of its legs.

I’ve never shimmied much.

Sometimes I would climb up enough to hang from it and try and do that Marines thing by maneuvering from one bar to the next.

I probably fell after three or four bars.

The other side of it, though, was where the truly twisted kids played. It was like the lower side except it was, oh, about 300 feet in the air.

On one end was a ladder that went straight up about 10 more feet and just ended. And for reasons completely unknown to me, some kids would climb up there. Maybe they were trying to see Rock City, I don’t know.

And when they fell, they landed on a big fluffy pile of rubber mulch.

Oh, no wait, they didn’t. They landed on compressed, hard-as-concrete, dirt.

Then the most unbelievable thing usually happened.

They would get back up and do it all again.

There are three types of people in the world, and we can illustrate this by which role they played on the merry-go-round.

First, you had your pushers. These were the worker bees of the class.

Then, you had the riders — the beautiful people.

Finally, you had the draggers. These were the outliers in the class who would hold on to the thing and drag in the dirt and see how much dust they could kick up.

It took a special kid to be a dragger. I recall the names of two. They both spent some time in my class, then we passed them on down, because back then, if you didn’t learn anything, you got another chance the following year.

My favorite thing to do was swing. I loved swinging high and jumping out, which I realize is out of character, but it was fun.

I loved the playground. We all did. 

But I don’t think it would be the same with the fluffy rubber mulch.