I don’t know that what or how we played differed much from playing as it’s always been done. I wonder if play has differed since we were apes. Watching puppies and guppies and my children’s baby gerbils I wonder if it’s differed since we became vertebrates. The essence of play is to run around and squeal or, with guppies, bubble.
But it’s hard to know to what extent there have been alterations in the nature of childhood play. Many authors have tried to recapture childhood (something that is interesting to real children only if it’s done ludicrously as in the Harry Potter books). Yet authors must, perforce, make stories from the material of their youthful activities, leaving the rest of us who have been children feeling like Tom Sawyer’s younger, duller brother, and you’ll recall he had one.
True play exists outside the realm of plot. You can, if you like, give complication, climax, and denouement to a game of Kick the Can. But your tragic catharsis is going to be a flop unless you’re telling a lot of lies. And people are liars about their childhoods, a trait they pick up from themselves as children. Even the youngest and most innocent children are unwilling to tell the truth about matters of childish importance. How boogers taste, for example.
Then we discover our private parts, learn to smoke, get driver’s licenses, and forget the realities of childhood. Among the things I’ve forgotten are the rules for the games we played. I doubt I’d be a successful competitor in even Mother May I. But I’m not sure we remembered the rules at the time either. Arguing about a game’s rules took longer than the game. And choosing up sides was of greater consequence than whether our side won.
Maybe the Baby Boom was showing its talent for what would become one of our most significant achievements, political impasse and standstill. Nobody thanks us for this now. But consider how the Baby Boom grew up in the aftermath of a period when politics had been doing anything but standing still, when politics had boldly trooped onto the field for a World War I and a World War II and was getting ready for a tripleheader. Not that we kids understood or minded this, but perhaps it affected us subliminally.
Or maybe we’re just buttheads. Anyway, winning was not the point of Baby Boom games. We weren’t much concerned with winning. Not that we subscribed to today’s “everyone wins” ethos. The point of our games was failure. The fun of the thing was to tag some other kid and make him “it” or “poison” or “out” or to trip him or tackle him or bonk him with a ball. And her too. All run-around-and-squeal games were mixed sex. They were conducted with a total lack of consideration for the feelings of others that would be the envy of any modern child.
The same games still exist but they are conducted in day care, rec centers, and play groups under the tutelage of trained physical activity directors who do remember the rules. Winning is still not the point. Sensitivity is. They probably play Inclusion Tag. “We are all it.” Total lack of consideration for the feelings of others has become too valuable to be wasted on kids. The media make billions from it.
Boys and girls ran around and squealed together, but outdoor games requiring greater concentration and precision were gender specific. In my neighborhood jacks was played only by girls, though the hand-eye coordination gained would have been more useful to boys with their ball sports. Marbles was played only by boys, though girls would have better appreciated the prettiness of the cat’s-eyes, mibs, and clearys. Thus the stage was set for dissatisfaction with traditional ideas of masculine and feminine. No doubt Simone de Beauvoir mentions mibs and clearys somewhere in The Second Sex.
The chalk outline for hopscotch was drawn on the sidewalk by girls, but there was no shame in a boy playing. It was our first inkling that girls are better at anything to which they choose to turn their hand or, in this case, foot. We already knew from school that girls were less foolish. Sometimes a boy would foolishly jump rope with the excuse that boxers did it. What girls pull in Double Dutch is excellent preparation for divorce court. Parcheesi, Chutes and Ladders, Clue, Old Maid, Crazy Eights, and 52 Pickup were for rainy days, and if it looked like the rain was never going to stop we’d get out Monopoly. Despairing of its page upon page of rules we’d make our own. This is how both Wall Street investment strategy and Washington economic policy were invented by our generation. We also invented selling “Get Out of Jail Free” cards to the highest bidder. And we made deals with each other that were so complex that by the time six hotels had been placed on Baltic Avenue none of us had any idea what we were doing. This is the origin of the derivatives market and the real estate bubble. Climate change may not be all bad. The twenty-first-century financial climate was caused by too much rain in the 1950s.
Most of our play, however, had nothing to do with games. We liked games but we looked down on them, or we thought we should. Later we’d make “playing games” a pointed insult.
Games by their nature have limits. Games cramped our imagination. Imagination was something parents, Captain Kangaroo, Howdy Doody, the Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeers, and other voices of authority were always urging us to use. Members of the Greatest Generation were terrible hypocrites about imagination. They refused to use theirs except as a way to create the dullest imaginable life for themselves. Then they turned around and insisted we use ours.
“The sky’s the limit!” was one of those phrases bruited about by adults to children sixty years ago. Maybe the adults were beginning to wonder whether, and in what way, they’d reached for it themselves. “Dream big!” our third-grade teacher would say, which was ridiculous coming from someone who ended up teaching third grade. But we didn’t know better. So the sky was the limit, to our limited ability to make it so, and we dreamed big, in our own small way.
What we did was make things up. Actually we didn’t. We appropriated characters, circumstances, situations, and settings. Then we engaged in that art form which has come to be so oddly praised, improv. We did so by indulging in that activity which has come to be so oddly deplored, acting out.
War was the crux of play among boys. There were six of us about the same age who lived at the same end of the block. Billy Stumf, a year older, was captain. I was lieutenant. Johnny MacKay and Steve Penske were a battalion. Bobby Stumf and Jerry Harris, a year younger, were reinforcements. Any boy from more than half a block away was an Axis Power.
Love was the crux of play among girls, or love’s simulacrum, domesticity. We boys might have tried to avoid girls’ play except that Susie Inwood, who lived next door, could whip any of us. Thus Bobby and Jerry and Johnny and Steve and Billy and I played House. One benefit was Susie’s big comic book collection, a whole milk crate full. Thus, when a blanket had been draped over the swing set or the branches in a brush pile had been arranged to form the rafters of a home, we would sit on the upturned box designated as a couch and do a good imitation of husbands helping in the kitchen.
Not that there were any kitchens when we were playing House. We each had a mother to whose kitchen all of us could resort and demand a snack at any moment as long as that moment was not within half an hour of a designated mealtime.
It was a snack to astonish those who believe there’s been a decline in the quality of childhood nutrition—a piece of commercial white bread covered in butter (the high-fat-content, salted kind) and liberally sprinkled with refined sugar. This we ate in that kitchen and not in our “house.” Nor did we, in our fictitious domicile, participate in any other household activities or perform any household chores. The point of playing House was for the girls to make up their minds about who was “mommy” and who was “daddy” and who was “baby.” All these years later, as far as I can tell, they’re still deciding.
Among the other forms of girls’ play into which we were dragooned was Store. It was an opportunity to gather all the money from everybody’s Monopoly games and arrange it by denomination in a shoe box. Then the shoe box full of Monopoly money would be misplaced, making the next game of Monopoly even more
like the operations of today’s Federal Reserve than it was already.
Nothing was ever bought or sold in Store. It was a reenactment of the attitude of shopping, a happy pastime. There was no choosiness or haggling or shortage of unreal goods. When we couldn’t find the Monopoly money, we used our parents’ ration tokens left over from World War II.
Sometimes the girls would build a lemonade stand by getting the boys to lay planks over sawhorses and the moms to make lemonade in the form of Kool-Aid that was usually grape flavored while the girls worked on the sign until all the grape Kool-Aid had been drunk by the boys. The lemonade stand was a virtual business.
There was a thing of Susie Inwood’s conception called Flying Horses. We were flying horses. We indicated that we were flying by hooking our thumbs into our armpits and flapping our elbows. There was no point to our being flying horses. We ran around as usual although this time neighing instead of squealing. There was no drama to our being flying horses. Nothing threatened our felicity. We were as big as horses and we could fly. We adopted roles for no reason and acted them to no purpose. The case could be made that we created reality TV before we knew anything about reality or much (there were only three channels) about TV.
And in a harbinger of what would be a generational trademark, we were sometimes in the mood for dark, edgy black humor. Then we played School.
When it was just boys we played Robin Hood. Tomato stakes were quarterstaffs. We played Knights of the Round Table with picket fence slat broadswords and garbage can lid shields. After the garbage can lids were taken away from us the fence slats became dueling foils or, if Mr. Biedermeyer had left his outboard motorboat on its trailer in the driveway, pirate sabers.
We played Cowboys. This was the only time it was permissible for a boy over five to skip. Done with our hands held out in front of us, grasping the reins, it was called galloping. We played Indians, but our twig arrows and tree branch and package twine bows didn’t amount to much. Indians turned out to be better at hurling beanpole lances at each other and scalping younger brothers with Scout knives, to the extent that the crew cuts of the period allowed for scalping.
We did not, however, play Cowboys and Indians. That this showed a nascent multicultural sensitivity is a nice thought. And Tonto did seem like a good guy, while the Lone Ranger was kind of silly. “Who was that masked man?” Well, who the heck else in the Texas Rangers goes around by himself wearing a mask? But, really, playing Cowboys and Indians would have required two kinds of role playing at once. Roping and branding buffalo? Fast-draw tomahawk duels? This would have been overcomplicated. Using our imagination was different than using our brain. A flight of fancy, once embarked upon, requires a dull consistency in the fanciful. Hence some of the longueurs in the later career of the Baby Boom, such as being entranced with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman in 1976.
We played Superman and Superboy and Superdog as well, if Johnny MacKay’s German shepherd couldn’t manage to free itself from the pillowcase tucked under its collar. When we raised our arms above our heads, fingers extended and palms down, it was stipulated that we were soaring through the air. But once Superman had landed (a hop on one foot with arms crooked and fists clenched) we didn’t know quite what to do with him. He was too super—nobody could fight him.
And fighting was our chief joy. We played war across the front yards, war in the local park, war indoors with foxholes behind the davenport and snipers at the top of the stairs. We were usually the marines, sometimes the army, but never the navy because sailors drowned instead of being dramatically wounded and bleeding to death while bravely urging our platoon to leave us behind and take the hill.
Sometimes we were the German army. Nazis were to be deplored but they had cool uniforms. Our part of the state had been settled by Germans, and most of our war veteran fathers had, perhaps not coincidentally, been stationed in the Pacific. The exception being Mr. Meinhoff across the street who was quick to point out that he’d fought on the Russian front. The Japanese sounded funny and wore funny uniforms with puttees and soup bowl helmets and were more fun to kill.
The six of us were all on one side in these wars. Not that there was another side. Combat was waged against never invincible, always invisible enemies.
After the wars there was War, on the living room rug or along the upstairs hall or in Mom’s herbaceous borders, with lead soldiers. We had hundreds of lead soldiers. We made them ourselves. Billy Stumf’s dad supplied the molds. My dad brought home tire weights from the dealership where he sold cars. Billy and I melted the lead in a ladle on an old hot plate in the basement workshop surrounded by paint thinner and wood shavings. Parents put a great premium on children quietly amusing themselves.
Soldiers that came out of the mold missing a leg or a rifle were painted blue. These were the French. We let Bobby paint them.
If Billy and Bobby and I had done a particularly good job of quietly amusing ourselves, Mr. Stumf would lead us up to the attic and show us a roll of banknotes he’d taken from the body of a Japanese soldier during the Battle of Okinawa. The bloodstains were an exciting dark brown.
Mr. Stumf also taught us how to make machine-gun noises by vibrating our tongues and how to yell “Die you rousy Amelicans!” and “Banzai!” in a Japanese accent. He served in the Korean War, too, where he was an artillery officer. I remember sitting on the lawn with Billy and Bobby while Mrs. Stumf read a letter from her husband at the front.
“Dear Ellen, We were shelling the Chicoms today and I wrote your name on a shell and Billy’s and Bobby’s names on another shell and our dog Sam’s name on a third.”
I don’t know where the idea of the reticent vet came from, the combat soldier who never speaks of his battlefield experience. Our parents told war stories all the time, including my mother, who’d been in the Women’s Marine Corps. She was a control tower operator at Cherry Point, North Carolina, and witnessed more carnage on the runway than most dads had seen overseas.
Our enthusiasm for fighting extended to snowball fights, water balloon fights, dirt fights where new houses were being built, and fruit and nut fights when crab apples and buckeyes were in season.
But only by accident, or an occasional ice ball, did anyone get hurt. The fighting rarely degenerated into “a fight.” We would wrestle angrily or try to give each other a kick in the shins at the most. Knockdowns and dragouts were unusual among Baby Boom children.
This must have been our own doing. We rarely heard adults—male adults, anyway—voice sincere disapproval of boys slugging each other. “So hit him back,” our dads would tell us. My grandfather would happily recount how, as a twelve-year-old mechanic’s apprentice, he’d fight his way to work through the boys in the Polack, Hunky, and colored neighborhoods and fight his way back home at night. To us this seemed inconceivable or like something from several blocks away where the poor kids lived and boys slugged each other all the time. Being poor back then—like joining ROTC later—meant you weren’t a real Baby Boomer.
I once threw a roundhouse right at Steve Penske. So unused to punching was I and so unused to ducking punches was he that I put my fist into the side of the house and he banged his head on the drainpipe.
And when the Vietnam War arrived only one of us, Bobby Stumf, went. The rest of us had excuses. Billy Stumf’s spleen was ruptured from high school football. Steve Penske developed allergies. Johnny MacKay got migraines. Jerry Harris came down with asthma. We used our imagination.
“Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe there is a beast . . . What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us.”
—William Golding,
Lord of the Flies
4
IN THE DOLDRUMS OF FUN
School, given the amount of childhood that’s spent in it, should form a greater part of this picture. But it doesn’t. School was just there, inexorable, inevitable, and almost escape-proof
. In our childhood, school life held the place that real life would occupy in our adulthood. You could avoid school but only by doing things that were worse or had worse consequences such as getting sick or telling wild lies, the juvenile equivalents of dying or going to Promises Malibu.
There were public schools and Catholic schools, mostly indistinguishable except that in the latter you learned about the infinite mercy of the blessed Virgin Mary and got your knuckles whacked more often.
Schools were big buildings. They resembled fortifications or castles. But they had been carefully designed to avoid any suggestion of the romance associated with citadels, strongholds, and keeps. The windows were large, to give children plenty of the healthy sunlight that didn’t use to cause skin cancer and lots of air during the climate change that happened only twice a year, spring and fall, instead of all the time. Through those large windows we learned what a wide and wonderful world it is and how much we’d love to be out in it.
Some of the massive public schools that were built in the first third of the twentieth century haven’t yet been torn down or repurposed. But their windows have been replaced with insulated panels that leave just a slit of casements for students to peer through. And we wonder at the increase in childhood suicide rates.
School started at 8:30. Before the doors opened children were expected to form two lines, one for the boys and one for the girls. The boys pushed each other. The girls teased each other. We would have been better behaved if we’d been mixed together, but the people who insist on organizing life and the people who have no idea how life is organized were and always will be the same people.
Classrooms were well populated. I count forty-two children in my third-grade class picture. The teacher was, until junior high, invariably a woman, usually single, and alone at her station of command. Teachers’ aides had not yet been sent to the aid of teachers. Busybody parents weren’t sticking their noses in from the back row. Elected representatives of the school board weren’t visiting to make sure that the curriculum was conformist, or that the curriculum was nonconformist, according to which kind of nut won the school board election. Not that our teachers needed such assistance. They wielded the kind of unalloyed power that God used to have in the Old Testament before 1950s Sunday school teachers got to Him.