Tag: walking to school

Playing British Bulldog After Scout Meetings

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn kids

British Bulldog is a tag-based playground and sporting game, commonly played in schoolyards and on athletic fields in the UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and related Commonwealth countries, as well as in the U.S. and Ireland. The object of the game is for one player to attempt to intercept other players who are obliged to run from one designated area to another. British Bulldog is characterised by its physicality (i.e. the captor inevitably has to use force to stop a player from crossing) and is often regarded as violent, leading it to be banned from many schools due to injuries to the participants. – Wikipedia

Our Scout troop met on Monday nights at the church. When the meetings let out, we often played this game on the post office lawn until it was time to head home for “I Love Lucy.” Since there were ample opportunities for getting hurt, our parents didn’t know about it. Heck, we had a nuclear war to worry about, so we didn’t sweat the small stuff. As far as I know, we never had any injuries.

And, since our uniforms were green, the grass stains weren’t obvious.

I just read a news story in which a mother was in trouble for letting her 10-year-old walk down the street without an adult. What the hell is that? We walked 30 minutes to school and certainly didn’t need parents following us.

We knew where all the nasty dogs were.

In general, kids were stronger and more self-reliant in those days. Now they’re so coddled, they need a parent to drive them to school 15 minutes down the street.

Box Hockey

Lots of other stuff got banned, taking the fun out of childhood. BB gun  wars, tackle football in the park, trick-or-treating without mommy going with us, bike riding without helmets, box hockey, and firing our shotguns at ducks at nearby lakes; we never killed anyone–and precious few ducks.

Mother hated cleaning ducks when friends stopped by with a handful when my brothers and I weren’t home.

As long as we weren’t picked up by the cops or the paramedics, the parents didn’t need to know!

Today, it’s illegal for a kid to walk to the far end of their house without a security detail–and God help them if they play outside after dark.

What a fine, wimpy mess we’ve all come to.

—Malcolm

In those days, our parents didn’t drive us to school

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life in general2 Comments

 

Tallahassee Florida’s Leon High School – Florida Memory Photo

I probably sound like my grandfather telling a when-we-were-kids story when I say that my brothers and I walked to school from grade school through high school–or rode our bikes. School buses didn’t serve in-town neighborhoods and parents didn’t serve as chauffeurs unless a hard rain was about to fall.

High school seems to far away now, it’s possible I’ve forgotten most of it. One student drove his Model T to school. That got a lot of positive attention except when he was out starting it (with a crank, of course) on rainy days.

Heck, even the early Volkswagens could be started with a crank and were light-weight enough for football players to carry them up the steps while the owners weren’t around and leave them in a high school hallway. As you can see, there are a few steps to navigate en route to the front door.

When I was a senior, I drove a car to school once in a while. It was a 1954 Chevy that wasn’t very dependable. It used more oil than gasoline and the driver’s side window wouldn’t roll up. Even though Florida winters weren’t all that extreme, we had to put a blanket over the front end on cold nights or it wouldn’t start in the morning. My bike was more dependable, though the older I got, the more embarrassing it became to arrive on a bike and be seen putting it in the “losers’ bike rack.”

Leon High “Redcoats” band at the state capitol. Somewhere, I have a photo of us at the U.S. capitol from the year we marched in the Cherry Blossom Festival parade.

It took me about 30 minutes to walk to school; fifteen if I rode my bike. Sometimes my car would make it half way and I could talk the rest of the way in five minutes if I was lucky and 25 minutes if I wasn’t.

After all these years, I remember the names of more of the girls I had crushes on than the names of my teachers; except for the teachers who were memorable for good or bad reasons. I think I got a good education in this school, played clarinet in the band, and was in the chess club.

Leon High was large and old: the school was founded in 1871 and is considered Florida’s oldest, continually accredited high school.  The “new” building in the photograph was built by the Works Progress Administration in 1936. When I was there, we had almost 2,000 students in grades 9-12, though in years after that, the school board couldn’t decide whether the freshman belonged in the high school or the junior high school (now called a middle school <yawn>).

Getting to school progressed from not very far to farther since the grade school was the closest to my house, the junior high was right next door to the grade school, and the high school was just down the street. My brothers and I knew all these streets well since our paper routes covered a swath of neighborhoods from the high school to the north edge of town past our house. We knew every possible way of walking home.

When you were in school, did you ride a bus (school bus or city bus), walk, ride a bike, or get there in a revolving car pool of neighborhood parents?

—Malcolm

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