No, seriously…have you seen the playground gear my generation had? And that was at the start of the ‘safety conscious’ era. Most of my classmates and I were still using the old stuff. Like these things:
I don’t remember if my friends and I had a specific name for this device on the left, but the moniker ‘steel-ribbed kid slinger’ is perfectly appropriate. We tried to make ourselves into textbook demonstrations of the concept of centripetal force by spinning that thing as fast as we could and hanging off the bars for dear life. Yes, were were near horizontal to the ground some of the time. Yes, we got hurt. Yes, it was worth every second of terror.
Edit…apparently you can still get these things. They are plastic coated metal now, and don’t go quite as fast, but still there.
How many here got their rears burned by the beauty in the middle? Hot summer day + shorts = second degree burns on your backside. It was jeans or nothing on those slides, especially if it was above eighty degrees.
Any guesses as to how many bones I broke on these? Zero. I have no idea how I managed THAT statistic…anyone who spends a few minutes in my company knows I’m a total klutz. Case in point was when I bounced down a flight of stairs on my butt because I refused to make two trips to carry four bowls of dog food.
But that’s a story for another time.
The one on the right? Heaven help you if you lost your grip. You were going to connect with at least one of those bars on the way down, and it was going to freaking hurt. And they got just as hot on summer days. Bruises and burns…the ultimate two-for-one! How many of us tried to do a flip in elementary or middle school and landed flat on our backs, winded, and questioning life choices? I refuse to believe I was the only one.
Hilary
Leave a Reply