The Peterson School Playground: Memories from the 1960s

By Frances O’Cherony Archer

The Peterson School playground I remember was covered with gravel, except for a paved walkway hugging the building and an asphalt surface on the west side. The playground equipment was almost entirely made of metal: the swings, a see-saw, monkey bars (or jungle gyms as some called them), high flyers, parallel bars, a high bar, and a spinning merry-go-round.

It wasn't pretty, and it certainly wasn't safe, but the playground during outdoor recess was the best part of the day throughout my years at Peterson. The playground extended from the school to Bryn Mawr on one side and to Kimball on the other side. The distance we ran from the building door to the swings seemed incredibly vast to me as a young child. What also seemed incredible was the intensity of the brief morning and afternoon recesses— the many different activities and games going on at one time all over the playground. These were the years when Peterson was always overcrowded, so there were hundreds of students climbing on equipment, racing across the gravel, jumping on pavement and bouncing balls everywhere. The air was filled with shouts and the sound of laughter.

The running games were played on the gravel and included Red Rover, Simon Says, Tag, and the ever-perilous Crack the Whip. Older students played games of marbles, kickball, fastball, and dodgeball, while the black top was home to jump rope, hopscotch, four square, basketball, and “pinners.” I spoke with a man who fondly recalled playing pinners at Peterson in the 1930s, and the game remained popular during the 1960s. Players would throw a rubber ball — usually a Spaulding "pinky" — against the terracotta ledge that runs horizontally around the school’s brick exterior and then catch the ball on the rebound. There was probably a bit more to the game than that — but I never played.

What I do know is that the gravel and hard surfaces of the playground regularly produced skinned knees and elbows, chipped teeth, bloody noses, and occasional trips to emergency rooms for stitches and broken bones. The most dangerous equipment on the playground by far was the green toboggan slide on the Kimball side.

It was a tall structure made of wood that had a steep slope on top and a shed on the bottom. In the warm months, a metal slide was mounted on the slope. The slide had a couple dips and was fast, and one student told me she made it faster by sitting on a piece of wax paper as she slid down. Another student recalls jumping off the top into mounds of snow after the great blizzard of ‘67.

If you are much younger than me (Class of 1970), you may have never seen a school playground like the one Peterson School had from 1947 to some time in the 1970s, when much of older equipment was removed. But for all its design flaws, the old Peterson School playground was home to a lot of happy memories.