Hill School Playground

I think it was 1950 when they built the "new" Hill School, just west of the "old" Hill School. We all moved over to the new school then but the old school remained and we would use it again in just a few short years.


The playground shared by both schools was enormous. Mainly open fields to the north of the schools, there was a baseball diamond in the northeast corner of the old school playground. All of the playground accesories remained there as well. I think that today none of them would be acceptable because if you behaved stupidly, you would certainly be hurt.


The swings were the least worrisome. Board seats with long, rather heavy chains supporting them with well-worn dirt depressions beneath each. The chains could pinch your fingers, especially if you went really high enough to cause slack in them. If you were holding them wrong, you received a nasty pinch when the slack was taken out. Naturally, the game for the boys was to swing as high as possible and then jump off onto the grass.

The teeter-totters were very long boards with concave cut-outs toward the end for young legs to hang down. They had metal handles and rested on a horizontal pipe, long enough to allow room for three or four boards. Under each board was a steel bracket which rested on the pipe and had three different positions available to balance differing weights. Of course we would try to get the girls in the air and then jump off...leaving the board...and girls...to come crashing to earth. It really hurt!

There was a long slide, metal, with a hump in the middle. Someone got the idea of throwing sand on the slide "to speed it up". Whether you went faster or not was debatable, but your school trousers certainly suffered causing Mother some degree of consternation.

Speaking of clothes wearing out, it was not uncommon, especially toward the end of the school year, for boys to have patches on their knees. Kids then were outdoors all the time and they played hard...so it was natural that the school clothes would get worn. However, most kids only had a couple of sets of clothes for school, purchased in the preceding fall...or inherited from an older brother. It really wasn't in the budget to buy new clothes until the next year.

I certainly don't mean to imply that we went to school looking like a bunch of scrufty little hobos...quite the contrary...cleanliness was very important...washing one's hands was mandatory due to the fear of polio...but parents took some pride in making sure their son or daughter went to school in clean...if not new...clothes.

Girls pretty much wore dresses or skirts and blouses. In the winter, they'd put on jeans or cords under their skirts to keep their legs warm, taking them off when they came to school. The teachers, particularly in the younger grades, spent an awful lot of time helping children on and off with their clothing in the winter. And they did it for each recess and when it was time to catch the bus. They must have had a great deal of patience.


The crowning jewel of the playground, however, was undoubtedly the merry-go-round. Composed of steel pipes, worn shiny by generations of little hands, and dried out wooden seat boards, it lacked the later addition of a kind of sprocket gizmo which kept the thing from smashing into the center pole. If you were uncareful enough to have a leg or an arm hanging over the inside, it would give you serious damage. Girls would hang on as boys ran at top speed around the thing, pushing it as fast as they could before jumping on themselves...at which time it would begin it's eccentric wobble. Kids were injured...but the teacher would bandage the cuts, and soothe the tears...and all would be well at the end of the day.

The tennis courts were concrete-walled and surrounded with a chain-link fence with a couple of gates. This was the site for kick-ball and "war"...kickball without the kicks...just throwing it as hard as possible to damage your target. In the spring, it was the home of myriads of june bug beetles which we caught and raced...if they were in the mood.

In the back of the playground, and reserved for lunch recess which was much longer and more or less unsupervised, was a neat heavy grove of tall old trees surrounding a little pond. We weren't supposed to play there but we did...coming back only when we heard the teacher ring her bell from the back steps.

The boys played softball, the girls could always be found playing jacks or hopscotch on the sidewalk or in the tennis court.

We had around 30 kids in each class. We had 3 recesses during the long day and the teachers did all the work themselves...yet the Minnesota schools were the best in the nation...and the US schools were the best in the world.

School was a wonderful place to be.