Fond Memories of Life at Punahou

"Games We Played"

Our 3rd-8th Grade Years

Playtime at "Middle Field" - (1950-1955)

After the Saturday evening Luau festivities were over at our last class reunion, I took some "quiet time" and wandered over to Middle Field. Awash in and overwhelmed by the emotions of the reunion weekend, my mind began to recall the wonderful events of my early Punahou years. I sat down by the Lily Pond and my mind regressed and a veritable flood of the most wonderful memories came back to me of the many years of activities and events that took place in that now seemingly small and compact area known as Middle Field.

Marbles on the ideal playing surface of short "pokey" grass in front of the Pavilion. Clayden Jim and Melvin Kau were finesse players and always carried around the largest bags of marbles.

Yo-Yo's. The Duncan Yo-yo man came by and gave away strings and taught us to perform tricks including "Walk the Dog", "Baby in the Cradle", "Loop the Loop", and "Around the World".

Trading Cards. Horses were the most popular. A good "Man of War" would bring three cards in trade. You could start out with a standard deck from home and by the end of the week have the most wonderful collection which you continued to refine each day in elaborate bartering sessions with your playmates.

Milk bottle caps where you stacked an equal number of caps from both players and took turns bombing the stack with your Master (3-4 caps stapled together) and you kept the caps you turned over. We used Dairyman's and Foremost milk bottle caps from home. Today the game is called Pogs which are plastic and cost $1 each. I remember the milkman delivery service to our home with the rich cream settling to the top of the glass bottles and the word cholesterol was not in the public vocabulary yet.

Smash pencil where you took turns trying to split your opponent's pencil in half with a sharp stab in the middle with your own killer pencil. Eberhard #2's were especially durable.

Capture the Flag. Tony Murray and John Dow Williams were the speed kings and almost always opposing team captains. The game accommodated anywhere from 10 to 100 players evenly split up on both sides of an imaginary line across Middle Field. The objective was to dash across the line and steal the opponent's flag at the back end of the out of bounds line (which was always closely guarded) and return safely across the middle line untagged. If you were tagged in enemy territory you had to go to jail and you stayed there until some one on your team ran across enemy territory and reached jail untagged and he or she then got to release one prisoner and take him or her back to home turf to be set free to resume the game.

Dodge ball where you stood in the middle of the circle and avoided getting hit as the ball was thrown across the circle. The person who got hit had to trade places with the thrower. Kehau Kea and Kaui Shutte both had particularly swift curve balls. I can't recall what winning was but it was definitely more fun and prestigious being in the middle.

Sky Inning with a softball and bat. The batter would throw his own ball in the air and hit it out into a crowd of eager players, with and without baseball mits. If you caught a pop-up, it was your turn at bat. Grounders were gathered in and you would then roll the ball back on the ground and try to hit the bat. The batter had to catch the ball in the air after it bounced up off the bat or he would lose his at bat in favor of the person who threw the ball.

Crayfish Hooking. We removed the leafy part of a palm frond and tied a "noose" at the tender end which if you were clever and quick could slip around an unsuspecting crayfish's claw or tail. This was strictly a "catch and release" program and we threw them back for the enjoyment of others. I suspect each crayfish in the Lily Pond was caught and released a thousand times in his or her lifetime. And we caught tadpoles and tiny frogs and kept them in our paper cups we brought from "Juice Break". 

I recalled that wonderful time each morning when juice would arrive and we would take a break from classroom goings on. I recalled hiding under our desks during air-raid drills, groaning when we learned we had to wear shoes starting 5th grade, the small intimate cafeteria in Alexander Hall, and classroom "Show and Tell".   And then my mind returned to the other games we played.

Hop-Scotch: A single square up front and four double squares and a turn-around square were drawn on the pavement with chalk. Each square was numbered. You threw your bean bag, a penny or some other personal marker into progressively further away squares in succession, and then hopped touching one foot in the single squares and both feet in the double side-by-side squares but always missing the square where your marker lay. If your marker bounced out of the next progressive square, you lost your turn and had to start over at the beginning. First person out and back without a mistake was the winner.

Jump-Rope: Individual or group jump. You could jump your own rope, faster and faster until you failed. Even more fun were the group jump ropes. One person would hold each end of a long rope while one person would start in the middle and jump over the rope each time around. To make it tougher there were double jump ropes, one going each way. And then there were the group jumps where you would start with one person in the middle, and more would join in one at a time until up to five or so were all jumping the rope together.

Spinning Tops including "Killer" Tops where the object was to take turns trying to land your Top directly on the top of your opponent's spinning top with enough force to split it in two. (The game became more intense as we removed the blunt metal tip and replaced it with a 2" long #10 penny nail ground to a sharp point on my father's grinder at home.) As I recall Tops was mostly a "guys" thing. But we let the "girls" take a spin with our Tops anytime they asked.

Jacks: A small rubber ball and a handful of metal "jacks" were all that were needed. You could use one hand only. First you flipped the ball in the air and let it bounce once while you spread the jacks onto the ground. Then with each succeeding throw/bounce, you would cycle through a sequence of picking them up, at first one jack per bounce until all picked up, then two per bounce until all picked up, and then three per bounce and so on until with the final bounce you had to pick them all up with one sweep of the hand.  And  the "no move" rule where if another jack moved while you picked up the one next to it, you lost your turn. As I recall this game was usually considered a "girls" game (no guy would ever consider bringing his own "Jacks" to school), but the girls always let us guys participate when asked. 

And at home there were more unsupervised seasonal games as well. Other games we played at home after school and on weekends included Touch and Tackle Football,,,, Kite flying.,,,,,, Pick-up-sticks,,,, Bike races, and Roller skating on crude noisy 4 wheel metal skates whose vibrations loosened your fillings and ripped the bottoms off your good leather Sunday School shoes which made your mother furious..

Our childhood playtime games were unsupervised. No coaches or parents were in view. In fact no adults were involved at all. We had never ever heard of organized team sports as Little League, uniforms, practice, game schedules, trophies or team dinners.  We were free to make mistakes and even to lose without risking the embarrassment of having our parents on the sidelines cheering their little charges on to victory.

All games were co-educational (except for "Squirrelsies" which was obviously a boys only game if you can call it that).

We invented elaborate unwritten rules which you dared not violate. Those who didn't play by the rules were ignored and ended up not playing so you learned and followed the rules.

Good sportsmanship was paramount. I can not remember one unpleasant argument over winning or losing or rules violation. Winners were magnanimous and always willing to accept a rematch. Losers always took a loss as an opportunity to improve and return a victor. Team selection varied with each game with the super-stars of each game being equally distributed with alternate selection, so you always got to play on a winning team from time to time. There were no referees but we somehow always managed to quickly resolve close calls amongst ourselves.

Equipment was low cost. A yoyo, a top, some bottle caps, a #2 pencil, a few marbles, jacks or some playing cards... and you could join in and play the game.

All games were fully democratic. Everyone who wanted to play was included.

Playing the game was fun, win or lose. There were no external pressures to perform and win.  Losses were quickly forgotten. 

I reflected back how so many of the important lessons I learned about life and growing up I learned in unsupervised playtime on Middle Field. The memories and lessons and friendships persist to this day.

"Burning Out at Nine"

The following article appeared in the November 23, 1998 edition of Time Magazine. 

"A new study suggests that kids are overscheduled. overworked, and running out of time for fun.

All work and no play could make for some very messed up kids. Child experts, usually a divided bunch, agree that fun is good. 

"Play is the most powerful way a child explores the world and learns about himself," says T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School has written a number of books on parenting.

Unstructured play encourages independent thinking and allows the young to negotiate their relationships with their peers.  But kids ages 3 to 12 spent only 12 hours a week engaged in it. Brazelton warns, "If we don't pay attention to this, we're going to create obsessive-compulsive people."

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