The Playgrounds in MY Mind

Memories of an unlikely popular song and the images that come to mind

Now that it is spring I’ve been thinking about songs and images from my childhood that remind me of the warmer months. Does anyone remember this 1973 number two hit by Clint Holmes, Playground in My Mind?

As a ten-year-old at the time it seemed like a perfectly acceptable Top 40 song. My seven-year old brother Jeff even bought the single. Listening to it now for the first time in decades it’s a strange, children’s song that would never be a hit today. It opens with young children humming what will be the chorus before branching into Clint Holmes’ solid and beautiful delivery of the lyrics. It should be noted that having the equivalent of a children’s choir on a pop song was not unusual at the time. The Carpenters had a big hit with Sing that same year which was basically a song from Sesame Street. They gave it over to the kids for a big rousing “la la la la la” sequence. (It’s hard to imagine pop radio programmers saying, “yeah, let’s add these cute songs to our playlist” considering all the other big rock artists with albums out at the time but for some reason, they did.) Were we giving over the pop reigns to children just a few short years before films like Jaws and Star Wars because Hollywood was noticing that there was a youth market worthy of targeting?

Playground in My Mind is curious though because Holmes is singing about young children like “Michael” and “Cindy.” Would we even allow a grown man to do this today?! Probably not, but then those were more innocent times when maybe the intent was to showcase how important it was for children to have a place where they could be kids away from the wars and political goings on of the time. Plus, Holmes is reminiscing about the playgrounds of his youth that were “left behind.”

Me, at age 6, at a park in the Chicago area

This got me thinking about the playgrounds I frequented at the time. Recently, one of the writing-focused Substack pages I follow offered up a prompt to write about a favorite playground memory. I started to consider the various parks near our home in Chicago when I was growing up. I wasn’t a major “playground” type. I preferred watching TV or hanging with the other kids on our street. On occasion though we’d venture out to those parks which seemed geared towards kids with their swing sets and jungle gyms.

There was an elementary school on Strong Street in Chicago, Lucy Fitch Perkins, which I first attended for kindergarten, that had its own small playground.

Playground can be seen in the lower right corner of this photo found on Facebook

One of my earliest memories was of my sister running me home after I’d fallen off one of those now considered dangerous bars which begged a kid to hang from. Apparently, I’d hit my head on the ground and started bleeding down my face. Judy quickly (I’d imagine!) picked me up and started the roughly six city block run back to our house. What I most remember about that experience was seeing the face of her friend Mary Sue running a bit ahead of us and turning around with a shocking look in her eyes as she saw my bloody face. When we got home, my mother immediately put me in the car to bring me to the ER at Resurrection Hospital. I remember crying and being more worried that they’d put me in an ambulance than any serious injury I might have sustained. I’m not sure when my fear of ambulances began but years later my mother would remind me that whenever one was around, my grandmother would say, “see, that’s how they took your father away when he got sick.” (He developed terminal cancer when I was 6.) I’d start screaming and covering my ears whenever I heard the siren from an ambulance.

Judy, Mary Sue, Nancy, Annie, and Me - crying about something…

Ultimately, that fall required a few stitches on my forehead, but it didn’t stop me from going back to Perkins and its unsafe children’s equipment. For various reasons, I ended up attending Perkins from 4^th through 6^th grade. One of my favorite memories from that period was recess. I don’t think we were allowed to play on the equipment all the time. Maybe each classroom had their own day. As a result, the days when we could enjoy it, we’d relish every minute of it. Then, when the bell rang to head back into school, we’d do a final adrenaline-fueled dash to get as much as we could out of that equipment in the remaining moments. All the other kids would be almost inside and then, and only then, did we make a mad run to get back to our classroom. (That school, by the way, was later torn down. Houses now stand where the school and playground once were.)

Sometimes I’d set forth with my younger brother Jeff and/or my neighbor friends to just hang out in a school yard. For a few days, one summer, the temperature in Chicago hit 100 degrees. I can still remember walking another several blocks on Carmen St. towards a lot by St. Monica Elementary School (where I attended from 1^st to 3^rd grade) in the intense heat with my pogo stick across my shoulders. Somehow, I had deemed myself the neighborhood pogo stick champ because I could jump on it longer than anyone else. Of course, I was the only kid in the neighborhood to actually have one so it did give me a leg up. I’m not sure why we went to St. Monica’s since they didn’t have any outdoor equipment to play on, but I guess the parking lot was pretty big for my pogoing.

My friend Lois trying out the pogo stick in OUR HOUSE in Chicago

Then there was Norwood Park. It was a big one on the northwest side of the city that had lots of fancy equipment. I remember the summer when they got this giant contraption that had three slides which seemed to be massively long. One featured humps on the way down. (I guess that was supposed to be fun.) The park was far enough away though that we had to be driven there. It felt like going to Great America before there was such a place. If we were lucky, we might be treated to White Castle hamburgers after our fun in the sun.

While this photo is of Horner Park in Chicago, a similar “rocket” slide was found at Norwood Park

One time, the mother of a neighborhood friend took us to a park further into the city off Foster Avenue. I’m not sure what we did but she sat on a bench with her husband’s best friend making out. We didn’t really think much about it but on the way home we were told not to mention that we saw the best friend that day. Of course, we didn’t. (She eventually divorced her husband and married him.)

Parks like these always seemed to have a lot of kids running around, getting wet in sprouting fountains, and playing the dreaded (for me) baseball or softball. When we moved to the suburbs when I was 12, there were a few parks around, but I can’t recall seeing that much excitement happening in them. I recall going to at least one and having the full run of jungle gyms and swings. When I think about it now, most of the other kids were probably in their air-conditioned homes staying out of the heat. At least, that’s what I did on most summer days.

My brother Jeff, me, and our friend Lois at a park in Palatine, Illinois

Anyways, those are the playgrounds in my mind. Maybe these memories and playgrounds weren’t the kind Clint Holmes sang about but they’re the “real” ones I experienced back in the good old 1970s.

Do YOU have a favorite playground memory or related song?