Lefty Parent » Imagination

Play School

Cooper Zale — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:44:11 +0000

Margaret Dow Towsley

At age four, before I went to regular school, my parents sent me to “Play School”, which may sound like an oxymoron to some. Actually the place was called “The Children’s Play School”, and it was founded (in 1935) and run by Margaret Grace Dow Towsley, a feminist, a University of Michigan graduate, and woman of wealth who was deeply committed to issues of child development. She was a founding member of the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. In the 1940s she led the effort to gender-integrate the Ann Arbor chapter of the YMCA, one of only two chapters in the country to accept males and females at the time. In the 1950s she served two terms on the Ann Arbor City Council. In founding her “Play School”, Towsley was acting on her belief that play was critical to child development, self-confidence and a sense of worth.

Towsley may well have been inspired by Maria Montessori, the famous Italian scientist, feminist and humanistic educator, who said that, “Education should no longer be mostly imparting of knowledge, but must take a new path, seeking the release of human potentialities.” Montessori demonstrated in her schools (and packaged in her “method” that is used today in thousands of schools around the world) that children learn best in an enriched child-centered environment where they can explore, touch and learn at their own direction. This should be an environment without tests or grades, which retard learning and self-esteem by introducing a negative and debilitating competition.

Conventional wisdom says that kids need to go to school and get formal instruction, testing and grading, by adults, to learn, and that play is something you do for amusement and leisure after you come home from school (and have finished your homework). But I agree with Towsley, Montessori, and many others today who say that “play is the work of children”. Unstructured time spent by kids doing whatever strikes them as fun or meaningful is the main way most kids learn, and move forward in their own development, at their own direction, at their own pace.

I have only a few recollections of “Play School”. I certainly remember the place, two green houses side by side on Forest street south of the University campus. I also have a memory of building a rocket ship out of some sort of large wood boxes that I could climb into and pretend to pilot, and another of being out in the backyard digging in the dirt.

So my mom and dad had the same insight as Towsley and Montessori and made my world, particularly the basement, the backyard, and with the park across the street, an enriched environment where I could explore and learn at my own direction. Here is a list of some of the most useful items that I remember to have “enriched” my basement and backyard environments:

1. Construction paper and cardboard boxes, small and large
2. Scissors (not pointy) capable of cutting those boxes
3. Clear tape for binding things together plus making windows
4. Chalk and some concrete surface that can be drawn on and then rinsed or swabbed with water to clean
5. Lots of human figures (mine were mostly military, but could be civilian instead, or both) of maybe the one to three inch tall variety
6. Animal figures of a comparable size including domesticated, wild and dangerous animals (loved those dinosaurs)
7. Constructible materials like Lincoln Logs, Duplos, Legos, Tinker Toys, wooden blocks
8. Lots of dirt or sand with water available

Bottom line, it’s really anything that facilitates the imagination of the kid to go any direction it wants to. The toy or the tool shouldn’t dictate how it is used. When I see those pre-programmed “fun” learning tools advertised on TV I cringe.

Helper Guy

Cooper Zale — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:27:59 +0000

One of the fun and very developmentally significant things that youths do is try on various personas towards developing an adult one (or several) they can call their own. Some of this is not pretty, and becomes one of those things that drive a lot of adults to distraction in dealing particularly with teenagers. But this sort of “scientific method” of theorem (persona), experiment (attempting to be or play that persona), and observation of results (seeing how others react to you), is such a critical developmental tool. Most kids (with notable exceptions of course) feel that they don’t have the gravitas and chutzpah to even consider being fully and comfortably themselves, if they even really know yet who that is. And in our patriarchal society, where kids are securely ranked at the bottom of the pecking order, most adults are comfortable with that fact.

Our son Eric, very into imagination play as a young kid, played a plethora of wild characters, including vampire, warlord, space alien, android, wizard, and deity, just to name a few. Later as an adolescent he tried on a number of personas more within the scope of the kind of people I would encounter in my daily life (since I am yet to be abducted by aliens), including Rogerian therapist (based on the work of psychologist Carl Rogers), neurotic perfectionist, aloof snob, driven zealot, agitated shepherd, uber geek, and persecuted victim.

One of the first of these more conventional-adult-world personas he adopted, maybe around age 10, was something that he and I came to call “Helper Guy”. It was notable at the time, because it was so different than a more predominating persona (at least in his home environment dealing with a perceived uppity kid sister and parents pushing early bedtime and school attendance) that was sort of Groucho Marx blended with master inquisitor. Eric could talk a blue streak of intelligible but obtuse diatribes, including verbally taunting his younger sister to the point that, lacking his verbal rapier, she would slug him. When I look back on the video tapes we made of the kids from that age (that we sent back to my mom across the country so she could track their development) you can clearly see this dynamic, and I still cringe.

Not sure exactly how it got started, but my recollection is that one day at home, Eric put on a pair of those black plastic glasses with the fake nose (that he got as a party favor at some friend’s birthday), came up to me and looked at me calmly, inquisitively without a word, very unusual for him at the time, with a look as if to say “so how are you really doing today?”

My first reaction was that I had to laugh. This character I was confronted with was so different than neurotic Groucho Master Inquisitor. Despite my possibly dismissive laugh, he persisted with the look, staying “in character”. I felt it was appropriate to maybe call out this persona so I said something to the effect of, “So you are Helper Guy!” He thought about it a second or two and then nodded and smiled. Groucho the Inquisitor had left the building, at least temporarily.

I wish my memory was more precise and granular in regards to moments like this, now more than a decade in the past, rather than my right-brained penchant for sort of composting all the rotting memory bits together into an emotionally charged gestalt which is more persistent in my mind. I recall during this first encounter with Helper Guy, deciding to share with him stressors du jour, and him responding by patting me on the shoulder and saying something to the effect of, “It’ll be okay”.

Obviously, some personas only make a single cameo appearance, but the glasses and nose reappeared occasionally over the weeks ahead. Helper Guy would get me a soda from the refrigerator or even get his sister a Popsicle from the bin in the freezer she could not reach. Helper Guy was there to be of assistance to others (in small ways only perhaps), but requests like “can you clean up the mess in Eric’s room?” were after experimentation, found to be out of scope.

Helper Guy made appearances I recall for several years, but was eventually phased out (as Eric became a serious pre-teen) as perhaps too naïve, or that derogatory term “childish”. Leaving school at age fourteen, and after a year of “Deschooling” and sloughing off most of the anxiety ridden personas associated with his school experience (and based on coercive parental efforts on behalf of his participation in that institution), Eric often exhibited a persona you might call “Rogerian therapist as beleaguered shepherd”. He had developed several circles of friends, including the best of his former school buddies, and based on hearing him on the phone in his room, he was patiently listening to his friends’ troubles, sometimes for an hour at a time, but with a more knowing listener’s ear than Helper Guy.

Now a young adult, Eric has an array of personas on display in the appropriate context. The one I particularly enjoy is his “soulful iconoclast”. Not much of helper guy in it, other than the willingness to listen part, but a real willingness to thoughtfully challenge the conventional wisdom of the culture.

Big League Manager

Cooper Zale — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 17:47:37 +0000

Table top hockey had created the bug in my brother and I for simulated worlds of sport. The drama of athletic competition in the arena of team sports and the personalities involved, both the star players and the journeymen who filled out the roster, was real fodder for our imaginations. We took it a step farther, a step more abstract, with Big League Manager.

I was introduced to BLM (Big League Manager) Baseball by my best friend in 8th grade. It was the summer of 1968 and he had recently moved to Ann Arbor from St Louis Missouri, and we had met in school, having several classes together. We were two white kids with a list of things in common…

* We were captivated by the book “Manchild in the Promise Land” about adolescence and race in America

* We both liked Simon and Garfunkle and particularly their current “Bookends” album

* We lived within a five-minute walk of each other

* We both had daily paper routes delivering the Ann Arbor News

* We both were into baseball

To that last bullet point, he being from St Louis was a big St Louis Cardinals fan, and I, being from southeast Michigan, was a big Detroit Tigers fan. He and I convinced either his or my parents to take us to maybe six or seven games over the summer. As events would have it, if you can remember back to 1968, Detroit and St Louis ended up as the two best teams in baseball and met in an exciting seven-game World Series, which Detroit ultimately won (and I won a dollar bet from my friend).

My friend had a game, BLM Baseball, which used statistical information about all the Major League Baseball players to let you simulate a baseball game and manage a team. Each player had a card with their abilities, based on their statistics from the previous season, boiled down to a set of seven numbers and ranges:

* A number between 1 and 100 representing the percentage of times they got a base on balls. If they were walked nine percent of the time, they had a “BB” value of 9.

* A number between 1 and 100 representing their batting average. If they hit .294, their “BA” value was 29.

* Three non-overlapping ranges of numbers between 1 and 100 that represented their propensity to hit doubles, triples and homeruns when getting a hit. A left-handed power hitter like Norm Cash of the Tigers might have a “2B” range of # to #, a “3B” range of # to #, and a “HR” range of # to #.

* A number between 1 and 100 representing the percentage of times when they did not walk or get a hit that they struck out. A player who struck out fifteen percent of the time would have a “K” value of 15.

* A number between 1 and 100 representing their ability to steal bases. An average player with no great base-stealing ability might have an “SB” value of 40. This indicating that they could steal third base about forty percent of their attempts and steal second about forty plus ten or fifty percent of their attempts. The plus ten for stealing second factored in that it was easier than stealing third. A good base stealer might have an “SB” somewhere between 50 and 80.

* Finally, a number between 1 and 100 representing their fielding ability. A player who successfully fielded a ball without making an error 98 percent of the time, had an “ER” of 2.

These seven numeric attributes represented a statistical abstraction of their unique abilities on the playing field. Add to these seven numeric attributes, the player’s name and what positions they could play, and that was the information that made up their card.

The pitchers as well had their stats, all the batting, running and fielding numbers above, plus pitching stats, which modified the batter’s stats when that pitcher was pitching to that batter:

* A number, indicating how much they added or subtracted from the batter’s walk percentage. An “M3” value was a pitcher who subtracted three points from the batter’s BB value, and a maybe a “P5” was as pitcher who was pretty wild, adding five points to the batter’s BB.

* Similarly, a number added or subtracted from a batter’s batting average (BA) when no runners were on base and a second for when runners were on base. Bob Gibson, perhaps the best pitcher in baseball that year, had a “P1” with no runners on base, but an awesome “M13” with runners on base, halving the batting average of a .260 (BA 26) hitter like the Tiger’s Mickey Stanley.

* Finally, a number indicating how many batters they could pitch too before their pitching capabilities would begin to deteriorate.

My friend and I would play this game for hours, often listening to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bookends” album while we did) playing the Cardinals against the Tigers, the Yankees against the Dodgers, or any other permutation.

Excited by this great simulation, I got my parents to buy me the game for Xmas, complete with the cards of every player on every major league team with their 1968 statistics. I showed my brother how to play the game and we went at it.

We played the entire American League 1968 schedule for April – all ten teams, some 25 games each for a total of ~125 games. I kept the box scores for every game and at the end of my mythical April, compiled all the player statistics. Through this odyssey we experienced the joy of simulated dramatic come from behind victories and unlikely heroes stepping forward. I recall it was the Boston Red Sox who emerged as the first place team after the final April 30 games.

But now that we were comfortable with the system, and given the fun we had previously had creating hockey teams, we decided to invent baseball teams and created the BLM-style player cards for each of them. We used 3 by 5 index cards and typed in all the numbers using our Dad’s manual typewriter. I had my Cooperstown team, I actually forget what our nickname was. My brother, three years younger at age ten, was still able to master and manipulate the statistics and create his Petersburg team, I believe known as the Pirates. Well of course we played a World Series between our two teams and awarded a trophy to the winner.

Our fantasy baseball teams also spilled over to our outdoor play. We would pitch to each other, calling out the fastballs and breaking pitches thrown by our star hurlers and the hits, strikeouts etcetera by each team’s lineups. Or one of us would pitch and the other bat, as each team member in our lineup, trying to mimic each fictional player’s unique style at the plate. Like the short chopped swing of my .370 hitting shortstop, Leonard Lessing.

Tabletop Hockey

Cooper Zale — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:19:36 +0000

Our parents got us a tabletop hockey game one X-mas, with the 2’ by 3’ hockey rink and the players maneuvered forward and back by metal rods that you twist to pass and shoot. Though other friends of ours had such sets, my brother and I were the only kids in our circle that built an entire imaginary world around this venue.

It started with each of us creating our own professional hockey teams. Mine was the Cooperstown Cats and I had named players, two “lines” actually, for each of the six positions represented by the plastic figures on the tabletop set. My “A-Line” center was “Steve Scimitar” and his “B-Line” comrade was “Sonny Star”. Each player had his own personality, athletic ability, style and personal history on and off the ice. My team’s coach was the legendary former hockey great “Kitty McBee” and the team was owned by “Manfred J. Sedgwicks”, a cigar-chomping old-school sport franchise owner who happened also to be a cat, thus the team name.

My brother had his counterpart team, the Petersburg Pipers, with its pantheon of bigger than life players as well. We actually created an entire league, two divisions of five teams each, each team with two lines of named players with all their varying abilities, peculiarities and so on. Since the Cats were in one division and the Pipers in the other, our two teams would invariably meet in the championship, a best-of-seven series. This league evolved over several real years, its season corresponding with the NHL hockey season.

I even made actual trophies for the winner. One year I glued a domino to the bottom of an inverted small bathroom Dixie cup, painting the domino silver and the cup a deep blue. I called it the “Silver Domino” trophy, aptly enough. The next year I glued a plastic Roman soldier to another Dixie cup, painted it bronze (what other color would a Roman soldier trophy be?) and dubbed it the “Bronze Roman”.

Though I was three years older than my brother and therefore generally more skilled at tabletop hockey, I do remember him squeaking out an amazing victory one year in the seventh game of a hard-fought series. There may have even been an injury to one of my main players that contributed to his unexpected triumph.

Not satisfied with just inventing and inhabiting our two teams, we proceeded to invent an entire league with two divisions of five teams each, one division including his team and the other with mine. Thus if both our teams had a stellar season (as they usually did…*g*) we would end up once again in the championship series. But the other teams were fully realized as well, with team names and city locations, “A” line and “B” line players, and personalities, egos, back-stories, scandals, you name it. Taking Russian myself, I had peopled my “Charleston Scarlets” team with Russian named players (predating the Detroit Red “Army” Wings of the 1990s).

I recall it was about a four or five year period, through my junior high and high school years that we played our table top hockey game down in the basement, usually in conjunction with winter time and the NHL season on “Hockey Night in Canada” on CBC channel 9 (Out of Windsor, Ontario, just across the river from Detroit). Contrasting to the more concrete, less creative world of school, this was a way one way for us to enjoy that inate fantasy spark that was still strong in us both, and pass the time on those long, cold, dark winter evenings in the upper Midwest.

Choice Time

Cooper Zale — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 17:15:08 +0000

My Kids at ages 7 & 10

Play was always a critical part of my own youthful development, so I worked hard to try and give my kids the same opportunity. When my two kids were young, they were always pestering me to spend time with them, above and beyond all the activities with them that I initiated. So I worked out a deal that I would allot a half-hour of time each day (which realistically often stretched to an hour) where I would do whatever activity with them they wanted me to. If they could not agree on what to do on a given day we would do each of their activities (with the other participating) for fifteen minutes.

Here are some of the activities – developed either by them, by me, or jointly – that were their favorite choices…

Cat Rock Video

I invented this game, generally played on our king size bed (and probably responsible for wrecking the box springs) where we played out various improvisations of the same basic scenario. I was a person that lived alone and decided to go to the pet store to get a pet cat. I would tell the store owner that I was looking for a nice calm cat for a pet, and my kids (and often the kid next store too) would be several cats eager to find a home and claiming to be nice, calm and generally well behaved. After some discussion, I would be convinced to take them home, and they would initially behave well.

But when I went to sleep at night (in my bed) they would come into my bedroom and dance on my bed wildly singing “Cat rock video”, disturbing my sleep but not actually waking me up. I would wake up in the morning and they would ask me politely if I slept well. I would answer that I had not and that I had had this wild dream that cats were dancing on my bed singing some inance song like “Cat rock audio”, “Cat rock stereo” or something like that, I did not quite remember. They would carelessly volunteer, “You mean ‘video’” and I would say “That’s it!” and then think about it a second and say “Wait a minute…”. The plot would play out from there.

Other common improvised events included when they would get infested with fleas or things much worse – buzzards, TVs, etc. – and I would have to buy a “dip”, a yucky medicinal solution in a pretend bathtub (off to one size of the bed) that I would try to dip them in, which they would invariably resist, degenerating to a wrestling match on the bed. They loved this game so much – it featuring jumping around on the bed and wrestling with me to avoid the “dip” – that we probably played it during over a hundred different “choice times” over several years. As they got bigger you can imagine that the bed took more and more of a beating and they would occasionally bonk a head on the wall or furniture or somebody else’s head, knee or elbow. As the adult “facilitator” of the game, that was the trick to make it as rough and tumble as possible while avoiding injury.

Dunta Dunta

This was a fairly simple bed game where I would lie on that same bed on my back with my feet pulled up and my knees in the air. One of them would sit on my knees and I would start singing the Del Monte tuna song to the words “dunt dah duh dunt dah duh dunt…” (and so on) while I bounced them on my knee. The pace of the song and the intensity of the bouncing would increase until they were thrown off.

Crashing Down

Another simple bed game, again with me lying on my back in the same position as for “Dunta Dunta”. One of them would sit on my knees and direct the action by saying “crashing up”, “crashing back”, “crashing sideways”, and other variations, which would direct me to move them on my knees in that direction. If they ever said “crashing down” I would pull my knees apart and they would fall on the bed.

The subtlety of the game would be in their patter which would include such phrases as “crashing somewhat down” and “down crashing” which though close did not trigger the fall. But finishing one sentence with “crashing” and then starting the next sentence with “down”, even after a long pause, would trigger the climactic event.

Escape from Jail

A game played on our driveway just outside the front door of our house. They would start from their “safe” area, which would be anywhere where one of them was touching the garage or the little flower bed next to the garage or touching one of the other of them who was touching the safe area. They would then leave the “safe” area and make a break for the sidewalk at the other end of the driveway which would constitute a successful escape. Once they left the safe area I could try to tag them and capture them again, and send them back to plan a new escape.

The game featured teamwork on their part – feints by one of them to allow another to make a break, or the two or three of them holding hands to form various sorts of chains to extend themselves as far as possible before one or more of them made the break. I would pretend to be distracted or move precariously away to lull them into trying a break.

Full Block Hide & Seek

We played a version of hide and seek where the hiding area included anywhere on our small block, including anywhere in our yard (front or back) or anywhere in front (only) of anyone else’s house on the block. I was usually “it” and they would hide, though occasionally they were it and I hid.

When I was “it”, their typical tactic was to the opposite corner of the block from our house and hide as best they could behind a bush or a low wall of that house. I would approach their hiding place along the sidewalk from one or the other direction and at some point they would make a break for “home” in the other direction, which I would attempt to detect and run back in the direction I came to beat them their. Sometimes they would feint a break for home and send me running back there but then they would double back and try to trick me.

We were blessed to have a block full of people who basically knew my kids and put up with the kids’ presence in their front yards.

Blue Blob

This game could be played on our bed or really anywhere in the house. I would cover myself in a blanket (the one usually available was blue… thus the name) and move slowly about menacingly saying “blue blob” over and over again and attempting to “swallow” any of them that I could grab. But my biggest vulnerability was that I hated ingesting dirty socks. So when I had one of them in my grip, my victim or one of their comrades would pull off a sock and stuff it in my blob “mouth” which would cause me to recoil, release my prey, cough and sputter and eventually spit out the offending sock with a loud “petouie” noise, before returning to the hunt.

My kids and I have great memories of these games. Even now, ten years or more since we last did “choice time” I bring up one of our games and their eyes light up and they laugh and recall some favorite story or incident.

Plastic Dinosaurs and the Tragedy of Jinx Island

Cooper Zale — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 21:48:49 +0000

Most of my posts lately have been related to the various paths forward for youth education in a more formal sense, but I feel that much (most?) profound learning takes place in more informal settings… like play. So rolling back the clock to revisit my own youth…

I am not sure what initially inspired me, at age five, to become obsessed with dinosaurs. Could be it was going to the University of Michigan natural history museum and seeing the big reconstructed T-Rex bones or the tableaus behind glass of small scale dinosaur models in the best guess of what their living environment looked like. Or maybe it was seeing the movie, “The Lost World” (the 1925 version) based on the book by Arthur Conan Doyle, of Sherlock Holmes fame. The story was a wonderful tale about scientists and adventurers who travel to a previously uncharted plateau in South America and discover that the stories of living dinosaurs there were true (kind of the progenitor to “Jurassic Park”).

Probably both were inspirational, and lucky for me at the museum they sold these plastic versions of all the dinosaur species with the scientific name and English translation inscribed on the bottom. Other than the obvious rock star “Tyrannosaurus Rex” (which translates to “Tyrant Lizard King”… how cool is that!) one of my herbivore favorites was “Stegosaurus” (“Roof Lizard”), with its spiked armor plates down its spine, the obvious inspiration for the more formidable Godzilla, the pulp sci-fi movie iconic import from Japan.

Our house when I was in elementary school with the great basement

Seeing my interest and always looking to fire my imagination, over the course of that year my parents bought me an array of these plastic beasts, maybe 20 in all (they were not very expensive I recall), from a six-inch-tall T-Rex to a two-inch-long Ankylosaurus. Also addressing my obsession, my first grade teacher (at least according to my mom) put together a whole unit for my class on dinosaurs. Over the course of the next few years I incorporated them into my imagination play, in the basement of our house.

That brings up the subject of the basement. Ours became a play heaven for a five year old kid with an untamed and unschooled imagination, a consecrated space where I could spread my toys on the unfinished concrete slab floor and not have to clean them up at night. My parents even let my brother and I use chalk and draw things on the concrete slab floor, like roads, shorelines, oceans and such.

Anyway, I loved stories of adventure, whether books, television or the movies. After learning the storyline and characters, I would then head to the basement to reenact, expand and spin-off on the story with my assortment of, what later as a parent I came to call, “imagination toys”. These included plastic figures (soldiers, civilians, animals and of course dinosaurs), building materials (Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, etc.) and various cardboard boxes and containers that I could cut up (with non-pointy scissors) and Scotch tape back together into boats and submarines.

Two of my all-time favorite movies were Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues under the Sea” and its sequel “Mysterious Island.” Later, at around age eleven I would actually read the books as well. These were stories set in the age of the U.S. civil war, full of futuristic technology and colorful characters. Captain Nemo in particular, was a mad genius who was trying to use his incredible submarine in a quixotic anti-war crusade to destroy all the warships in the world. He finally retired to a deserted island and played with strange forces (presumably nuclear radiation) to create mutant creatures (such as chickens that were 10 feet tall) to try and end the food shortages that he felt were a key cause driving humans to fight war after war.

My dad had been in World War Two, and I was fascinated with all aspects of these human conflicts of men, weapons, machines, strategy and logistics. I would check books out of the library and read about wars, battles, generals, warships, warplanes and weapons. I was a bit of a shy kid myself, who shied from any fight or any other heated confrontation in real life, but was intrigued with the passion of the committed warrior. Yet I also resonated with captain Nemo’s quest to end all wars. I also found the U.S. civil war particularly intriguing, and the blue and gray soldiers were readily available at a dollar a bagful at the local toy stores.

So down in the basement, armed with the story lines from Jules Verne movies, my blue and gray soldiers, my dinosaurs, Lincoln logs, and assorted card board boxes and tape, I was ready to spin off my own epic stories. First I chalked out one quadrant of the basement as “civilization”. With Lincoln Logs I built a fort where the blue (Union) soldiers were. Across the basement in the area of my dad’s office, that was “Jinx Island”. An area rich with minerals that the Union needed to mine for war materials. The island was also inhabited by dinosaurs, plus Captain Nemo lurked in his hidden submarine.

“Lieutenant Cord”, a blue soldier my brother and I had named who looked like an officer brandishing a pistol, was in charge of the initial expedition to the island to set up the mining operation. Soldiers, supplies and mining equipment (built with Tinker Toys) were loaded into a large rectangular barge (a customized cardboard box), and with an escort of warships headed for Jinx Island. Captain Nemo attacked the convoy with his submarine but managed only to sink one of the escorts.

Once on the island, Lieutenant Cord and company set up camp and began the mining operation in a huge cavern (the space under my dad’s desk) that was rich with precious minerals, needed for the war effort. Dinosaurs (of course) attacked the camp, wreaked havoc and were finally repelled at great loss of life, and acts of individual heroism. The barge made a successful journey to the island bringing reinforcements and materials for fortifying the camp/mine.

My dad managed to do his work that week at his desk avoiding the camp and the lurking “thundering lizards”. I think he got a kick out of the whole thing and had me explain to him all the different aspects of the “island”.

In one final pitched assault against the fortified compound, the monstrous ancient reptiles were on the verge of breaking thru and destroying the operation, except for the tremendous courage of the same Lieutenant Cord, who lost his own life protecting his men and stemming the breach. Every man on the expedition, plus the entire Union army back home mourned the loss of this courageous and charismatic leader. We staged an official honoring ceremony on the island and his body was returned to civilization on the barge. Even Nemo honored him by not attacking the funeral convoy.

Then came a difficult issue for my brother and I, the two creators of this epic, to resolve. The Lieutenant Cord figure was our favorite, of all the blue and gray plastic soldiers. If he was truly dead, then we should not recycle him for other characters in future stories. But that meant we would have to play all future scenarios without our prized figure. After much soul-searching, we finally agreed, and Lieutenant Cord was buried in full military honors, with both blue and gray soldiers present in our backyard. I believe I wrote a eulogy which I read at the ceremony. My brother designed the tombstone.

I don’t think we ever dug him up later. Now some 45 years later he may still be under the grass somewhere behind our house on Prescott Street, for plastic of course never decomposes…

So as a five-year-old in my self-initiated play I was already dealing with issues of narrative, human drama, logistics, leadership, archeology, history, ritual, construction, and geography, just to name a few. I was developing my own take on the elements of the human story, that I would conatinue to read about in books, see in movies and TV shows, and hear about from adults I knew telling the real stories of their lives.