Swords Into Playground Equipment - A Reminiscence

An iconic visual juxtaposition often seen at the intersection between the first and third worlds is the indigenous child or children, playing atop the rusted hulk or still smoldering wreckage from some multi-million dollar first world military hardware.

For most people, these pictures represent everything that's gone wrong; it's the worst of all worlds, and a sign of the failure of adults to give their children a better world.

But for me, such images only bring fond memories of a brief period in the 1970's when I was a kid, and large surplus military gear began to show up in the suburban playgrounds of Northern Virginia and Maryland.

Today it seems almost like a dream, a shimmering childhood memory with no more substance than than the 'smoke' that comes out of your mouth on a cold winter day. There are many memories from growing up in the suburbs in the 1970's that seem like a strange dream today; the student smoking lounge at the local high school for one. The military jet that came to our local playground would be another.

I know it was real, though, because recently I found some old super 8 movie films that my brother and his friend had shot showing the plane. The images themselves seem almost dreamlike, but I know they're not. I know they're real. There was a jet in my old playground, Van Dyke Park, and it was one of my favorite things to play on.

It was an amazing piece of playground equipment. Salvaged military jets, like the one at Van Dyke Park, are made almost entirely of steel and aluminum. The wings and body are aluminum, the seat is cut from a block of solid stainless steel, the guide wires are metal cables, and the rivets that hold it all together are metal. What wasn't metal on this plane was the Plexiglas canopy, and the plastic insulation to the thick wires that must have made up the nervous system of the plane in it's flying days.

The reason all this metal impresses me is that I recall how much of it was sheared off, curling back, protruding, or otherwise acting as a cusineart on 'puree' for the children who would play on it. Imagine if you took an aluminum can of your favorite soda, and you took scissors to it, cutting a slice out here, and folding back a section of it there. The result of such slicing cutting, peeling and folding might be a reasonable facsimile of the cockpit of this plane. It was an incredibly dangerous piece of playground equipment, and probably caused far more blood and destruction amongst neighborhood children than it could have ever hoped to cause on the battlefield.

Fascinated that such a piece of equipment could have made it to my playground, I began researching it, and found very little information. Massive cover-up? Or just an ephemeral piece of history, unimportant to everyone but me? What I was able to find, through hours of research in the local library was that the plane was a gift to the park by the local Kiwanis Club of Fairfax. How they got a hold of a piece of military equipment like this is beyond me. I was further able to determine the type of jet, a T-33A, a type of jet that was typically used as a training jet in the United States, although sometimes modified overseas for active military use. Buried deep in my research, though, I was also able to learn that the T-33A was one of the jets that George W. Bush had trained on in his days with the Air National Guard training at Moody Air Force Base near Valdosta, GA. Was the jet in Van Dyke Park the hidden key to gaps in his service record? Of course not, but the coincidences were intriguing.

Despite the hazards, playing on this jet was one of the peak experiences of fun I remember from my childhood. Now kids are by nature very creative. I mean, you can give a kid a small plastic jetplane, and most kids could play "dogfight" or "precision laser guided bomb run" for hours. Or you could build some full scale abstraction of an airplane at a playground, and have similar success.

But give a kid a real live jet plane, and tell him to play with that? It's like apples to oranges. Sitting in the cockpit of this plane, even at six or seven years old, one could sense the moral dimension of the powerful equipment at our disposal. One could sense the US tax dollars that went into paying for such equipment. And one could really imagine flying through the air with a realism that would permeate our dreams at night.

And at night, while we dreamed of flying high, and refusing to bomb indiscriminately, the neighborhood teenagers, hippie wannabes, would collect around the plane with its totemic military power to smoke pot, flirt with each other, return to childhood as they climbed around on it, and one day, vandalize it, with red paint to simulate blood, spattered across the windshield of the plane. The Vietnam War was not over yet, and this vandalism brought politics into the playground. (Assuming of course, the plane was apolitical to start with).

All I know is that one morning, I woke up, and the plane was gone. I don't know if it flew away, migrating to friendlier playgrounds, or was lifted by crane onto the back of some flatbed truck to be towed away by authorities disgusted with the indiginities this incredible piece of machinery had suffered on the playground battlefield.

Sure, there was still another plane on another playground - in fact, an even better one at Cabin John Park in Maryland, but it was quite far and a special trip that my parents only made occasionally. The jet at Cabin John was quite magnificent because you could actually shimmy your way through the narrow pipe like fuselage, to pop out into the sunshine at the back of the plane like a rebirthing ritual. I wasn't able to find any information or get a photograph of this jetplane, so if anyone out there knows more, please contact me.

I did locate a couple of other examples of playgrounds with military equipment in them. As far as similarity to my story, check out Frank Leskovitz's account of the The Palm View Park F-86D Sabre Jet. I also even found a reference to a tank at a playground. Boy, I would have loved that. Enjoy the happy vacation photos of the Hardman's trip to Missouri, and keep scrolling till you get to the sixth picture down!

So the next time you see photos on the news of kids playing on doomed tanks or shatter helicopters, think, like I will, back to the days in the United States when such scenarios weren't evidence of the abject failure of humanity, but wonderful new playground concepts, pushing the edge of the adage of turning swords into plowshares. And maybe, it's an idea to return to. With all the multimillion dollar equipment our country is currently deploying, surely some of it could finish its useful life in the playgrounds of the suburbs.

Note: If anyone else had such equipment at their playground, I would love to hear your stories, or see photos if you have them!

Comments

[Binks]

James, brother of my dearest friend Ethan, perhaps the plane is not really gone because it never existed on your playground, and while it may serve as some intriguing hypothesis related to George W's "military" background, I prefer to see it as a comparison, or a metaphor, even a juxtaposition if you will, of those pesky WMD's that likely never existed in Saddam's sandbox. Your sources, be them your vivid memories or shared lore with friends, may simply be inaccurate. I'm sorry. But it was an excellent read.
-Some call me Binks

[Beth]

James,

Not to go off on a tangent, but of course I recall the smoking lounge in high school you refer to, and it was great! Not because kids smoked, but because they could. The freedom was there. Now we are all in lockdown. Can you imagine a freedom like that in any public high school in this politically correct nation we live in these days? Smoking itself is not such a great freedom, but I loved the casual nature of having a smoking lounge. The very existence of such a thing indicates a certain relaxed attitude rarely seen in this country anymore. We are all too uptight and controlled.

~Beth

[Martin]

GREAT ARTICLE IN BOTH SUBSTANCE AND STYLE!
I'LL FORWARD IT TO THE CURRENT PARKS PEOPLE WHO'LL PROBABLY ROLL THEIR EYES AT WHAT WAS POSSIBLE BEFORE THEIR TIME. WHEN DID SUING BECOME SUCH A NATIONAL PASSION?

MP