IN the late 1970s, in the Mississippi River town of Dubuque, Iowa, the threat of summer boredom was real. The nearest theme parks were hours away, and the best video games (Space Invaders, Asteroids) were coin guzzlers, fueled by hard-earned lawn-mowing or paper-route funds. While we had the requisite tennis courts and public swimming pools, which we used to exhaustion, our best resources were our rawest ones — hilly streets, undeveloped woods, local streams and hours of unstructured, unsupervised playtime.
As a 6- to 8-year-old, when I wasn’t searching for sticks to whittle with my collection of X-acto knives (or giving myself the scars to remember them by), I was getting lost in ragtag gatherings of kids. We played afternoon-long basketball games and twilight sessions of kick the can that could span three streets and involve 30 or more screaming kids.