Sledding in Kansas, 1960s, by Marshall Poe

From MemoryArchive

Who: Marshall Poe
What: Sledding in Kansas
When: Late 1960s
Where: Wichita, Kansas

As everyone knows, Kansas is flat. As fewer people know, it's also cold and snows quite a bit. Now, skiing is largely impossible in Kansas, due to the aforementioned flattness. But sledding, that you can do. When it snows, that is. Here's how we did it when I was a little kid.

First, you have to know that in addition to getting really cold in Kansas, it also gets really hot. In the summer, especially. When it's hot, people like to cool off with a swim. Unfortunately, there aren't many places to swim in Kansas. The rivers are very few and small, and the natural lakes and ponds fewer and smaller. So, the fathers of my city, Wichita, decided to build a swimming pool so the people of my city, Wichita, could swim in the summer. It was to be on Edgemoor Street, and would be called Edgemoor Park.

Building a large public swimming pool involves digging a really big hole in the ground. That's the first part, at least, and it's the part most important for this story. So they dugg that really big hole and that left a really big mound of DIRT. I really don't think the city fathers had thought through what to do with this big pile of dirt. They just left it there and continued their work on the pool. We, the kids of the area, knew just what to do with a big pile of dirt (and I mean REALLY BIG)--have huge dirt clod fights. And this we did, day in and day out for weeks. We'd meet in the morning, rebuild our fortifications, and set to chucking big clods of dirt at one another. When they hit the ground (or someone's head) they sort of "exploded," which we thought was the greatest thing ever. Today, of course, kids would never be allowed to play on such a dirt hill--liability issues. But those were different times.

But the best was yet to come. The city fathers saw that we were playing on the big dirt hill. And so they thought "Why don't we let them have the hill and build a little park around it with jungle gyms and such." Maybe they had the thing planned from the start, but anyway it was very enlightened. The city came in, shaped the hill with big dirt movers, planted some gym equipment, and let us loose. Great.

Then winter came. It snowed. For the first time, we had a place to sled (well, you could go to the overpass on I-95 and use the off-on ramps, but those were a long way off). We got our sleds and ran to the hill. What fun. No parents. We raced, piled a million kids on one sled, hooked the sleds together, crashed them into one another, built ramps and jumped them, and did every imaginable thing one could do with a sled. It was great. Except for one thing. The gym equipment had been placed squarely at the bottom of the hill, so when you were heading down, you had to be careful not to run smack dab into a swingset strut or something similarly immoble. Once I met such a pole head on, and it cracked my head open. If I recall, I was unconscious for a while. My friends just rolled me out of the way (I would have done the same) and waited for me to come around. I did, and headed back up the hill--which was a swimming pool upside down.