The Community Course
Part 3 - Specific Community Interests
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19. Small Community Recreation

Recreation in Community
Most discussions of recreation are from the point of view of urbanized communities, in which many facilities, considerable equipment, and paid supervisors are available. Yet perhaps a third of the people of America are beyond the reach of such facilities. What can they do about recreation in their small communities?

No specific answer can be given to that question. Some small communities have natural settings favorable to recreation, which others lack. Some have financial resources which others do not have. Good recreational leadership is fairly abundant in some communities, and almost wholly lacking in others.

Perhaps the best that can be done is to indicate the natural place of re­creation in society and the spirit and attitudes which will make recreation most fully realize its possibilities, and then to suggest numerous possibilities. No one small community can develop more than a small part of these, but nearly every small community can find some within its reach. In this discussion least attention has been given to those forms of recreation most universally practiced, understood, and provided for.

The Place of Recreation in Human Life and Society
After every heartbeat the heart has a short period of rest and relaxation before the next beat. By this rhythmical process of work and rest the normal heart is able to keep going for three-score years and ten. For a very short time under stress it can beat faster and omit the periods of rest, but if that speeding up lasts very long, death results.

That rhythm of alternating work and rest, of effort and relaxation, is characteristic of all normal life. To ignore it is perilous. A civilization which speeds up its living pace and omits relaxation may seem to make great headway, but it will quickly burn out.

Importance of Recreation
Recreation is just as necessary as work. Provision for recreation is not a minor incident of good community life, but a vital element in social well-being. Human society as a whole the world over has recognized play as a primary need. Most accounts of primitive peoples deal at length with feasts, dances, and social recreation, and indicate that such occasions are given as much dignity and importance as any other part of the community life.

So important is recreation to normal living that as a rule if a people is required to choose between freedom and recreation, it will give up freedom and choose recreation. Worldly wise tyrants are aware of this. They may rob the people of their rights, but only at their peril do they interfere with the people's play. During the period of the English Restoration, in the conflict between the autocratic Royalists and the democratic Puritans, one of the most effective means used by the royalty to undermine the influence of the Puritan regime and of democracy was a nation-wide program of sports, such as Cromwell's Puritan regime had ignored or frowned upon.

Evolution of Play
Like the other arts of life which make up human culture, the art of play is not suddenly acquired. The folk games which provide a satisfactory outlet for primitive communities have been centuries in development. Watching the folk dances of Pueblo Indians I have seen a perfection of precision and skill far beyond anything I ever saw in an American theater. That skill had been developed in that one small village for probably eight hundred years. No one generation creates very much. It mostly inherits from the past.

An interesting illustration of the slowness with which games originate came to my attention. I observed many years ago that African American children on cotton plantations did not seem to play at games in the way of some northern white children, and supposed that they were different by nature. Some time later I discussed the matter with the Director of Race Relations of South Africa. I was told that in their native African villages children play at their ancient folk games, as do children in their native communities the world over. The reason for the difference is evident. Each slave brought to America was torn out of his or her native environment as an adult, and was put to work for long hours in America with no regard for old-time traditions. As their children were born and grew up in America there was almost a complete break from the old folkways. Young children could not learn from older children, for the older children knew nothing of those old African games, and two centuries in the new world was not time enough to create anew the folkways of play.

Another incident illustrates the fact that the play impulse was not lack­ing in these children. A good many years ago some colored teachers from Hampton In­stitute spent a year going to Negro schools through the back country, teaching Eng­lish folk games to the school children. Years later, when those children had grown up and left the school, the same schools were visited again. It was found that the same folk games were still being played. The entire school population had changed, but the tradition had been kept alive as the younger pupils learned by playing with the older ones. It was not the spirit of play, but the knowledge of how to play that had been lacking. If one thinks that condition indicates exceptional lack of originality, let him or her stop to think whether he or she ever created a new game or a new way to play. 

Quality in Recreation
In every field of human activity there is a vast difference between clumsiness, vulgarity, and crudeness on the one hand, and skill, refinement, and beauty on the other. Genius, experience, skill, and leadership are necessary to turn the former into the latter. This is fully the case with recreation. What is more tragically pathetic than the effort of people to play when they do not know how? “A holiday of miserable men is sadder than the burial day of kings." 

An old-time village Fourth of July celebration, or the annual county fair, were illustrations of people wanting to play and not knowing how.

As a boy I had seen folk dancing only as a clumsy, boisterous activity, in which there was no sense of beauty of motion and little refinement of skill, and in which the greatest fun was in jerking one's partner off her feet. From that experience I supposed that folk dancing was essentially clumsy and loutish. Then when I saw these same dances under the direction of a master, their skill, charm and beauty were a revelation.

Play as a Great Art
The transition from the one manner of action to the other, whether in recreation or in any other field, is the process of civilization. The field of recreation offers unlimited possibility for creative genius, knowledge, skill, and leadership in making play into a great art. A people is not civilized until it is creative, skillful, and versatile in its play. With the greater leisure of the machine age, recreation properly is taking an increasingly large place in community life, requires increasing intelligence and design, and provides increasing oppor­tunity to add quality, variety, and interest to living.

Environmental Influence on Play
A great people will be great in every phase of its life, and a trivial, inconsequential people will show its real character in whatever it does. Very often greatness or triviality of character is not inborn, but is the result of growing up in a great or a trivial environment. What we are thoroughly used to becomes "second nature" to us. If young people have become used to cheap and tawdry interests, then any other kind may seem "highbrow" and uninteresting. If they have become used to fine quality, then cheapness and crudeness is distasteful.

This principle holds in recreation as in any other field. The character of a people is formed in its play as surely as in its work. Leadership of skill and quality and imagination can gradually lead people to feel at home with quality, and to prefer it. Democracy in recreation should not mean holding recreation to the levels of the least developed persons, but rather the development of widespread interest in and love for excellence.

Simplicity vs. Triviality
Much of the dramatics in American small high schools and rural groups is exceedingly inane and trivial. Much recreational reading is on the same level. There is a great difference between simplicity and triviality. Some great drama and some great literature is so simple that children can understand it. To a large degree the language of excellence must be learned and the feeling for excellence must be acquired, through gradual acquaintance. Great leadership in recreation will first have appreciation of excellence, and then will steadily and persistently work to make people familiar with excellence, never going too far beyond their present interests and experience to keep contact.

In a community workshop, instruction in excellent, simple furniture design substantially affected the taste of the community, so that crude and ugly pieces tended to disappear from the shop. A good leader by skill and patience can change folk dancing from crude loutishness to a thing of beauty and refinement. The leader of a drama group, instead of trying to find the latest popular hit, can search for the world's masterpieces which combine simplicity and greatness. In field sports, constant emphasis on fair play, sportsmanship, and considerateness can be a material influence in the development of good manners. Quality in recreation can go far toward making a great people.

Play in America
Americans have been so busy at pioneering that a large number of them have not learned how to play intelligently and effectively, as have people with deeper roots in the soil of the homeland. Wherever a fundamental human need is denied or neglected, perversions, distortions, and abuses appear. The destructiveness of boys' gangs often is but an unconscious protest to society against being deprived of the arts and opportunities of normal play. Commercial interests seeking for some unfilled need to supply, may provide amusements, not with the aim of making the greatest social contribution, but to make the greatest profit. The disintegration of many American communities is due in no small part to the lack of adequate provision for recreation, and of skill and refinement in play.

In pioneer American communities necessary work often was turned into play. The husking bee, the barn raising, the quilting party, the sewing society, were examples. With the fading of neighborly community life, with the coming of the factory, and with commercialized farming, these folkways disappeared.

Types of Play
In their place three general types of amusements have developed. There are school, community, small group, and individual games and recreation which repre­sent the best of the tradition of play, including tennis, basketball, hockey, golf, sand lot baseball, swimming, skating, skiing, hiking, hunting, fishing, handicrafts, community music, and many other activities. There are commercial amusements operated for profit, such as dance halls, commercial amusement parks, pool halls, movies, and other establishments. And there are sports, commercial or otherwise, in which a few people participate and a large number are spectators, such as horse racing, collegiate football and professional baseball.

Under existing conditions the aim of a program of community recreation most frequently should be to increase the first type of recreation - that of non-commercial games, sports, amusements and related occupations - which are directed chiefly by those who participate, and for their benefit, rather than for spectators. Such a program would not rule out either of the other classes of recreation, but would reduce their relative importance.

Recreation for All
Even where a community may seem to be over-organized, and to have too much recreation, from a quarter to a half of the young people of the community may be without any planned recreational opportunities, at least outside the regular school program. A community council or other community organization should not be satisfied with the presence of numerous recreational activities. It should endeavor to make sure that no part of the population is without reasonable opportunity for play and relaxation.

The field of recreation is so wide that a detailed discussion of recrea­tion methods would be out of place here. Only a few major forms can be mentioned. Little or no mention will be made of forms of recreation which already are generally provided, such as bridge clubs, country clubs, baseball teams, competitive inter-school athletics, and conventional school dances.

Recreation for the Community as a Whole
There should be definite efforts to have times and occasions when the community as a whole can get together for play and acquaintance. Music furnishes an excellent opportunity for such meetings. Outdoor community band concerts and community singing have been among the most success­ful community occasions. A union of the two - band concerts in which the people listen, and community singing in which they participate - makes an excellent combination.

Periodical community picnics and field days are desirable. Community pageants in which nearly every member of the community takes some part have had a large vogue in America. At their best, and if not overdone, they have much social value, especially as a unifying influence. As actually produced, sometimes with diluted and colorless symbolism originated by uninspired authors, the community pageant may represent prodigious effort with but relatively transient value.

Community dances and social evenings can make a great contribution to community recreation and community spirit. At Mesa, Arizona, a town of about four thousand people, is a large public recreation building, built by the Mormons, but open to the entire community. Here on one evening a week the community gathers, often to the number of a thousand or more. In an atmosphere of good order, con­sideration, and courtesy, young and old people dance or visit or enjoy light re­freshments, or sit around the sides of the great room and watch the others. In a Maine village near the State University one finds the town hall used in a similar way, though largely by young people.

Facilities for Recreation
Among the most satisfactory provisions for community recreation are community parks, playgrounds, and camp grounds. Many communities have provided these, and they are in great variety. Sometimes there is simply a public park. Sometimes there is a community recreation building, as well as ball grounds, tennis courts, horseshoe courts, swimming pool, golf course, children's playgrounds, all available to the community members, perhaps on a small charge to cover maintenance.

Where it is feasible a general community recreation building is desirable. Seldom if ever should a community recreation center try to provide facilities for all kinds of recreation, but it can choose from many kinds, such as games, dancing, folk dancing, basketball, volley ball, boxing and wrestling, handicrafts, bands, glee clubs and choruses, theater clubs, and picnic meals.

These are but suggestions of the many ways in which members of the community as a whole can play together.

Group Sports
The commonest way for people to play is in small groups, with or without audience. Most communities are so well aware of the desirability of providing tennis courts, ball fields, basketball courts, swimming pools, golf courses, horseshoe courts, etc., that little argument for them would seem to be needed. Yet, even in fairly prosperous communities, it often is true that a large part of the population is in effect denied access to such opportunities for play. Too often the more prosperous elements of the community, from which leaders are more usually drawn, have the impression that because they and their associates have opportunities for games and sports, no community problem remains. Sometimes opportunity to play can be provided without great expense. A survey by Cornell University of a rural New York area disclosed that the most popular forms of recreation for men were reading, baseball, swimming, and horseshoes - only one of which is very expensive to provide.

Educational Recreation
Recreation is more than amusement. There is a common misconception that play must be without practical value, or it is not play. That idea is in conflict with the whole of human history. In primitive life a very large part of children's play is imitation of the work of adult life. That is, it is a process of education. A girl in playing with her dolls is learning to be a skillful mother. A boy with tools is learning the skills of adult life. Scarcely any recreational device is so popular as a community workshop. Both children and adults take to it.

In a town of two thousand the community workshop proved to be almost the most popular activity. Young people and their elders made boats, furniture, pewter dishes, woodenware dishes, and numerous other articles. As a rule the greatest difficulty in maintaining a community workshop program is in finding men and women in the community who will supervise it. Activities which may be included are wood-work, metal work, weaving, printing, photography, electrical work, painting, and modeling. Since most children no longer see their parents at work, society needs to make definite provision whereby children can play at the work which adults do.

Many other forms of educational and cultural recreation are feasible. Study clubs, reading clubs, Shakespeare clubs, music clubs, poetry clubs, nature clubs, garden clubs, science clubs, and discussion clubs are among the most long lived and most persistently attended of all recreational undertakings. Some of them have kept alive and active through generations.

Cultural Recreation
Many people enjoy recreation which has an intellectual or aesthetic content. Either for the community as a whole or for smaller groups lecture courses, music programs, drama clubs, panel discussions, art exhibits, museums of art, science, or industry, zoological and botanical collections, and other cultural undertakings, find popular approval. Even small communities may have some of these advantages if those who direct such undertakings have imagination and know their fields.

The community theater has grown to such dimensions that it is a national movement by itself. Its prominence is due partly to its innate merit, and partly to the fact that a recreation hungry people who have not achieved an art of play seize upon it as an outlet for their craving for activity. In some cases dramatics absorbs a disproportionate part of the leisure time and resources of school or community, and represents a psychology of escape from a real world that is not interesting.

Individual Recreation
Many public recreation programs deal with masses or groups of people, and thereby neglect an element of recreation that is of no less value. Most great men and women have found solitude to be a vital necessity, and the best that is in us often demands time to be alone, or with one or two companions. A detailed study by Cornell University of a rural community in New York State indicated that more people chose reading than any other form of recreation. Another widespread study gave the same results. A wise program of community recreation will make provision for individual enjoyment. Today as never before this is feasible.

The community library is a primary necessity. Its shelves should not be wholly filled with the latest best sellers. There should be room for literature, science, poetry, biography, history, philosophy, and religion. It is not always the book most talked about and taken out most frequently which is most interesting. The great books of the ages often can be the most familiar friends. Many people would like great books if they were not afraid of them, and if they were willing to learn the special language which great thinkers frequently require for expressing their ideas.

A phonograph records circulating library can be a great resource to a community. It can be kept in the community library, and administered by the per­sons who handle books.

An art exchange also can be very interesting. Original paintings or copies, small pieces of statuary, and other beautiful things can be loaned for a few weeks at a time, as books are loaned. Often there are persons in a community that will lend some of their belongings for that purpose, while often artists will lend original paintings, with the expectation that occasionally one will be pur­chased by the borrower.

The toy loan library is becoming a widespread institution. In scores of communities toys outgrown by their owners are given to the library, and are loaned like library books.

The Little Wilderness
Millions of persons visit our national parks, but seldom do they do more than drive through, or perhaps stand beside a geyser or a big tree to have a photograph taken, or stop beside a waterfall for lunch. Not one in a thousand stops to relax and to make deliberate intimate acquaintance with primeval nature.

The kind of intimate enjoyment of nature and of solitude which characterized Henry Thoreau does not come suddenly. It needs opportunity for growth. Most American small communities have been blindly insensitive to the natural beauties around them, and have tended to destroy whatever opportunities there were for saving them. A wooded river bank may have been used for a city dump. A beautiful native woodlot has been cut for the timber. In most parts of America hogs and cattle have overrun the beautiful wooded tracts and destroyed the wildflowers.

Acquiring Wilderness
Yet in hundreds if not in thousands of cases there is opportunity for the community to get possession of wooded river banks, or rough pieces of woodland, or bits of open marshy meadow, or wooded swamps where native wildflowers are not yet destroyed or can be replaced. Few expressions of nature are more awe-inspiring than a tamarack swamp, with great trunks, gray cylindrical pillars reaching toward the sky, and the ground of the shady aisles underneath covered with tamarack needles, and here and there twinflower or golden-thread. Compared with its stately, silent beauty, a European cathedral seems artificial and commonplace. Most such places have been temporarily spoiled by cutting the timber, but time can heal such wounds, and the beauty can return.

A community does very well to acquire as it can its river banks, springy hollows, wooded hills, or marshy shorelines where the pink gerardia and the blue lobelia bloom. Even if there is no money at present to care for them, the years will be busy in restoring nature. Children will explore these little wildernesses, and will become acquainted with squirrels and groundhogs and woodpeckers and thrushes, and some of them will develop a sensitiveness to nature which will add to the appre­ciation of our national parks and other great natural monuments. A few people have ability to see potential natural beauty “in the rough,” through blackberry briars and tramped-over springs. On them we must largely depend for saving our resources of beauty.

Beauty Spots and Vista Points
About most villages in rolling country there are small spots of natural beauty which are of no particular economic value to their owners. Often they can be acquired and developed into nooks for picnic parties. Along the highway an acre or two may provide a picnic ground. Often there is a point from which an exceptional view may be had. A community in which there is imagination and sensitivity, and energy to acquire such bits of land and bring out and preserve their beauty for the public, may be more fortunate than a community endowed with an art gallery and a museum. A keen sense of beauty applied to the home environment may give a community quality and distinction beyond what money could buy.

A young Chicago lawyer had a keen sense of natural beauty and a craving for the out-of-doors he had left behind. On weekends he explored the environs of the city. Finding a tumbledown farm on rough land of woods and swamp he saw potential beauty in it. During weekends for a considerable time he studied its possibilities. With axe and grub-hoe he would open a vista, clear away underbrush, explore a marshy spot for an underground spring which could be made beautiful.

When the possibility of beauty in this rundown farm had been revealed he sold the farm to a golf club for a high price, and then searched out another waste place, where he repeated the process. Thus he maintained vigorous health (he is now past ninety), enjoyed the out-of-doors, gave play to his creative sense of beauty, and in the process made a fortune. Would that a thousand communities had each a nature lover who would explore his or her community setting to discover its natural beauty, and then, not for profit but as a community service, help the community to possess the beauty he or she had discovered. What an interesting avocation!

Hobbies
Other individual recreations are included under the general term of hobbies. Many a person finds relaxation and interest in some one of numberless special interests among then handicrafts, printing, bee-keeping, carrier pigeons, collecting glass, corresponding with people of other nations, writing a column in the local newspaper, or raising tropical fish. The community need not conduct these, but it can make young people aware of interesting hobbies, and can encourage them. Since most of us do not have very original minds, suggestion and example are needed to help us to discover possibilities and to learn how to enjoy them.

A Directory of Interests
Even in a community of one or two thousand persons there may be several persons with some one keen personal interest, each of whom is unaware that anyone else has that interest. If some person, or some organization, will take the trouble year after year to develop a directory of personal interests, and make a few copies available to the public, as in the public library, persons of like interests may discover each other, and find companionship in common avocations. Such a directory can be compiled by sending a return post card to each member of the community, listing perhaps fifty subjects which can be marked 1, 2, or 3, according to whether they come first, second, or third in the interest of the person replying. The subjects listed may range all the way from philosophy and poetry to boxing and hunting. A small space should be left on the card for a description of equipment or facilities available.

Camping, Hunting, and Fishing
Our spirits hark back to the ancient days when our ancestors lived close to the soil and depended directly on nature. Hunting and fishing and camping are in our blood. Often the camera can take the place of the gun with no loss of interest. 

When well-to-do members of the community go off on their hunting and fishing and camping trips they may be unaware of any lack of such opportunities in the community, yet half or more of the population may never find it possible to satisfy these cravings. A community does well to have access to some wild country, and to make it possible for each family in the community to have a modest share of camp life. Sometimes, with the help of the State Fish and Game Commission, local streams, ponds, and lakes can be stocked, so that local boys and girls may have their opportunities without the burden of an expensive fishing trip.

Outdoor Clubs
Nature clubs, bird clubs, botany clubs, cross-country clubs, hiking clubs, bicycle clubs, science clubs, mountain-climbing clubs, geology clubs, Boy and Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, Youth Hostels, outing clubs, and 4H clubs are among the possibilities for out-of-door recreation, in addition to sports and games.

Work as Recreation

John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education expressed an important truth:

"The great men among the ancients understood very well how to reconcile manual labor with affairs of state, and thought it no lessening of their dignity to make the one the recreation of the other."

"Nor let it be thought that I mistake, when I call these or the like exercises of manual arts, diversions or recreations: for recreation is not being idle (as everyone may observe) but easing the wearied part by change of business: and he that thinks diversion may not lie in hard and painful labor, forgets the early rising, hard riding, heat, cold and hunger of huntsmen, which is yet known to be the constant recreation of men of the greatest condition.”

--From Eliot's Five-Foot Book Shelf,   Vol. 37, p. 181.

 At Alexandria, Ohio, the people of the community worked together to turn a dump into a playground. It is doubtful whether the use of the playground gives any greater enjoyment than did the making of it, Working together for community ends often is a pleasant and desirable form of recreation.

Updyke, the great printer, worked for ten hateful years at the printing trade, despising his work, and wishing he were free from it. Then he began to won­der what he would do if he were free, and he asked himself whether his own work had no possibilities of interest. The result was that he fell in love with printing, became one of the world's great printers, and by that route found an open road to the companionship of the men and women of intelligence and appreciation whose acquaintance he had so much desired.

A woman who had kept house for thirty years said that only recently had she discovered that the processes of the kitchen had at least as great range of possibility for emotional satisfaction as would modeling clay, painting pictures, or driving a golf ball. She has become an artist in her home, and her friends enjoy it with her. She learned that freedom may come by self-discovery and self-mastery more surely than by escape.

Gardening
There are some forms of individual or family recreation which do not need public financial support so much as public encouragement. Gardening is one of these. In many small communities, especially in those far from industrial centers, money is less abundant than time. If such a community can take pride in its vegetable and flower gardens it may become a place distinguished for its beauty and individuality. Tyler, a small town on the prairies of western Minnesota was settled by Danish people. Although the houses were small and set on flat rectangular lots fifty feet wide, the people of the community used so much skill and imagination in planting their gardens that after thirty-five years the writer looks back to this little village as one of the most interesting he ever saw. The neighborly exchange of plants, vegetables, and flowers, and the discussion of common problems, created at least as much neighborly feeling as membership in a golf club. The Dane is by tradition a landscape artist, and turns a commonplace setting into a place of beauty. He or she finds recreation in doing so. In one Ohio community the garden club had a committee to appraise vegetable and flower gardens during the season, and each fall at the garden festival prizes were given for the best use of whatever facilities the gardener had, whether little or great.

Valuing Recreation
The feudal, aristocratic attitude, dating back to Aristotle and before, held that usefulness and beauty are incompatible. In the ancient democratic atmos­phere of Switzerland some people know better. I recall an evening at the home of a rural Swiss pastor in the Bernese Oberland. His garden was a masterpiece of design, so informal that the design was invisible. Vegetables and flowers were blended in an apparently artless unity. As we sat in the evening looking across the garden to the mountains, he remarked, "How beautiful the evening sunlight is on the beet leaves."

How great in beauty and in recreation America might become if we could but free ourselves for the deadly pall of convention inherited from tawdry aristocracy, which leads us to feel that useful work cannot be recreation, that necessary tasks are mean, and necessary things are ugly. What if Americans should treat their gardens as did the Swiss pastor! What if American women should forget fashions from Paris, Vienna, or New York, and each who had creative ability should qualify herself to design her own costumes to suit her personality and her work, whether the resulting style should follow ancient Egypt or medieval Japan or modern America! What an increase of variety and interest, yes, and recreation in a true sense, might result, though except for qualified persons the initial efforts might be far from happy. In such a process skilled leadership would have more range of action, not less.

Recreation Through Community Organizations
The community as such should not try to monopolize all public recreation within its borders. Members of churches, farm organizations, labor unions, and other working organizations find increased unity playing together as well as in working together. Community recreation facilities should be made available to such organizations.