Go back

A School Field

Black and white image of a girl standing in a large field with chalk lines on the grass. She is in the centre of the photograph and has a banner of track and field ribbons draped over her right shoulder. In the background on the left side there is a man and a woman each riding a bike across the field, on the right side is a group of kids playing in a crowd. A two-storey school house is also visiable in the background surrounded by mature trees.

Interview with Marylou Kumagawa, at the Aurora Public Library, August 5, 2016

Image Courtesy of Marylou Kumagawa

Marylou Kumagawa (pictured) reflects on how Town Park was used as a school field while she was a student at Wells Street School in the early 1960s.

Transcript

Interviewer: So the field day that Wells Street school did…

MaryLou: It was our park, it was our recreation area. So um, we always had our field days there. The um, by the armouries the high jump pit was just a little further down and then we did the races here. And there was another ball diamond over by the um, just a make shift ball diamond over by the band shell a bit…

Interviewer: Oh! Okay.

MaryLou: With some benches, I remember grade 8 we spent a lot of time there just as all elementary kids do. Yeah, recess was always great. We’d go over even though it was different times, the first snow was an exciting time. We’d make a big “pie” and play “pie tag” on it and keep it. Every time it snowed we’d go out and remake it, and go home for lunch and when it was summertime weather and the first person back was pitcher, the second person back was bat catch and then whatever you came back we played ball until, baseball until the school bell rang. It was great.

Interviewer: How do you play pie tag?

MaryLou: It’s just a pie and you cut it up like this, and when you play tag you can only run on the spokes and around the the circle… yeah, yeah. You made your own fun!