When you were a little girl, when you were a little boy, where did you
play? Was it in a barn? Was it a city park? Did you hunt gophers on the
plains of Iowa? Perhaps it was in a California poppy field. Perhaps a
graveyard. I played in one, and remember very vividly the grave of
Josephine Sarah Huthinson who died at the age of 11 months, and had a
little lamb on the top of her stone and an inscription: "Except ye
become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of
Heaven." Many delightful games we played around the grave of little
Josephine.

Wherever childhood found us we played, and out of our environment and
often in spite of it, lived in a delightful world of our own into which
no grownup ever really entered. Now, you and I, grownup, walk along the
sidewalks of San Francisco and all we see under our calloused old feet
is a sidewalk. But to children even a sidewalk blossoms with
possibilities. Who but a child invented: "Step on a crack, you break
your mother's back." Only the other day I saw a kiddie avoiding every
crack and muttering some incantation as he walked along.

And out of the sidewalk grew all the different types of kiddie kars and
coasters that are so prevalent. I saw a whole load of children zipping
down a steep San Francisco hill the other day much as we children
coasted down winter hills on wicked "double rippers." A hill and gravity
and a lot of kids, what possibilities. And out of the sidewalk have
evolved those nameless explosives that have been so popular over the
recent Fourth. A row of kids sitting on a curb, one of them darts out to
the car track, a car comes, great expectancy from the kids, terrific
noise, annoyed looks on the faces of sour adults, unbounded joy from a
row of kids sitting on the curb.