 |
| Everett Bird Mero, American Playgrounds, their Construction, Equipment, Maintenance and Utility, Boston, Massachusetts, The Dale Association, 1909, page 66. |
PLAYGROUND SONG
In friendly feats of skill we vie
As o’er the Maypole rope we fly,
Or balance in the tossing swing,
Or on the see-saw lightly spring.
We cluster on the giant stride,
And gaily coast on Kelly’s slide,
And, upside down, we face the stars
Upon the horizontal bars.
. . .
Playground fun and playground ways
Make for children merry days.
So we sing our playground song,
Happy as the day is long!
-G. F. P., in the
Philadelphia Record
Playgrounds
and playground slides were both well established features of pop-culture when
the poem was published in the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle in 1911.[i]
Things were
different in Brooklyn two decades earlier when electric trolleys first plied
the streets of Brooklyn:
Little Zetta Lumberg, aged four, was this morning said to be
dying at St. Mary's Hospital, Brooklyn. She was knocked down by trolley
car No. 118, of the Fulton street line, last night.
As the child crossed the street at Saratoga avenue there was a maze of trolley cars and vehicles. She dodged behind an uptown car just as another trolley car came flying down the other track.
As the child crossed the street at Saratoga avenue there was a maze of trolley cars and vehicles. She dodged behind an uptown car just as another trolley car came flying down the other track.
The
Evening World (New York) October 3, 1893.
 |
| The World (New York), February 27, 1895. |
The new-fangled
vehicles brought speed and danger to the streets, a place that previously had
been a relatively safe space shared by horse-drawn wagons, pedestrians, and children
at play. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ nickname,
shortened from the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers (first used in 1895), is a lasting
reminder of those dangers. See my earlier piece, The Grim Reality of the “Trolley Dodgers.” [ii]
One solution
to the problem – playgrounds:
Those children of Brooklyn who survive the attacks of the
remorseless trolley car will at least have pleasant play-grounds next summer.
New York Tribune, October 8, 1893, page
6.
As the
electric trolley spread to other cities, playgrounds were never far
behind:
[I]n the spring of 1895, the trolley system was adopted in
Philadelphia, and many accidents to children playing on the streets stimulated
the public sentiment very greatly in favor of playgrounds were “the poor little
urchins could play, free from danger to life and limb.”
Stoyan Vasil
Tsanoff, Educational Value of the
Children’s Playgrounds, a novel plan of character building, Philadelphia,
1897, page 136.
In 1899, the
Mayor of Toledo, Ohio waxed philosophical about the need for more playgrounds
and better playground equipment:
I want to give them places where they may play free from the
electric cars and the temptations of the street, where they may get together
and learn to love each other. It is true
that in many of our cities certain parts of the parks have been designated as
playgrounds for the children: but, as a rule, they have not been equipped with
apparatus and are nothing more than places where children might romp and play ball,
etc. But, with the closing years of this
century, we catch glimpses of the new civilization that is to characterize the
twentieth century. We are looking
forward and thinking of a larger life that refuses to be satisfied with the
sordid scramble or possession of property and demands opportunity for
expression of men’s spiritual nature that has been in danger of being crushed
out by the fierce warfare of competition that is now giving way to a more
sensible order of combination, which, in turn, is to be succeeded by a
co-operation that will lead to brotherhood, a brotherhood that is to make it
its business to see that the possibilities of happiness be within the reach of
every man, woman and child – in short, to see the kingdom of heaven set up and realized
on earth.
The North Adams Transcript (North Adams,
Massachusetts), August 12, 1899, page 2.
A bit
overwrought, perhaps, but the kingdom of heaven on earth sounds like a worthy
goal, regardless of one’s religious bent.
But Mayor Alanson Wood was a man of his time, and his time was defined
by the
progressive movement, which swept the country from the 1890s through about
the 1930s. The progressive movement, in
part a reaction to industrialization and urbanization, was marked by broad efforts
to improve living conditions, public health and safety, and working conditions.
One aspect
of the progressive movement were so-called “settlement
houses,” a worldwide network of charitable, neighborhood social work
institutions, hundreds of which were scattered across the country and
throughout the world at the turn of the century:
Settlements were organized initially to
be “friendly and open households,” a place where members of the privileged
class could live and work as pioneers or “settlers” in poor areas of a city
where social and environmental problems were great. . . . The idea was that
university students and others would make a commitment to “reside” in the
settlement house in order to “know intimately” their neighbors. The primary
goal for many of the early settlement residents was to conduct sociological
observation and research. For others it was the opportunity to share their
education and/or Christian values as a means of helping the poor and
disinherited to overcome their personal handicaps.[iii]
One such
“settlement house” was Washington DC’s “Neighborhood House,” where an anonymous
janitor designed and built the first known children’s playground slide sometime
between its opening in April 1902 and August 1903, when the earliest known
reference to a playground slide appeared in print:[iv]
“Shooting the Chutes.”
One of the most delightful sports in this playground is
“shooting the chutes,” a piece of apparatus invented and installed by “Uncle
Richard,” the colored janitor of Neighborhood House, who takes as great delight
in the pleasures of the little folks as they do themselves. The “chutes” consists of a long, smooth
plank, the lower end about twelve inches from the ground and the other placed
at an elevation of about twelve feet.
There is a platform at the top of the chute, which is reached by means
of a ladder. The children climb up the
ladder and seating themselves on the smooth, sloping board, slide to the bottom
with greater or less speed, holding onto the slide railing which has been
erected along the course to prevent accidents.
It is a thrilling slide and one greatly enjoyed, even by older people.
 |
| Evening Star (Washington DC), August 1, 1903, page 7. |
And if
playground safety was the goal, some playground equipment of the period seems
to have missed the mark, at least as viewed from the perspective of our more
safety conscious era, with our plastic “play structures” and rubberized
playground surfaces.
One early
example of retrospectively obviously dangerous playground equipment appeared in
Boston a few months before Washington DC’s more conventional playground slide –
the sliding bars.
 |
| Boston Post, May 3, 1903, page 7. |
A
description of the use of similar sliding bars in Washington DC a year later
illustrates the potential for injury:
At one place where there are sliding poles – that is, two
long smooth poles set a couple of feet apart and forming the base of a right
angle between the ground and a platform about twelve feet high – some feats
were performed that were truly spectacular.
One favorite “stunt” seemed to be the trick of standing on the platform
and jumping out about six feet into space, catching by arms and legs on the
pole, the body between, and sliding swiftly to the bottom. This was done time and again, but, curiously
enough, without mishap. One of the boys
had a trick of sliding halfway down and continuing the descent by means of a
series of somersaults. He would land on
his head two times out of three, but a small matter like that did not seem to
feaze him.
Washington Times, September 11, 1904,
part 3, page 9.
The national
reach of the “settlement house” and playground movements made it possible for a
good idea in one city to be copied in another city; but which slide was
first? Boston’s “sliding poles” fell
squarely within the range of time during which “Uncle Richard” could have
designed the first conventional playground slide in Washington DC, thereby complicating
the question. The appearance of another
type of slide during the same period of time complicates the question even
further.
And, in a
touch of irony, the dangerous trolleys that a decade earlier had prompted the
need for more playgrounds for children of poor and working class families, and
thereby resulting in the invention of the playground slide, also provided
easier access for those same poor and working class families to visit “the
biggest playground in the world,”[v]
Coney Island, where increased attendance spurred the creation of more and
better attractions – including “Kelly’s Slide.”
Amusement Park Slides
On opening
day of Coney Island’s new Luna Park attraction on May 16, 1903, visitors were mesmerized
and enthralled by its electric lights – and thrilled to its new rides, including
a slide:
They have created a realm of fairy romance in colored light,
so beautiful that the rest of Coney Island will have to clean up and dress up,
if it is to do business. . . . [T]he beauty of the place under its
extraordinary electrical illumination scheme is its primary feature.
. . .
In one corner of the grounds is a quaint old Dutch windmill,
and here was discovered one of the most popular contrivances for amusement ever
seen. It consisted of a bamboo chute with a good sharp incline, but with
many devious turnings, and just broad enough for a good-sized boy. It was not an hour before an unnumbered host
of boys had discovered this wonderful slide, and before many minutes boys were
shooting down this chute at the rate of about three a second, and fairly
smoking as they slid down the curves.
The chute has not yet been worn smooth as glass, as it will be soon, and
last night it was estimated that something like 3,000 pairs of trousers were
more or less damaged within the short space of an hour. It was great fun.
The New York Times, May 17, 1903, page 2.
Young boys
were not the only people who enjoyed the “Helter Skelter” or “Kelly’s Slide”:
 |
| Colliers , Volume 33, August 27, 1904, page 20. |
“Kelly’s
Slide” was so successful that they installed a new slide the following year – this
time with bumps:
Gov. Odell Bumps the Bumps and Shoots the Chutes at Coney
Island
 |
| Evening World (New York), July 22, 1904, page 3. |
 |
| New York Times, June 12, 1904, page 25. |
Although it
is uncertain whether Boston’s sliding poles, Coney Island’s “Kelly’s Slide” or “Uncle”
Richard’s “chute the chutes” was first, there may have been some earlier slides.
A brief
notice in a St. Louis newspaper from 1901 refers to two attractions that sound
like slides:
Summer Garden Arrangements.
New attractions on the Midway will be seen. . . . The moving stairway, Kelly
Slides and cellar door will be included among the other features.[vi]
There may
even have been some sort of children’s slide in the Children’s Pavilion of the
1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, the fair that put the “Midway” in fairs :
One of the charming sights seen here [(the Children’s
Pavilion)] was a little red-cheeked English miss, whose stockings reached half
way to her bare knees, and who, after long persistence, succeeded in “placing
the cart before the horse,” rumbling her wagon in front of her, as she slid down the shining “cellar door.”[vii]
So what was
this “cellar door”?
The
quotation marks suggest that it was something other than a literal cellar door. The description of the “cellar door” as
“shining” may refer to something “polished smooth as glass,” as was the
“Kelley’s Slide” at Coney Island several years later.[viii] One chronicler of the fair described the
Children’s Pavilion as “the biggest playhouse in the world” with “toys of all
nations, from the rude bone playthings of the Eskimo children to the wonderful
mechanical and instructive toys of modern times,”[ix]
which suggests that this “cellar door” may well have been something
purposefully designed for children to slide on.
The truth is
out there, but we may never know the answer.
It is also
possible that the “cellar door” at the Children’s Pavilion was an actual,
typical American cellar door, installed with the express purpose of having children
to slide on it, as generations of American children had been doing for decades.
 |
| The Herald Los Angeles, June 21, 1896, page 13. |
Cellar Door Nostalgia
Early
playground slides and amusement park slides were frequently compared with
inclined cellar doors, like the one Dorothy tried getting into to escape the
twister in The Wizard of Oz.
This fall he is going to have an entirely new list of
attractions. Chief among these will be a
tobogganless toboggan slide. It is a
contrivance similar to the one known as “bumping the bumps” at Coney Island. .
. . No cars are provided for the slide,
the venturesome passenger merely sitting down in it and sliding over the route,
just as we used to do in childhood’s happy days on the
old cellar door.
The L’Anse Sentinel, (L’Anse, Michigan),
September 17, 1904, page 1.
American
children were sliding down cellar doors as early as the summer of ’42 (1842):
But there is one grievance which clearly demands the
concentrated energies of the whole civil – and, if it must be so, in the last
resort, military – power of our city for its eradication – we mean the “rowdy
boys,” from three to ten years of age, who “deface our fences” with chalk and
pencil, “injure our palings,” by riding on them, drag their miniature engines
[(wagons)] upon our sidewalks, play “tag” up and down our alleys, perch
themselves upon our stoops, and slide down our
cellar-doors.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16,
1842, page 2.
The joys of
sliding on cellar doors inspired a
popular song entitled “Grimes’ Cellar Door” and a stage play of the same name
that ran for decades.
The popular song
“Grimes’ Cellar Door” debuted in 1870:
For I would give all my Greenbacks,
For those bright days of Yore,
Old Grimes’ Cellar Door.
The play made its debut at Proctor’s Opera House in Wilmington, Delaware in
August 1890. Grimes Cellar Door ran continuously, in one form or another, for more than a decade;
frequently put on by small touring companies playing small towns.
 |
| Pittston Gazette (Pittston, Pennsylvania), December 23, 1910, page 3. |
By 1897,
sliding down the cellar door was considered one of those nostalgic pleasures of
lost youth:
But of all sliding places the most delightful, beyond a
doubt, is the cellar door. There are
many reasons for this, which will appear upon a moment’s consideration.
In the first place, the cellar door stays put; you don’t have
to be forever fixing it, as you do the chair and the ironing board. It is outdoors, in the open air, an added
delight. It draws other children, who
come to play with you, to slide on your cellar door, or it may be that you go
to slide on theirs; the cellar door is perhaps the scene of your first
introduction into youthful society.
There are cellar doors everywhere, but the outside, inclined
cellar door, of the kind that you slide on, is peculiar chiefly to smaller
cities, to towns and villages and to houses in the country; to localities where
there is room. . . .
Blessed is he among whose earlier recollections is a cellar
door, with the bright blue sky above and green grass to roll upon all around.
The Salt Lake Herald (Utah), August 1,
page 14.
The
expression “cellar door,” and its association with childhood play, was used
idiomatically in circumstances where we might use “plays well with others” or
“takes his ball and goes home,” as the case may be.
What the Monroe Doctrine Means.
Burlington Hawkey.]
The Monroe doctrine simply and explicitly declares that no
foreign nation shall come over here and slide down our
cellar door. . . .
Public Ledger (Memphis, Tennessee),
April 12, 1880, page 2.
The Pittsburgh Times mustn’t let its Washington correspondent
speak of “a man named Miller” in connection with the Internal Revenue
Commissionership. He doesn’t slide on our political cellar-door, and we
have at times refused to spin tops with him for keeps; but he isn’t altogether
unknown in Washington and is very far from being a nobody.
Wheeling Daily Intelligencer (West
Virginia), March 16, 1885, page 1.
Now that Prince Bismarck has apologized and declared that the
Samoa incident was all a mistake, we freely forgive him, and he may slide down our cellar-door whenever he chooses,
just as if nothing had happened. – Chicago
News.
The Vermont Watchman (Montpelier,
Vermont), May 1, 1889, page 4.
 |
| Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), November 6, 1895, page 6. |
 |
| Semi-Weekly Independent (Plymouth, Indiana), April 22, 1896, page 5. |
 |
| Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minnesota), October 12, 1902, page 41. |
A few years
later, the expression “cellar door” first became known as the most beautiful
expression in the English language.
Coincidence? Cause and Effect? You be the
Judge.
See, for example, “Cellar
Door”, Grant Barrett, The New York Times
Magazine, February 11, 2010 (tracing the idea that “cellar door” is an
inherently beautiful, sonorous or euphonous expression to 1903) and “Slide Down My Cellar
Door,” Geoff Nunberg, LanguageLog, March 16, 2014 (speculating that the
perceived special beauty of “cellar door” may have been influenced, in part, by
the “cellar door” songs and their romantic, nostalgic associations).
I will save
that question for another day.
More Slides
But as
popular as cellar door-sliding was before 1903, it quickly gave ground to the
modern playground slide.
There were
playground slides in Chicago by 1905:
 |
| Webster Playground – Thirty-third and La Salle Streets (Chicago). “Shooting the Chutes;” a Line-up of Little Ones. A Plea for Playgrounds, Issued by the Special Park Commission, Chicago, W. J. Hartman Company, 1905, page 6. |
St. Louis
had a new “Slide, Kelly, Slide” in 1908:
A constant line of youngsters stood awaiting their turn at
the “Slide, Kelly, Slide,” a contrivance constructed
on the principle of the shoot-the-chutes.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), June
15, 1908, page 4.
The new
“Kelly Slide” was front-page news in Kansas in 1913:
 |
| The Junction City Daily Union (Kansas), April 28, 1913, page 1. |
Soon, you could
buy your very own “Kelly Slide” so that your children wouldn’t have to mix it
up with the riff-raff down at the public park:
 |
| Springfield Missouri Republican, June 15, 1919, page 7. |
The common
names, “Slide, Kelly, Slide” or “Kelly Slide,” refer to an earlier pop-culture
phenomenon, the song, “Slide, Kelly, Slide.” The song, one of the first big hit
songs recorded on a phonograph, was itself a reference to an
earlier sports and pop-culture icon, “the Only” Mike “King” Kelly, a popular
vaudeville performer and professional baseball’s first $10,000 man.
Mike Kelly
was an aggressive base-runner and known, along with his other Chicago
teammates, as a good slider. The hook
slide, or “Chicago slide,” originated in Chicago while Mike played there. However, the “slide” of “Slide, Kelly, Slide”
fame may be more of a dig at his leaving Chicago for Boston, and later breaking
a contract to go on an Australian baseball tour with the Chicago team
(“sliding” being a euphemism for breaking a contract or getting out of an
obligation), than it is a reference to base sliding. The timing, circumstances, and lyrics of the
song suggest as much. He may have only
become famous for his sliding retroactively, in the afterglow of the song that
firmly associated his name with sliding.
Slide, Kelly, Slide!
Mike Kelly is
a hall of fame catcher who played seventeen seasons of professional
baseball. He first rose to prominence as
a member of the Chicago White Stockings in 1880. He played for seven seasons, much of that time
under owner Albert Spalding; yes, that Spalding, who is now better remembered
for is sporting goods company which is still in business today.
Following
the 1886 season, Kelly announced that he would never play in Chicago
again. He claimed to have been
improperly fined $275 for “intemperance” (drinking too much). He and his brother were doing well in the
horse business at Hancock Park, Chicago, and he didn’t need his baseball money. To recoup on his investment, Spalding sold
Kelly’s contract to the Boston Beaneaters for a then unimaginable sum of money
for a baseball player - $10,000.
In 1888,
Albert Spalding organized an Australian baseball tour in which his Chicago
White Stockings played a series of exhibitions against a team of all-stars from
other teams. He called the all-star team
the “All-American Baseball Team,” which is believed to be the origin of the now
common expression or designation, “All-American”. The teams left Chicago in late-October and
played a series of games across the country, en route to its port of departure,
San Francisco.
Mike Kelly
initially agreed to join the “All-Americans”. His image appears on promotional material and
was prominently mentioned in the pre-tour publicity campaign.
 |
“The All-American
Team” (Mike Kelly, top row-center), Outing, Volume 13, Number 2, November
1888, page 160.
|
His team was
glad to see him go on tour, for reasons that lend credence to Spalding’s
reasons for fining Kelly two years earlier:
President Soden of the Boston club says he is glad Kelly is
going to Australia this winter, for he will have no opportunity to carouse with
his Boston friends.
Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1999, page
13.
But as the
day of departure grew near, Kelly was nowhere to be seen – and rumors started
circulating that he was not going to make the tour.
 |
| St Louis Post Dispatch (Missouri), October 11, 1888, page 8. |
Tiernan and Mike Kelly still say that they are not going to
Australia. The two Kellys - $10,000 Mike
and Umpire John – are to open a saloon in New York this winter.[xiii]
Despite the
rumors, numerous newspapers ran articles assuring that Mike Kelly was on his
way, would be there in a few days, or would catch up with the team soon. The news of his imminent arrival followed the
team on its cross-country tour from Chicago to San Francisco, in a kind of
running gag that would have done Chevy Chase (and his “Generalissimo Francisco
Franco is still dead bit”[xiv])
proud.
When Kelly’s
name showed up on pre-printed scorecards in Minneapolis, the backup catcher pretended
to be Kelly. But they still expected him
in Cedar Rapids.
The boys have been having a laugh about it ever since, and
will have lots to tell Kelly when he joins us.
Evening World (New York), October 23,
1888, page 1.
Or at least
in Salt Lake City a week later.
The absorbing conundrum with Mr. Spaulding, Mr. Anson and the
Australian contingent last week, was: “will Kelly go with us to Australia,” as
rumor had it that Kelly was about to jump his contract
at the last minute. Mr. Spaulding
was confident, however, that the “great beauty” would show up at the eleventh
hour, and latest accounts have it that Kelly is now with the team, and will surely be here on October 31st and November 1st.
The Salt Lake Herald, October 24, 1888,
page 5.
 |
| Evening Bulletin (Maysville, Kentucky), October 25, 1888, page 1. |
 |
| The Sunday Leader (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania), November 4, 1888, page 6. |
But surely
he wouldn’t miss the boat, even after missing a game in San Francisco:
Mike Kelley, the beauty, will arrive in this city
in a few days. He will accompany Spalding’s players to
Australia. It looks as if Mike was
afraid of a California audience. Perhaps
he has recollections of his work in San Francisco last season.
Oakland Tribune (California), November
14, 1888, page 3.
One day
before his ship sailed out of San Francisco, some papers were still reporting
his imminent arrival.
 |
| Fisherman and Farmer (Edenton, North Carolina), November 16, 1888, page 3. |
The joke
followed him into the next season. At
the end of the 1889 season, Boston treated Kelly to a big party at which he was
presented with a Charlotte Russe (a
type of cake) in the shape of a giant tureen:
On the cover was the inscription “Slide, Kelly, slide!” and
below this on the other side of the tureen were the words, “Where is he?”
The Evening World (New York), October
11, 1889, page 1.
The song
“Slide, Kelly, Slide” was first performed in Chicago in early November, 1888, less
than two weeks after he missed the train out of Chicago with his
Australia-bound, All-American teammates, and about two
weeks before the ship sailed for Australia.
Although the song would later be associated with (and the sheet music
dedicated to) the singer, Maggie Cline, the song was first performed by its
writer, comic actor J. W. Kelly (no relation), the “Rolling Mill Man.”
 |
| Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1888, page 3. |
This first
notice refers to a “great hit,” which at first blush might suggest the song has
been around for awhile. But a paper trail of his performances in and
around Chicago during the weeks leading up to this earliest notice never mention the song.[xv] An advertisement for his performance at the
Park Theatre just two days earlier also does not mention the song, suggesting that the song was new, or least relatively new, in early November 1888;
in the same place and time where Mike Kelly was skipping out on his Australian tour commitment.
And what’s
more, some of the lyrics arguably relate to Mike Kelly’s life and career, while curiously avoiding any praise for Mike Kelly and his purported sliding skills.
In the first
verse, Kelly strikes out, but has a chance to get on base when the catcher
muffs the ball. The chorus encourages him
to:
Slide, Kelly, slide,
Your running’s a disgrace,
Slide, Kelly, slide!
Stay there, hold your base!
If someone doesn’t steal you,
and your batting doesn’t fail you,
They’ll take you to Australia!
Slide, Kelly, slide!
In the
second verse, Kelly goes into the game to replace a catcher who “went to get a
drink.” Poor Kelly can’t see the ball and
gets his “muzzle” broken. Cue the chorus.
In the
third, they send him out to center field despite his rapidly swelling nose. It doesn’t go well, and he doesn’t’ remember
what happened. When he regains
consciousness as they carry him home, he learns that they lost the game
62-0. “Slide, Kelly, Slide! etc.”
So the song
is largely nonsense and isn’t clearly about Mike Kelly. The song was written and first performed by a
singer named Kelly, so perhaps it was merely eponymous.
The lyrics do not reflect a great baseball player or runner. The words of the chorus encourage him to
slide, but he is always in trouble and never quite succeeds.
Some
aspects of the lyrics, however, arguably relate to Mike “King” Kelly. There is a catcher who drinks, his “running is a
disgrace,” and “if someone doesn’t steal him” they might take him “to
Australia.” The song debuted during the week in which Mike Kelly, a professional
baseball catcher and notorious drinker, famously skipped out of his contractual
agreement to go to Australia in the city and with the team from which
he was famously “stolen” by Boston two years earlier.
A slang
dictionary of the time reveals that the verb, “slide,” then as now, could be
used to mean leave, skip, shirk – all words that a Chicagoan might have used
with respect to Kelly’s leaving Chicago and skipping his promised trip to
Australia.
 |
| John S. Farmer, Slang and its Analogues, Volume 6, 1903. |
To my mind,
the circumstances suggest that the song was at least as much about his leaving
Chicago and skipping the trip to Australia, as it is about his prowess as a base-runner. And in any case, there is very little
contemporary evidence that he was widely known or regarded as a particularly
skillful base-slider.
I could not
find any contemporary evidence that he was particularly well-known for sliding
before 1889. But in May of
1888, a mere five months before the song first appeared in Chicago, a newspaper published a two-column, page-length analysis of the dangers
of baseball sliding, including an analysis of the distinct sliding styles of several players.
He must sprint away when opportunity offers, and by throwing
himself head foremost or feet foremost to the earth, slide along the ground
towards the goal, over pebbles and through mud and dust, only to be greeted
with laughter if unsuccessful, and with mingled laughter and applause if
successful. Barked shins, torn scalp,
bruised limbs and body he gets for his daring, and very little else. . . .
The best sliders . . . prefer the headlong plunge, Johnnie
Ward, Ned Williamson, Fogarty, Ewing, Sunday, Mulvey, Nash, Brown of
Boston. Latham, Dave Orr, McClellan and
others equally as well known go in head foremost, while “the only” Kelly, Gore, Connor, Smith, Robinson, Bastian, Anson,
Hanlon and others prefer jumping feet foremost.”[xvi]
The article
details the base-running idiosyncrasies of several players, including Orr,
Easterbrook, Williamson, Ward, Ewing, Latham, Connor, Hanlon, Fogarty, Sunday
(Billy Sunday who, decades later, famously
couldn’t shut Chicago down) and Brown; with no mention of anything peculiar
or particularly interesting about Mike Kelly’s slide.
I could find
only one oblique reference to Kelly’s slide from his time in Chicago; a
humorous anecdote originating in Chicago used the expression, “Chicago slide”,
idiomatically in reference to a disheveled person.
In the
story, a bloody passenger boards a train.
His “trousers looked as if he had made a Chicago slide for third base
through a briar patch.” When pressed
about why he looks so bad (had been in an railroad accident? – no; was he a
runaway? – no; was he a baseball player? – no), he responds with a passive-aggressive
threat; “I tried to stick my nose into another man’s business.”
 |
| The Woodstock Sentinel (Woodstock, Illinois), August 27, 1885, page 6 (reprinted from the Chicago Herald). |
Years later,
“Chicago slide” and “Kelly’s slide” appear more regularly in print with
reference to the hook-slide in baseball.
 |
| John J. Evers, Touching Second; the Science of Baseball, Chicago, Reilly and Britton, 1910, page |
The best
evidence that Kelly was, in fact, known for developing a unique style of sliding
appeared a couple decades later.
Kelly invented the “Chicago slide,” which was one of the greatest tricks
ever pulled off. It was a combination
slide, twist and dodge. The runner went
straight down the line at top speed and, when nearing the base, threw himself
either inside or outside of the line, doubled the left leg under him (if
sliding inside, or the right, if sliding outside), slid on the doubled up leg
and hip, hooked the foot of the other leg around the base and pivoted on it,
stopping on the opposite side of the base.
Every player of the old Chicago team practiced and perfected
that slide and got away with hundreds of stolen bases when really they should
have been touched out easily.
Los Angeles Herald, June 10, 1906, page
8.
The same
article claimed that only one man could still do the “Chicago slide” to perfection;
Bill Dahlen, then of the New
York Giants. A few years later, when he
was the manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Dahlen wrote an article in which he
explains that he learned the slide directly from Kelly’s old teammates in
Chicago:
Another thing they taught me was sliding to bases, not only
so as to avoid being touched, but also to avoid getting hurt or hurting anyone.
That slide known as the “Chicago
slide” was the invention of Kelly and adopted by Burns, Williamson,
Pfeffer and the great players of that day.
The Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio), June 8, 1910, page 5.
In 1924,
sports columnist and sports historian, Frank Menke, similarly credited Kelly
with developing the “fade-away” slide:
Kelly was first to use the “fade-away” slide – and no man since
then, except Ty Cobb, has been able to duplicate it in its remarkable entirety.
. . . Before “King Kel’s” day, base
stealing was almost an unknown art.
Batters who could not hammer their way to second or third either were
advanced by another hitter – or died there.
Kelly would start his slide about ten feet from the bag with
a high leap into the air which shot his body downwards at the bag with
tremendous speed. . . .
Few basemen then had the nerve to try to block off
Kelly. He never went into the bag twice
the same way. He always threw himself
with cyclonic force and seeming more vicious.
Yet spiking by Kelly were rare happenings.
The Lincoln Star (Nebraska), July 11,
1924, page 14.
It is
therefore believable that “Slide, Kelly, Slide” could have been an homage to
his sliding acumen, but the lyrics, context and timing of the release of the
song suggest a different reason, or at least a double-meaning, as a knock
against Kelly for skipping out on Spaulding’s Australian baseball tour and
leaving Chicago for Boston.
Summary
An anonymous
janitor named “Uncle” Richard designed and built the first known playground
slide sometime between April 1902 and August 1903. Boston’s “sliding poles” and Coney Island’s
“Kelly’s Slide” (or “Helter Skelter”) show up in the historical record in May
1903.
But the
playground slide was not imagined from whole cloth. It was part of a continuum of gravity-powered
sliding entertainments including the good-old cellar door. Other predecessors include “Shooting the Chutes,”
“water toboggans,” “water slides,” “toboggans” and the roller coaster, each of
which has its own fascinating history – but that’s a story for another day.
 |
| Evening Star (Washington DC), June 4, 1922. |
 |
| Washington Post (Washington DC), July 2, 1905. |
[i] Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 11, 1911,
page 22.
[ii] When
the automobile made streets even more dangerous a few years later, it became
necessary to develop traffic codes with new violations, like jaywalking, to
live in harmony with the new technology. See my earlier piece, Jaywalkers
and Jayhawkers - a Pedestrian History and Etymology of "Jaywalking."
[iv]
The report of “Uncle” Richard’s “shoot the chutes” slide disproves earlier
stories about the purported “first playground slide.” On April 17, 2012, the BBC and The Daily Mail published stories online with images purporting
to be the “World’s first children’s slide.”
The slide, they reported, was invented by a man named Charles Wicksteed,
who, they claimed, installed the first slide in Wicksteed Park in Kettering,
Northamtonshire in 1923. Paige Johnson
of Play-Scapes
playground blog quickly refuted the claim with images of slides at the
Russian Tsar’s summer palace (1910), Coney Island (1905) and a recent image of
a restored slide in Philadelphia believed to have been installed in 1904. The Play-Scapes post also included an image
of a slide on a rooftop in New York City dated to “circa” 1900, although the fashions
shown the photo almost certainly date that image to at least a decade or two
later.
[v] Blue Grass Blade (Lexington, Kentucky),
June 2, 1907, page 3.
[vi] The St. Louis Republic, April 17, 1901,
page 8.
[vii]
Mrs. Mark Stevens, Six Months at the
World’s Fair, Detroit, Michigan, Detroit Free Press Printing Co., 1895,
pages 210-211.
[viii]
Colliers , Volume 33, August 27,
1904, page 20 (“One of the things which the crowd likes best is a sort of
winding inclined trough, made of bamboo and polished smooth as glass.”).
[ix]
Benjamin Truman, History of the World’s
Fair, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, H. W. Kelley, 1893, page 194.
[x]
Image from Cigarboxlables.com.
[xi] Dan de Vere’s Comic and Sentimental
Song-Book: Hudson’s Californian and North and South American Circus,
Quebec, “Le Canadien” Office, 1873, page 20.
[xii] Dan de Vere’s Comic and Sentimental
Song-Book: Hudson’s Californian and North and South American Circus,
Quebec, “Le Canadien” Office, 1873, page 20.
[xiii]
Wichita Eagle (Kansas), November 22,
1888, page 8.
[xiv]
Chase’s Franco joke resonated with audiences at the time, because rumors of the
strong-man dictator’s impending death were reported for several weeks before he
actually died. In a typical report by
the UPI, a headline read, “Brain test shows Franco is still alive” (Traverse
City Record-Eagle (Michigan), November 14, 1975, page 2). After his death, Chase parodied
such coverage with repeated reports that he was still dead.
[xv] He
performed at a benefit for newsboys on October 11, an Elks Club benefit on
October 28, and took a side-trip to Springfield, Missouri on October 31.
[xvi] The Sunday Leader (Wilkes-Barre,
Pennsylvania), May 27, 1888, page 6.
