OCR Document


 

CHILDREN'S 

FOLKLORE 

REVIEW 

VOLUME 27 
2004-2005 

PUBLISHED BY THE  

CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE SECTION OF THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY  

WITH SUPPORT FROM THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY 



 

CONTENTS 

FROM THE EDITOR ................................................................................................................ 5 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS AND CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE 

 JAY MECHLING ................................................................................................................................. 7 

THE SINGING GAMES OF MUNSTER CHILDREN 

 JOHN BUCKLEY ............................................................................................................................. 33 

THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL: A DILEMMA IN EARLY TWENTIETH-

CENTURY GIRL SCOUTING 

 LAUREEN TEDESCO.. ................................................................ ... ................................................. 89 

AUNT BETTS' ATTIC 

 C. W SULLIVAN III ....................................................................................... 108 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS ....................................................................................109 

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS ................................................................................................110 



 

FROM THE EDITOR 

I am sitting here thinking about the future of Children s Folklore Review. I 
have been editing this journal for 27 years now. All I have to do is look at 
the volume number on the cover to figure that out as I took over the 
Children s Folklore Newsletter with volume I, number 2, back in . . . well, 
you can figure that one out if you like. 

I hope that a look at this volume will indicate how pleased I am with 
how far we have come as the Children's Folklore Section of AFS and as the 
Children s Folklore Review. We are still able to attract articles from 
children's folklore scholars at the top of the profession. Jay Mechling's 
"Found Photographs and Children's Folklore" is certainly an example of that 
as well as an example of the new avenues to be explored in children's 
folklore. I am also pleased when contributors appear out of the blue, as did 
John Buckley with his massive collection, "The Singing Games of Munster 
Children." And I am equally pleased to find a colleague interested in the 
traditional roles of children and depictions of those roles in mainstream 
culture as I did in Laureen Tedesco and her article, "The Lost Manhood of 
the American Girl: A Dilemma in Early Twentieth-Century Girl Scouting." 
These three articles make for a very fine volume 27. 

There are no minutes from the 2004 Children's Folklore Section because 
no one sent me anything. If I can find those minutes, they will be published 
in the next volume. 

I also have a couple of concerns. There were no submissions for the 
Newell Prize this year. I am sure some of you out there have students 
interested in children's folklore, I know the articles in CFR are being indexed 
by the MLA and others, but I wish we were being bought by more libraries. 
My other concern is about the future of CFR. I think that we, the section, 
should start looking for a new editor. It's not that I want to step down, 
necessarily, but I think that next year or the year after could be my last at 
East Carolina University. Anyway, I would be happy to talk details with 
anyone who thinks that he or she might be interested in taking over as editor, 
and I will discuss this with the Executive Board in Atlanta at the 2005 AFS 
meetings (when, perhaps, my future plans might be a bit clearer). I had 
thought to step down after the 30th volume, but I may have to do so before 
that. 

See you in Atlanta. 
C.W. Sullivan III 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS AND CHILDREN'S FOLKLORE 

JAY MECHLING 

Children's folklorists do not always have the luxury of studying live children. 
Because children live largely in an oral, material, and customary world, 
leaving little written evidence (aside from the occasional diary or autograph 
book) of their worldviews, reconstructing the history of the everyday lives of 
children requires the creative use of what scant evidence we do have of their 
elusive worlds. Folklorists are accustomed to reconstructing the historical 
cultures of children using written materials, such as autobiographies, diaries, 
letters, ethnographic accounts dating back to the late 19th century, and other 
sources largely created by adults. Folklorists and historians also have learned 
to make creative use of the material culture of childhood in reconstructing 
the everyday lives of past children (e.g., Bronner 1999). We necessarily 
make a great many guesses about what the evidence really means, and we 
know that in most cases the evidence has gone through a great deal of 
editing, as adults ultimately are the gatekeepers for what evidence of 
children's lives survives and what perishes. 

The rise of photography after its invention in 1839 introduced a new 
genre of evidence of the everyday lives of people, and children have been the 
subjects of countless photographs since then. In what follows, I aim to 
examine what are sometimes called by dealers and collectors "found 
photographs" in order to discover how these snapshots might be used to help 
write the history of American children's lives, especially their folk cultures. 
First, I provide a bit of history of the photography of children and describe in 
more detail the nature of "found photographs." Then I briefly characterize the 
sorts of questions the folklorist would have about past children's lives, for my 
aim here is to treat the photographs as true evidence and not merely as pretty 
pictures accompanying generalizations of the sort we make from other sorts 
of historical evidence. Finally, I offer some close readings of a few 
representative snapshots I have collected as of this writing. That final section 
amounts to a test of the proposition that snapshots actually might teach us 
something new about American children's folklore. 

Children's folklorists share with, historians, sociologists, and 
anthropologists the desire to understand children's cultures on their own 
terms, but I believe folklorists are especially inclined to brush aside as best as 
possible the adult contaminations of our evidence of children's lives. 
Photographs are especially seductive evidence in trying to recreate the 
autonomous worlds of children, and with proper caution scholars can use 
photographs to see what might otherwise go unseen. At the same time, 
photographs seduce us into believing what we are seeing. I provide here 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

only a beginning for navigating these tough issues of evidence, authority, 
authenticity, power, and subversion in found photographs of children. 

Photographs of Children 

The earliest photographs of children, given the bulky technology and 
the long exposure times required by that technology, are usually set in 
studios. These have some value as historical evidence in that photographic 
studio portraits borrowed from painted portraits certain conventions, which 
in the case of children meant that the photographic portraits often include 
toys and the more formal dress for children. In many cases these probably 
were toys and other props provided by the photographer, so it is hard to sort 
out those photographs where a child is holding or otherwise posed with a 
favorite toy. The clothes in these studio portraits are, one presumes, chosen 
by the adults and do not necessarily (or likely) represent the everyday dress 
of children. 

Studio portraits fulfilled the family's need for more formal images, but 
the 1890s saw an explosion of stereoviews, from commercially produced 
sets to snapshot-like views taken by those amateurs who could afford a 
stereoscopic camera and developing. Many of these stereoviews are still set 
in the studio, but George Eastman's invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1878 
freed the photographer from the constricting limits of the earlier technology 
and made it possible for the photographer to move outside. Most stereoviews 
were still posed, though collectors find the occasional one-of-a-kind 
snapshot-like stereoview. There is a very interesting history of adult views 
of children that could be written using stereoviews as the texts; briefly, we 
can note that some of these photographs captured some of the folklore and 
other dimensions of children's everyday lives. Frozen in the images of these 
stereoviews are children's more formal games, such as Maypoles and Blind 
Man's Bluff, and play with toys, but the stereoviews also record more 
informal play in snow and sand, for example. 

Professional art and commercial photography in the late 19th century 
and well into the 20th still operated from the romantic era view of the 
innocent child (Higonnet 1998). The adults' romantic view of childhood crept 
into more documentary views of children's lives. To be sure, a social realist 
strain of the documentary photography of children-practiced by Lewis Hine, 
Jacob Riis, James Agee and others-has had its place up to 
the present, but in the wake of World War II many photographers of children 
seemed to adopt the ideological position so evident in the famous "Family of 
Man" exhibit Edward Steichen created for the Museum of Modern Art in 
1955 (see Sandeen 1995), namely, that all human beings share a universal 
human nature and that children everywhere are inherently 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

innocent. Barbara Morgan's 1951 photographic essay, Summer's Children, 
for example, seems driven by this ideology as she documents kids at summer 
camp. These two traditions in documentary photography-some showing 
children innocently at play in middle-class, benign settings and some 
showing disadvantaged children (still innocent) in some of the most squalid 
settings-have co-existed for the past seventy-five years or so. 

Some of this documentary and art photography does reveal a bit of 
children's worlds under their own control. Salinger's photo essay of teenagers 
in their bedrooms, for example, is wonderfully provocative for those scholars 
interested in the material culture of teens, but Salinger's only use of words 
are the kids' brief self-descriptions; she bypasses the opportunity to analyze 
the larger meanings of the visual and oral testimony. Similarly, Lauren 
Greenfield's two color photo essays--Fast Forward (1997) and Girl Culture 
(2002)--give voice to the teens themselves without offering much analysis of 
what we are to make of these affluent kids and their worlds. The 
photographer winks knowingly at us, as a sort of postmodern joke between 
photographer and audience, but also some true affection for the subjects 
comes through, just as in Bruce Weber's Branded Youth: And Other Stories 
(1997). Weber, like Andy Warhol before him, straddles the already fuzzy 
art/commercial photography boundary to offer a photoessay wherein punks 
and Boy Scouts seem equally freaky and wherein Weber seems to love them 
all in a Warholian, postmodern move that refuses to judge and refuses to 
make distinctions. 

All of these photoessays, and more, are produced by professional, adult 
photographers who aim to say something profound about the lives of children 
and adolescents in contemporary American culture. These, really, are not the 
texts for my analysis here, but the whole constellation of photographs of 
children serve as a contextual background for what does interest me here--
namely, the snapshot, the found photograph. 

Snapshots of Children 

George Eastman's invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1878 made the 
true snapshot possible. In 1888 Eastman introduced his Kodak Camera No.1, 
the first portable camera containing a roll of film that would take one 
hundred shots developed as 2-1/2 inch round images. The amateur 
photographer would send the whole camera back to Eastman, who developed 
the roll and sent back the developed prints and the camera loaded with a new 
roll of film. In 1889, Eastman brought out Kodak Camera No.2, which 
produced larger (3-1/2 inches diameter), still round prints (King 1964, 6). It 
was then possible for the amateur photographer to create what came to be 
called "snapshots," borrowing for photography 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

a term that described the hunting shot hurriedly taken in the field 
(Kouwenhoven 1982, 161-62). 

What collectors and dealers call "found photographs" are plentiful and 
perplexing. These are the snapshots that we find at yard sales, at estate sales, 
at vintage photography shows, and on the Internet in online auctions and on 
the sites of dealers in vernacular photography. These are orphaned 
photographs usually tom from their original contexts; they no longer live as 
texts interacting with human memories. Now they are objects for collectors 
with a variety of tastes and aims. Unless there is writing on the back ("real 
photo" postcards often have a full message and were mailed), a date 
included as part of the printing process, or some internal clue to place and 
time, we often are forced to guess where and when the snapshot was taken. 
These snapshots sometimes are of poor quality, as the amateur misjudges the 
light and the shadows, blurs the image with the camera or with film too slow 
to capture a moment in motion, frames the picture oddly, accidentally 
creates a double exposure, or commits any number of other "errors" that 
help signal an image as a snapshot (King 1964, 4957). At the same time, 
these telltale signs of the snapshot also help certify the authenticity of the 
moment; its spontaneous, unposed, candid, opportunistic qualities help 
persuade the viewer that the image captures a "true" moment in time and 
perhaps a "truth" about the subject. 

A very few scholars have begun the work of using snapshots to write the 
history of children's lives. The most important to date is Thompson and 
Austin's massive 2003 work, America’s Children: Picturing Childhood from 
Early America to the Present. Using a range of sorts of photographs of 
children, some by professional photographers but also many "found" 
snapshots, the authors "read" these photographs as evidence for writing the 
history of American children's lives. Rather than following a simple 
chronological scheme for organizing the photographs and commentary, the 
authors present thematic chapters around family life, mobility, community, 
work, learning, play, and courtship and marriage. 

There are billions of snapshots of children out there in the world. I have 
at hand a small sample of these for the analysis I present here, though I have 
looked at enough snapshots at antique fairs, vintage photography shows, and 
on the Internet to have a firm grasp of what the genre has to offer. My 
generalizations have to be modest and provisional. There is also a bias in my 
sample toward snapshots of boys, as this project arose out of my research on 
the Boy Scouts and on the larger question of the social construction of 
masculinity in boys and young men (see Mechling 2001). And, of course, the 
snapshots at hand have survived editing of one sort or another. People have 
made choices about which snapshots to save and which to discard; dealers 
select snapshots deemed interesting enough to sell, sometimes poring 
through hundreds of thousands of snapshots to 

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yield a few hundred images. And for my own collection I have chosen to buy 
some images and not others. So there is cultural bias galore in these existing 
snapshots. Still, they have an oddly powerful grip on the collector, as we gaze 
into the faces of these kids now aged or dead. 

Before examining the genre, we have to acknowledge at the outset that 
most snapshots of children and youth very likely have been taken by adults. 
Kids have had access to cameras across the 20th century, and doubtless some 
surviving snapshots have been taken by kids, especially in settings such as 
schools, playgrounds, summer camps, and neighborhood play spaces. Some 
researchers actually teach children how to use cameras and analyze the sorts 
of visual conventions and topics the kids adopt in using snapshots to capture 
their everyday lives and to communicate with other kids and with adults 
something about their kids' worlds (e.g., Ewald 1985, 2000; Hubbard 1991, 
1994; and Padilla 2002). We even have snapshots of kids with cameras, so 
we know that some images from the past were captured by children and 
youth. 

One sort of kid with a camera, of course, is the school yearbook 
photographer, and yearbook pictures are a surprisingly neglected source of 
information about the cultures of teens. In the United States, yearbooks tend 
to capture the worlds of adolescents, generally kids twelve and older, teens in 
junior high and senior high schools. Yearbook photography includes three 
sorts of photos-posed pictures (individual portraits plus pictures of classes, 
clubs, sports teams, performing arts groups, formal 
events, and so on), action shots (e,g, sports), and "candid" snapshots of 
students in less formal and usually unposed contexts. Yearbook photography 
works under adult supervision and surveillance, usually, so there are several 
layers of censoring behind each "candid" snapshot published in a yearbook. 
Still, these photographs capture teens in some unguarded moments and, 
presumably, represent a version of the "story" of going to that school as seen 
from the students' viewpoint. The historian always hopes that someone 
"cleaning house" in an organization did not throwaway the invaluable 
evidence the historian is looking for, and one wonders how many boxes of 
old yearbook snapshots (or contact sheets of negative strips) are out there in 
boxes and file cabinets. The folklore historian would be especially interested 
in the photographs that were not selected for publication, photographs that 
did not get through the self-censoring and adult censoring processes because 
they are photos judge inappropriate or even disruptive. 

The one island in this sea of general neglect of yearbook photographs is 
a little-known book, School Spirit (2003), by Pierre Huyghe and Douglas 
Coupland, who is perhaps the quintessential Generation X novelist. In this 
quirky, but fascinating, book, the authors (compilers, really) use real 
California high school yearbook pictures and inscriptions to create a quite 

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open and ambiguous narrative about life for high-schoolers, which is to say 
that Huyghe and Coupland provide no meta-narrative of their own other than 
the order of photographs and handwritten texts from the yearbooks. Coupland 
must have been working on this book at the same time he was writing his 
novel, Hey, Nostradamus! A Novel (2003), a postmodern fiction telling the 
story of a Columbine-like school shooting. Coupland comes no closer than do 
filmmakers Michael Moore (Bowling for Columbine, 2002) and Gus van Sant 
(Elephant, 2003) in understanding what was going on in the worlds of the 
perpetrators and victims of the Columbine High School massacre and similar 
shootings, but I think School Sprit is an attempt to do visually what Coupland 
attempts to do in his novel. 

The value in School Spirit lies in its suggestion that coded somewhere in 
high school yearbook pictures are the answers to questions adults have been 
asking about teenagers for some time now. I am not prepared to explore this 
lead here and now, but I hope an army of folklorists and historians gets out 
into the schools to rescue this photographic record from oblivion. 

Returning to the body of snapshots we know are available, what can 
be said of the found photos with children's lives as the subject? Most of these 
snapshots of kids and teens hold few surprises. Setting aside the posed 
photographs of kids with families, often in front of the family home or car or 
on a family vacation, the snapshots that capture kids' play and rituals tend to 
feature familiar scenes. Birthday parties, First Communion, Halloween 
costumes, playing in the sand at a beach, playing with the electric train under 
the Christmas tree, posing outside with the new bike, and playing with a 
family pet are common images. Yet, among these images are a few that I 
think can be used as texts for revealing something about children's folklore, 
and in offering close readings of a few of these I hope to provoke folklorists 
and historians into making more of found photographs. First, though, I need 
to inquire what we think we know and don't know about children's folklore, 
for it would be unanswered questions that would be the only justification for 
taking found snapshots seriously as historical evidence. 

What's Missing in Our Knowledge of Children's Folklore? 

What do we think we know about American children's folklore? 
Although we have earlier accounts of children's games and play, some of 
which are still useful today for recognizing the continuities and 
discontinuities in children's play, I would have to say that the modern (maybe 
postmodern, a topic for another time) study of American children's folklore 
began in the mid-l970s, in large part in response to the emergence 

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of the performance paradigm in folklore studies. (The mid-1970s also saw 
the emergence of the animal rights movement, and I believe that the two 
movements are connected, though that also is a topic for another time.) 
Independent initiatives in the University of Texas, Indiana University, and 
the University of Pennsylvania graduate programs in Folklore sent a good 
many graduate students into the field to study children's folklore in 
performance, and from then on the study of children's folklore seems to have 
split into two strands, the one still operating from a text-base approach and 
the other committed to studying children's performances of folklore in 
natural contexts. By the mid-1980s that second, ethnographic strand, had 
also come under the influence of the postmodern approach to ethnography, 
especially the view that objective, scientific ethnography was not possible. 
Many ethnographers in several disciplines made this "linguistic turn," but the 
epistemological questions were especially relevant and vexing for those of us 
who conduct fieldwork-based study of children. Children's worlds are 
inaccessible to us in so many ways that we understand more than most 
folklorists, I think, the tentative and provisional nature of our generalizations 
about children. 

When, in that mid-1980s period of upheaval in the epistemological basis 
for studying the lives of other people, I came to write a chapter on 
"Children's Folklore" for Elliott Oring's textbook, Folk Groups and Folklore 
Genres (1986), I attempted to generalize about American children's folklore 
by alerting readers to certain themes in the lore they might observe, themes 
like power and the child's body as a symbol of the society. I wrote then about 
some binary tensions in children's folklore--order/disorder, 
hierarchy/equality, male/female, and dynamism/ conservatism ("Newell's 
Paradox," as Gary Alan Fine [1980] named it)and I recommended a 
Batesonian approach to the paradoxes of play in children's folklore (see 
Bateson 1972). 

I wrote that essay nearly twenty years ago, and in thinking what I might 
change if I revised that essay today, I would add a much more thorough 
section on the ways folklore and popular culture continuously fold back upon 
one another, proving every day the point of Newell's Paradox-namely, that 
children's folklore is simultaneously very dynamic in its content and very 
conservative in its forms. I touched on this point only slightly in the 1986 
essay, but I have come to think of this interaction between mass-mediated, 
commercial, popular culture produced with kids and teens in mind as the 
consuming audience, on the one hand, and children's and teens' folk cultures 
on the other as one of the most important set of relationships in 
understanding children's everyday cultures. Commodity culture endlessly 
appropriates children's folklore and sells the folklore back to the children, 
but children's folklore endlessly 

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appropriates popular culture and uses that culture for the children's own 
motives. 

Several things have changed or, at least, accelerated in American 
culture since 1986. First, it has become clear that kids and their cultures 
have become the sites for political battles in the adult "culture wars" (see 
Hunter 1991). Second, adult panic over kids' popular culture has led parents, 
teachers, politicians, and others to blame the violent and sexual content of a 
great deal of mass media aimed at kids for a range of social evils, including 
the murder of children by children, teen suicide, gang rapes, and the series 
of school shootings in the last half of the 1990s and into this century (see the 
special section on "Folklore Responds to Columbine and Adolescence" in 
the Children s Folklore Review in 2002). Third, the mass-mediated cultural 
products aimed at kids and teens shows signs of belonging to a global, 
international culture. In the most visible example, manga (graphic novels, 
comic) and animé (cartoon versions of the manga) created initially for 
Japanese audiences now find voracious consumers among children, teens, 
and young adults in the United States. What are the implications of the 
Internet and other globalizing forces on the folk cultures of children? 

So the workings of Newell's Paradox in the dialectic between children's 
folk cultures and the mass-mediated, popular, commercial cultural 
commodities produced for youthful consumers is the first new, real question I 
expect the found photographs to help illuminate. The second open question in 
the study of children's folklore has to do with "dark play" (Sutton-Smith & 
Kelly-Byrne 1984) or "dirty play" (Fine 1988). Both sorts of play challenge 
adult notions of the innocence of children. "Dark play" is the phrase Sutton-
Smith and Kelly-Byrne use to describe play that relies on some degree of 
danger or transgression for its pleasure, a form of play more likely found in 
older children and teens. "Dirty play" is Fine's phrase for the transgressive 
play of children, especially if it involves forbidden words and actions. 

"Dark play" and "dirty play" usually take place away from adult 
surveillance, so we should not have high hopes that snapshots will capture a 
great deal of such play. Polaroid and digital photography bypass many of the 
possibilities for adult censorship, so it might be that there will be an 
increasing number of available images recording dark and dirty play. Still, 
existing snapshots point in some interesting ways to transgressive play and 
traditions, as I shall show. 

A third sort of question about children's folklore and folklife that 
snapshots might address has to do with gestural culture and proxemics. 
Moving pictures (film or video) are the best media for capturing how 
children move their bodies in space, how they position themselves in relation 
to playmates, how they touch or don't touch other children, and 

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so on, but still photography can capture some of the ways children use bodies 
and space, and snapshots of children reach much farther back into history 
than do home movies and home video. 

Finally, it seems to me that snapshots might help write the history of 
children's emotional lives. Emotions are fundamentally human (probably 
fundamentally mammalian), but cultures shape human emotions, socializing 
fear, jealousy, love, anger, sadness, grief, and so on into forms the cultures 
deem acceptable and minimally likely to disrupt social relations. Historian 
Peter N. Stearns almost single-handedly created the interdisciplinary field of 
"the history of emotions," but he and others have relied almost exclusively on 
written evidence to chronicle the history of the socialization of particular 
emotions across time and space (e.g., Stearns and Stearns 1986). The family 
is the primary setting for the socialization of emotions, the setting where a 
child learns, for example, how to express or repress anger. Children's folk 
groups certainly must be another site for the socialization of emotions, and it 
is possible (as is so often the case) that the socialization in the children's 
group resists and undermines the socialization in the family. In any case, 
since we have good reasons to believe that facial expressions, gestures, and 
other visual cues signal a person's emotional condition, we would expect 
snapshots to provide some sort of evidence of the contexts for the emotional 
lives of children. 

Some other issues in children's folklore and folklife will arise as I 
discuss particular images below, but this list of four sorts of questionsabout 
popular culture, about dark and dirty play, about proxemics, and about the 
socialization of emotions-helps orient the analysis to come. Note that in all 
four cases we have very little historical evidence reflecting the children's 
point of view. Snapshots might be our only evidence for some insights about 
children's everyday lives. 

All of this hope I bear for the usefulness of snapshots for understanding 
the everyday lives of American children in the past relies upon "reading" the 
photographs. This matter of "how to read" photographic images is the subject 
ofa great deal of useful criticism (e.g., Chalfen 1975,1987,1991; King 1984; 
Ohm and Bell 1975; Ibson 2002). When we look at any snapshot, we tend to 
read meaning into it from the nonverbal clues the image offers. We draw 
upon our experiences with other images and the history of our interpretive 
successes and failures-as, for example, when we may have misread a facial 
expression. These readings of found photographs involve a great deal of 
speculation, but then (I would argue) so does the folklorist's observation of a 
live folk performance in context. The inner meanings of the immediate event 
for the participants are no more accessible to us, really, than are the meanings 
to the participants of an event photographed a hundred years ago. Still, these 
are not wild guesses but may be reasonable and persuasive interpretations of 
the 

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meanings of the event captured in a snapshot. Let me illustrate some of the 
interpretive possibilities with a few select snapshots. 

Children's Lives in Snapshots 

Up to this point I have laid out some issues we should be on lookout for 
as we peruse found photographs for evidence of children's everyday folk 
lives, but rather than organize the remainder of this essay according to these 
analytical categories, I prefer to work instead from a sample of interesting 
and provocative snapshots in my collection, always on the lookout for the 
more theoretical issues I have laid out. When I choose to buy a found 
photograph, I am drawing upon these issues in finding a photograph 
"interesting," but I am also open to being surprised by a photograph that taps 
some issues I had not expected. This is why it is best to begin with some 
compelling snapshots. The sample photos and the interpretive comments I 
offer here are illustrative, meant to be suggestive and provocative rather than 
definitive and comprehensive. With these qualifications in mind, let us look 
at some actual snapshots. 

Some photographs serve the text-based approach to the history of 
children's folklore, as in snapshots that capture a traditional game or a 
calendrical custom, for example. As we gaze at the real photo postcard (Fig. 
1) of a school playground in 1912, we recognize that the very nature of 
photography is to capture a brief moment in time, a micro-second slice of the 
continual flow of everyday life. Seeing such photographs adds a visual 
memory and impact to the historical point that, say, children have played the 
traditional game of Red Rover across time and space. Now in 
our mind's eye we can put real faces and settings to a past performance of the 
game. But the photographs seem poor evidence for a performancebased 
approach to children's folklore in context. In this real photo postcard, for 
example, we do not know if the girls chose to play the ring game or were 
directed to do so by an adult. We do not have the contextual background for 
this playground scene that Linda Hughes (1993) had, for example, in her 
ethnographic study of the game of Four Square as it was played by the same 
kids over several months' time. We do not know the players, their 
relationships, or the other information we would need to answer the 
characteristic folklorist's question (based on Kenneth Burke's pentad-see 
Rueckert 1982): Who performed what traditional item of folklore, how, for 
what audience, in what time and place, for what reasons, and what was the 
outcome? The photograph does suggest some things about gender segregation 
on the playground and children's clothing for a time period, but that is about 
the extent of information we're going to glean from this photograph. 

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But other photographs suggest thicker interpretations might be possible. 
Let me narrow my gaze to snapshots revealing boys' everyday folk lives, 
with the understanding that we could put the same fine lens on girls' folk 
cultures and on a mix of the two. Masculinity studies generally agree that the 
social construction of masculinity in cultures across time and space is a 
fragile project, and that a good many observable features of boys' and men's 
group cultures arise as adaptive responses to this fragility. For western 
middle-class cultures like ours, the emotional structure of the nuclear family 
and the fact that mothers have primary care of young children lead to a 
developmental circumstance in which boys must separate from the mother 
and identify masculinity as "not female." One's masculinity must be proven 
constantly, and cracks in the male façade must be repaired quickly and 
effectively. This leads to certain features of male friendship group cultures, 
including stylized aggression, hierarchy, misogyny, the deprecation of men 
perceived to be too feminine (in some contexts full homophobia), and a 
tendency to communicate relationships through "doing side-by-side" rather 
than through speech. There is a "boy code" enforced largely by a shame 
culture (Pollack 1999). 

I think some snapshots help us see the workings and affective impact of 
these features of growing up male in the United States. For one thing, unlike 
formal, posed portraits, snapshots show us the everyday dress of boys and 
how boys used their clothing and hairstyles to perform masculinity in a 
particular social, cultural, and historical context. This snapshot of a teenage 
boy (Fig. 2), probably from the 1940s or early 1950s, features the wide-rolled 
dungaree cuffs necessary for the performance of a "cool" masculinity. The 
squared body language and the direct stare into the camera by the young man 
standing in front of the car is aggressive and confrontational, and even his 
hairstyle connotes challenge. He frames his genitals with two hands, fingers 
spread for added attention, intensifying this male performance. 

The automobile in that photograph signals a common convention in 
American snapshots. Americans love their cars, and kids of all ages can be 
found posing in front of or in the family car. In some cases-this is one, I 
suppose-the car actually belongs to the teenager. This American infatuation 
with the automobile-an affection that tells us much about American culture, 
as lots of scholarship has shown-extends to kids, often photographed playing 
with cars and trucks or, more interestingly, posed in a commercially 
produced pedal car or, more interesting still, some version of a home-made 
car. These snapshots range from the more formal "boxcar derby" cars (Fig. 3) 
to the far more ad hoc constructions from scavenged parts, evidence of a 
continuing tradition of bricolage among boys. 

17 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Some snapshots capture kids in the process of making things or even 
constructing folk playthings (Fig. 4). Snapshots of kids of both sexes 
building castles and other forms in sand on the beach (Fig. 5) confirm one 
important point-namely, that kids' folk constructions tend to follow what 
Robert Plant Armstrong (1981) calls an aesthetic of syndesis rather than the 
aesthetic of synthesis we are used to in western art. Working from a 
syncretic aesthetic, kids create things through addition and accretion such 
that creations might never be finished. As kids get older, the great 
preponderance of snapshots with constructions are of boys. Sometimes 
(Figs. 6, 7) the constructions are of materials provided by the commercial 
culture-another instance of Newell's Paradox at work-while in other cases 
the constructions demonstrate the bricolage we see in the folk constructions 
of playthings, such as this raft (Fig. 8). 

Some snapshots provide fascinating, concrete detail to the 
generalizations we make about boys' friendship groups. For example, some 
of the photos of boys building things capture the point made by Pollack 
(1999) and others who write about boy cultures that boys often express and 
experience closeness through engaging in activities "side by side." Whereas 
girls more often favor face-to-face play and come to understand intimacy as 
requiring face-to-face communication, boys tend to rely upon "doing side-
by-side" as an expression of intimacy. Some scholars make a sociobiological 
argument that boys experience face-to-face gazes from other boys as 
aggressive, as an invitation either to fight or to back down, so that 
expressions of intimacy between boys generally avoid the face-to 
face contact. And, as Bateson notes, the very act of sharing a frame--such as 
"we're building this raft together"--communicates to the participants in the 
frame important things about their relationships. 

Just like the male gaze, male touching must be managed in the 
friendship group. In general, boys touch each other only in stylized ways, 
such as playfighting. One of things we see in some snapshots is rough-and-
tumble play. This 1957 snapshot (Fig. 9) of eight early teens boys on what 
must be a school playground in Southern California speaks volumes; the 
racial mix here--at least black, white, and Asian--is unusual for the time 
period, but the photo also confirms the view that touching between males in 
American society must be framed very carefully as heterosexual. Touching 
in the frame of some sort of "horseplay," for example, is permissible. In fact, 
a number of the snapshots in my collection of rough-and-tumble play by 
boys will not reproduce well here for publication because their blurry focus 
is a product of a spontaneous action barely caught by the photographer. More 
problematic than rough touching are the less aggressive ways boys touch 
each other in snapshots portraying friends in an affectionate embrace (Fig. 
10). It is interesting that Internet auction sellers often insert the phrase "gay 
interest" in the description of 

18 



 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

a snapshot of two boys or men posing with their arms around each other in a 
clearly affectionate embrace. How to sort out affection between two 
heterosexual males and between two homosexual males is not easy from the 
appearance of this touching alone, and heterosexual male friends constantly 
must construct and maintain a frame that the touching is not sexual while still 
powerfully emotional. These matters are highly contextual, of course, as 
conventions of male touching and the meanings of those conventions change 
over time, across ethnicity and social class, and across social contexts (e.g., 
all male settings versus mixed groups). John Ibson's (2002) study of the 
changing conventions of such touching in snapshots of men (some of which 
Ibson knew, through their provenance, were of gay men) deals mainly with 
males college age and older, but if we were to write a similar snapshot history 
of boys we would find the same ambiguities, albeit with a much larger 
proportion of the snapshots capturing touching framed as horseplay. 

Many of these points about the ways boys relate to each other physically 
are made in a photographic album in my possession. An album often provides 
context and narrative flow missing for a single found photograph. This is an 
"orphan album" in that the dealer from whom I purchased it on eBay could 
not provide any information about its provenance. In more than two hundred 
photos, the album records high country mountain hiking and camping trips 
stretching from February to September (and maybe beyond) in 1938. The 
photos for the first three fourths of the album have captions recorded in white 
ink on the black pages, and it seems clear from the captions for the many 
mountains and lakes in the photos that these are the Cascade Mountains of 
Oregon and Washington. Nine to a dozen boys and young men appear in 
group photos, sometimes just in pairs, and sometimes doing more than 
posing-such as cooking, eating, fishing, and swimming. 

In the posed, group photos these boys and men are hanging on each other 
just as we see in so many group photos. We also find some horseplay, such as 
this snapshot (Fig. 11) of boys having a playfight with knives, and, late in the 
album, photos of a group of younger boys swimming and huddling around 
campfires, Spread throughout the album are photos taken during "skinny 
dipping" swims in the mountain lakes and streams (Fig. 12), and the naked 
bodies remind us that one sort of framed, safe intimacy between boys and 
men is expressed through casual nudity in each others' presence. 

I also have in my possession a remarkable set of negatives of a Cub 
Scout Den and Pack (a collection of the smaller Dens). The pictures of the 
Pack record a banquet, with each Den's boys and his parents sitting together 
by Den. Judging from the women's clothing and hairstyles, I would guess that 
these photos are from the 1940s or early 1950s. The 

19 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

photos of the Pack banquet are not what is so remarkable about the 
collection, however. Dens typically prepare skits for such Pack gatherings. (I 
was a Cub Scout in the 1950s and my mother was a "Den Mother," so I 
know this world.) Amongst the pictures of the Pack gathering are pictures of 
these white Cub Scouts dressed in blackface and white gloves, clearly 
prepared to perform a minstrelsy skit (Fig. 13). We know well the racism 
embodied in minstrel shows, and we also know well the racially segregated 
world of the 1940s and 1950s when these Cub Scouts were growing up. But 
even this knowledge does not prepare the viewer fifty-some years later for 
the jolting impact of seeing these eight- or nine-year old white boys 
performing blackface minstrelsy. In this case, no written historical record or 
testimony can convey the alarming mix of innocence and social evil 
captured in these photographs, just as some lynching photographs slap us 
when we see children in the crowd of onlookers laughing, posing, and even 
gathering souvenirs (Allen, Als, Lewis, and Litwack 2003). The 
lynching photographs seem like "dark play," but can we say the same of the 
Cub Scout minstrels? Possibly. 

Also in this category of white children dressing up as something they are 
not are the photographs of kids "playing Indian." Such snapshots are plentiful, 
and they reinforce our understanding of the power of such play for white 
children in the 20th century. Adults created youth organizations based on 
"Indian Lore" almost as soon as real Native Americans were no longer a 
threat (Mechling 1980, Deloria 1999), but the snapshots show how pervasive 
was "playing Indian" in the informal, folk play of kids (Fig. 14). 

This snapshot (Fig. 15) of young kids playing with guns also counts as 
dark play. I think most adult viewers would have shuddered a bit at this 
snapshot even before the Columbine and other school shootings, but in the 
post-Columbine world, where kids have become demonized and are 
scrutinized closely to see who is the next sociopath to bring an arsenal to 
school, it is impossible to view this snapshot without invoking those 
meanings. In fact, there is good reason to believe that a great deal of "dark 
play" by kids and teens involves firearms. At the same time, in other contexts 
snapshots of children holding guns would not be dark play but merely 
evidence of the socialization of boys and girls into the hunting cultures of 
their fathers and mothers (Mechling 2004). 

There is no logical place to stop with examples, so let me end with a 
snapshot showing a moment of hazing (Fig. 16). This snapshot from 1941 
shows the very public paddling of a fraternity pledge, one assumes, as part of 
the hazing process for bringing new members into the fraternity. College 
students are no longer children, in most cases, but children's folklorists easily 
extend "childhood and adolescence" into the college years because they find 
so many continuities between adolescent folklore 

20 



 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

and college student folklore. In the case of hazing, high school and college 
fraternities haze pledges as a more formal version of the informal hazing 
quite common in male friendship groups, where a young man must pass a 
"test" to show himself worthy of belonging to the group. Hazing-which is 
now generally outlawed by colleges and by the national offices of 
fraternities, but still practiced nonetheless-has its private moments and its 
public moments, and both sorts of moments have been captured in snapshots. 
Snapshots capturing public moments of hazing (as in Fig. 16) remind us that 
this was not "dark play" but socially recognized and accepted "fun" for boys 
of certain ages. In more private contexts away from public scrutiny, 
humiliation, power, dominance, submission, shame, nudity, and even some 
homoerotic moments show up in hazing, and a vernacular photographic 
record of the hazing appears to play an important role in marking the 
moments and in "remembering" them (an accidentally wonderful word in 
this context, given the uses of the photographs to rehearse again the 
conversion of a pledge into a "member" of the group) once the pledge can 
look back fondly upon hazing as a test passed. The now infamous 
photographs, made public in the spring of 2004, of the humiliating treatment 
of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers in the Abu Gharib prison seem 
familiar to the folklorist who knows the male folk culture of the military. 
Some commentators have blamed Internet sadomasochistic pornography 
sites as the sources of the visual tableaux that led the American soldiers to 
pose the Iraqi prisoners in certain positions and nude; but any folklorist of 
male cultures knows it is fraternity and military boot camp hazing, not 
pornography, that provides the visual commonplaces re-enacted in the prison 
photos. This is disturbing dark play, but it has a long pedigree. 

CONCLUSION 

As these examples demonstrate, found photographs provide a potentially 
rich body of evidence for writing the history of children's everyday lives, 
especially their folklore. In the case of boys, the bulk of my examples, the 
vernacular photographic record is invaluable in reconstructing the rich 
nonverbal worlds of boys' friendship groups. Nearly thirty years ago in a 
special issue of Folklore Forum a group of folklorists attempted to alert their 
colleagues to the value of photographs as evidence of folklore as a form of 
visual communication (Ohm and Bell, eds. 1975). 

21 



 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

It is time that we return to that invitation and mine this evidence for all it 
reveals. 

WORKS CITED 

Allen, James, Hilton Als, John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwack. 2003. Without 
Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms 
Publishers. 

Armstrong, Robert Plant. 1981. The Powers of Presence: Consciousness. Myth, 
 and Affecting Presence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. "A Theory of Play and Fantasy [1955]." In Steps to an 
 Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, 177-93. New York: 
 Ballantine. 
Bronner, Simon J. 1999. "Material Folk Culture of Children." In Children s 
 Folklore: A Sourcebook, ed. Brian Sutton-Smith et al., 251-71. Logan: Utah 
 State University Press. 
______, ed. 2002. Special Section on "Folklore Responds to Columbine and 
 Adolescence." Children s Folklore Review 24 (1& 2): 7-63. 
Chalfen, Richard. 1975. "Introduction to the Study of Non-Professional 
 Photography as Visual Communication." In Saying Cheese: Studies in 
 Folklore and Visual Communication, ed. Stephen Ohm and Michael E. Bell, 
 19-25. Folklore Forum No. 13. Bloomington: The Folklore Institute, Indiana 
 University. 
_______. 1987. Snapshot Versions of Life: Explorations of Home Mode Photography. 
 Bowling Green, OH: The Popular Press. 
_______. 1991. Turning Leaves: The Photographic Collections of Two Japanese 

American Families. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.  
Coupland, Douglas. 2003. Hey, Nostradamus! A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury. 
Deloria, Philip J. 1999. Playing Indian: Otherness and Authenticity in the 
 Assumption of American Indian Identity. New Haven, CT: Yale University 
 Press. 
Ewald, Wendy. 1985. Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories by Children 
 of the Appalachians. New York: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc. 
_____. 2000. Secret Games: Collaborative Works with Children 1969-1999. 
 Zurich: Scalo. 
Fine, Gary Alan. 1980. "Children and Their Culture: Exploring Newell's Paradox." 

Western Folklore 39: 170-83. 
______. 1988. "Good Children and Dirty Play." Play and Culture 1:43-56.  
Goffman, Erving. 1976. Gender Advertisements. New York: Harper & Row. 
Greenfield, Lauren. 1997. Fast Forward: Growing Up in the Shadow of 

 Hollywood. NY: Knopf. 
_________. Girl Culture. 2002. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 
Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal 

 Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson. 
Hubbard, Jim. 1991. Shooting Back: A Photographic View of Life By Homeless 

 Children. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 
_________.1994. Shooting Backfrom the Reservation: A Photographic View of Life by 
 Native American Youth. New York: The New Press. 

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MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Hunter, James Davison. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. 
 New York: Basic Books. 
Hughes, Linda. 1993. "'You Have to Do It with Style': Girls' Games and Girls' 
 Gaming." In Feminist Theory and the Study of Folklore, ed. By T. Hollis, L. 

Pershing, and M.J. Young, 130-48. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 
Huyghe, Pierre, and Douglas Coupland. 2003. School Spirit. Paris: Encounters.  
Ibson, John. 2002. Picturing Men. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. 
King, Graham. 1984. Say "Cheese"! Looking at Snapshots in a New Way. New 
 York; Dodd, Mead & Co. 
Kouwenhoven, John A. 1982. Half a Truth is Better Than None. Chicago: 
 University of Chicago Press. 
Mechling, Jay. 1980. '''Playing Indian' and the Search for Authenticity in Modern 
 White America." In Prospects 5: An Annual Review of American Cultural 

Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, 17-33. New York: Burt Franklin Company. 
________.1986. "Children's Folklore." In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, ed. 
 Elliott Oring, 91-120. Logan: Utah State University Press. 
________. 2001. On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American  

Youth.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  
________. 2004. "Picturing Hunting." Western Folklore 63:1/2,51-78.  
Morgan, Barbara. 1951. Summer s Children: A Photographic Cycle of Life at 
 Camp. Scarsdale, NY: Morgan & Morgan, Publishers. 
Ohm, Stephen, and Michael E. Bell, eds. 1975. Saying Cheese: Studies in Folklore 
 and Visual Communication. Folklore Forum no. 13. Bloomington: Folklore 
 Institute, Indiana University. 
Padilla, AI. 2002. Reality from the Barrio: The Photography and Prose of Native 
 Santa Fe Youth, from Censorship to Survival. Santa Fe, NM: Santa Fe Boys 
 & Girls Club. 
Pollack, William. 1999. Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sonsfrom the Myths of Boyhood. 
 New York: Henry Holt and Company. 
Rueckert, William H. 1982. Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. 
 2nd., ed; Berkeley: University of California Press. 
Salinger, Adrienne. 1995. My Room: Teenagers in Their Bedrooms. San Francisco: 
 Chronicle Books. 
Sandeen, Eric. 1995. Picturing and Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s 
 America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 
Stearns, Carol Zisowitz, and Peter N. Stearns, 1986. Anger: The Struggle for 
 Emotional Control in America s History. Chicago: University of Chicago 
 Press. 
Sutton-Smith, Brian, and Diana Kelly-Byrne, eds. 1984. The Masks of Play. West 
 Point, NY: Leisure Press. 
Thompson, Kathleen, and Hilary Mac Austin, eds. 2003. America s Children: 
 Picturing Childhoodfrom Early America to the Present. New York: Norton. 
Weber, Bruce. 1997. Branded Youth and Other Stories. Boston: Bulfinch/ 
 Little,Brown. 

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FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

ILLUSTRATIONS 

Fig. 1. 1912 Playground 

Fig. 2. Teen boy with car and attitude 

24 



 

 

 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 3. Boy in soap box derby car 

Fig. 4. Boys play with Legos 

25 



 

 

 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Fig. 5. Sand castles at beach 

Fig. 6. Boy with erector set construction 

26 



 

 

 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 7. Boy with tinker-toy airplane 

Fig. 8. Boys on raft 

t 

27 



 

 

 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Fig. 9. Boys on Los Angeles playground, 1950s 

Fig. 10. Affectionate boys 

28 



 

 

 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 11. playfighting with knives (album) 

Fig. 12. skinning dipping (album) 

29 



 

 

 

FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS MECHLING 

Fig. 13. Cub Scout minstrels 

Fig. 14. Boy Playing Indian 

30 



 

 

 

MECHLING FOUND PHOTOGRAPHS 

Fig. 15. Boys with guns 

Fig. 16. Fraternity hazing, 1941 

31 



 

THE SINGING GAMES OF MUNSTER CHILDREN 

JOHN BUCKLEY 

Skipping--A Definition 

Skipping is an activity that usually goes on in a group, although it can 
be done alone. Skipping is usually associated with girls, but boys also join in 
depending on the context and circumstances. A shorter rope can be used if 
only one person is skipping while a longer rope is used for group skipping. 
The beat or rhythm of the rhyme dictates the rhythm of the skip or jump. The 
rhythm or pace of the jump or skip is also influenced by the beat of the rope 
against the surface of the ground that's being skipped on. This relationship 
between the rhythm of the rhyme and the turning of the rope is very 
important because if the coordination between the two is lost, the flow is 
interrupted causing the rope to be tripped up thereby stopping proceedings. 

The Language of Skipping 

Girls have their own terminology associated with skipping. For instance, 
in Cork City, if you are not skipping but instead are turning the rope for those 
skipping, you are known to be "on the rope." If, while skipping, a girl causes 
the rope to stop, the term used is that she has "downed the rope." When the 
suggestion in a group is announced to skip, or to "play skipping," shouts of 
"begs not on" (again heard by Cork children) might be heard, which means 
that the person doesn't want to be one of the group to turn the rope for the 
others to skip. There can also be pre-skipping rituals, such as the reciting of a 
counting-out rhyme or the wrapping of the rope with the bend between the 
thumb and first finger being one end and just above a bent elbow of one 
group members being the other end for the rope to be wrapped. The elbow is 
usually at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the arm below the elbow, and the 
hand of the person performing this ritual is usually vertically positioned 
above the elbow. Each girl in the group then grabs hold of a piece of the rope 
and whoever picks the parts of the rope nearest the ends of the rope, have to 
be "on the rope," that is, have to turn the rope for the rest of the group. 

Classification Systems 

Brian Sutton-Smith and various other scholars have attempted to 
classify skipping and skipping rhymes either from activities that are carried 
out while skipping or from the subject matter of the rhymes themselves. 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Sutton-Smith, according to Abrahams, divides the skipping games into 
"those in which the turners attempt to trip the jumpers, those skipped 
through in turn, those calling for special jumping skills, those using multiple 
ropes, those calling for divination, and those calling for imitation. These are 
not mutually exclusive categories but simply as a basis of discussion and 
description" (xx). 

Bruce Buckley is another researcher who attempted a classification 
system, and a simple one at that. In his article, "Jump-Rope Rhymes-
Suggestions for Classification and Study," he broke skipping down into four 
categories based on what the jumper does. They are: "Plain Skipping," 
where the person skipping just jumps up and down while reciting a rhyme, 
for example: 

Gypsy, Gypsy, Caroline, 
Washed her hair in turpentine 
The turpentine makes it shine, 
Gypsy, Gypsy, Caroline. 

(Cape Clare Island, Co. Cork, Ireland. Spring 
1982) 

"Action Skipping," where actions are carried out during the skipping 
process, as in: 

All in together, girls. 
Never mind the weather girls. 
When I count two, tip your shoe. 
When I count four, tip the floor. 
When I count six, do some tricks. 
When I count eight, tip the gate. (Run out and tip the 
gate.) 

(Cork City, Ireland, Spring 1980) 

"Call In/Call Out Skipping," where a girl is called in to skip with another 
who then leaves the rope to allow the girl she called in to skip alone. She in 
turn, calls another in. An example is: 

Vote, Vote, Vote for Devalera. 
And we call in Mary at the door. (Mary runs in to skip.) 
Mary is the one we all like the best. 
And we don't like Veronica anymore. (Veronica runs out.) 

(Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland. 1981) 

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BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Bruce Buckley's last category is "Endurance Skipping," where the person's 
skipping ability is tested in terms of speed and energy. The following is an 
example: 

I had a motor bike, No. 48 
I went around the c-o-r-n-e-r, 
(Run out, go around one of the 
turners and back 
in again.) 
And never pulled my brake. 

A policeman caught me, 
And put me in jail. 
How many years was I there. 
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, etc. (The rhythm of the rope speeds 
up to test how long the person 
can last under pressure.) 

(Cork City, Southside. 1981) 

Other researchers have attempted to classify skipping games and 
rhymes, not from the actions but from the rhymes and their contents. We 
could look at Roger Abraham's Jump-Rope Rhymes--Dictionary (1969) as a 
classification system in itself whereby he classifies rhymes in an alphabetical 
order and thus becomes a great help to those working with this genre of 
game rhymes. Yet another classification system is Francelia Butler's 
approach, in which rhymes are differentiated according to the themes of the 
rhymes. In her work, Skipping Around The World (1989), she has chapter 
headings that read as follows: Mystery and Romance; Hope and 
Hopelessness; Sex and Skipping; Protest; Political and Personal; Skipping to 
Silliness; Food and Feet; Pondering Death; and Rhymes of Joy. 

Yet another classification has been done by Robert Cosbey, All in 
Together Girls (1980), in which skipping song-games fall naturally into three 
categories: (1) where everyone gets a quick turn at skipping, somewhat like 
the "call in/call out" category of Bruce Buckley; (2) central character games 
which tend to be longer and tend to be more favored according to the girls he 
studied in Saskatchewan, Canada; these would be rhymes where only one 
girl is skipping and all the attention is placed on her to see if she performs 
the actions correctly or how long she can skip in a quick fashion; (3) group-
skipping games, where the emphasis is on coordination. Two or more 
persons skipping together is common in this type of skipping, and this group 
effort can make the process more difficult, 

35 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

simply because there are more people involved and consequently there's more chance 
for error. The rhyme: 

All in together girls. 
Never mind the weather girls. 
When I count your birthday 
Please run out 

(Cork City, northside, Spring, 1980) 

is a typical rhyme for this type of skipping. 

The Collection 

The following game rhymes were collected between 1979 and 1983, 
when I lived and worked in Cork City. They were collected from girls 
(mostly) and boys between the ages of 6-12. Initially, my collecting was 
confined to Cork City, but later my interest and curiosity grew, and I started 
collecting in the county of Cork and then around Munster. In my travels, I 
visited primary schools where I interviewed children in the classroom and, if 
the time and weather permitted, I then accompanied the children to the school 
yard where some of the games were demonstrated. Also, I observed children 
in their "natural" environments, i.e. the street, the terrace, the lane, the road, 
the estate, the back or front garden, the wood, the playground, the field or 
whatever kind of space they found themselves in. These different 
environments threw up different kinds of props and challenges for children 
to work with, and they manipulated these environments in all kinds of 
creative ways under their own terms and using their own code of legislation 
away from adult interference. 

In my collecting, I used a note book, tape recorder, 35mm camera, and 
video camera, and during the four years I spent collecting, I amassed a lot of 
material that includes hundred's of pages of notes, about thirty hours of audio 
tapes, hundreds of photographs, mostly black and white and some color, and 
two video tapes of games and rhymes. 

These games and rhymes are, for the most part, taken for granted by 
most adults and even considered trivial. But the more I observed children and 
collected their games and rhymes, the more I realized how important they 
were from the point of view of learning. Some writers have called what 
children do amongst themselves as the other educational system they have in 
their lives. They are an example of pure folklore, in that they are passed on 
from children to children by word of mouth, and in so doing, give games and 
rhymes generational continuity. The mere fact that children, as a group, tend 
to be conservative, also makes for traditions to be maintained. But they are 
also creative and will change a rule or change a word or line of a rhyme to 
suit the local environment, if they feel it makes 

36 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

sense. And even though these rhymes were collected in Munster, it doesn't 
make them peculiar to the area. The rhymes sung by Cork and Clonmel 
children can also have versions heard in Chicago or Cambridge or the 
Caribbean. They have a far-flung existence, reflecting travel across 
continents and ocean stretches. 

A lot of these games go on in groups of two and more, and this allows 
them to be transmitted to other children, increasing our understanding of the 
group process, how groups work, who makes the decisions, how they are 
made and how the rules of the game are worked out. Games also teach them 
about those who lead and who follow, who has power and who doesn't, and 
what it means to have it, versus not to have it. Through games, children also 
observe how conflicts are resolved and how harmony within the group is 
important for the game to continue. The need for cooperation is perceived, 
and the experience of competition is also discovered along with what it's like 
to manipulate, cheat, get caught and possibly go undetected. A sense of 
morality is learned, a morality that may not always seem fair, depending on 
the personalities present.  Along with learning to listen to the other person's 
point of view, and from this the idea of compromise and consensus can be 
appreciated. The joys of winning are savored, and the disappointments of loss 
are tolerated. Physical skills are demonstrated, sometimes bringing the big 
boys down to size, strategies are refined, and chances taken, that succeed 
from time to time. 

The whole area of children's folklore in Ireland is an area that is only 
recently getting the attention it deserves. While one of the biggest folklore 
collection anywhere in the world is housed in the folklore library at UCD, 
entitled "The Schools Collection," carried out in 1937-38, by foresightful 
folklorists of the time, publications on the subject of children's folklore have 
been relatively sparse. References to games and rhymes played and sung by 
Irish children have appeared in the work of Lady Alice Gomme that she 
carried out in the l890s. To assist her in her two part publication, The 
Traditional Games of England, Scotland and Ireland, she had informants in 
Cork, Down, Dublin, Kerry, Leitrim and Waterford. These 1894 and 1898 
works, published by David Nutt, London, as Part 1 of the Dictionary of 
British Folklore (1894), and Part 11 in 1898, were later published by Dover 
Publications in New York in 1964. The next major work pertaining to Ireland 
was written in wonderful style, in 1949 by Leslie Daiken, Children s Games 
throughout the Year, followed some years later by another collection, this 
time Dublin street rhymes, Out Goes She. Little, if nothing, was published 
until Sean O'Suilleabhain's, Irish Wake Amusements (1967), translated from 
the original Irish, Caitheamh Aimsire ar Thoraimh (1961), by the author, 
which dealt with, among other things, dancing, riddling and rhyming, 
mischief making, and pranks at wakes. Some of these activities, no doubt, 
were also played outside the environment of the "wake" and were probably 
passed on to or imitated by 

37 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

children. The same author also has a thorough classification of games in, A 
Handbook of Irish Folklore, published in 1970. Eilis Brady's excellent book, 
All In! All In!, a selection of Dublin children's traditional street games with 
rhymes and music, was published in 1975 by the Folklore Commission at 
UCD. This was the first serious publication on the study of children's games 
and rhymes in Ireland. In more recent times, Bill Meek has collected rhymes 
and songs that appear in his humourous and informative book, Moonpenny, 
published in 1985 by Ossian Press in Cork. In 1986, Mercier Press in Cork 
published, The Irish Children s Songbook, by Carmel O'Boyle. This has 
some children's game rhymes. And in the last couple of years, Maurice 
Leyden's fine book, Boys And Girls Come Out To Play, A Collection of Irish 
Singing Games, has been published by Appletree Press in Belfast. 

In the Irish language, Cniogaide Cnagaide, Rainn traidisiunta do phaisti, 
written by Nicholas Williams, was published in 1988 by An Clochomar Tta I 
Baile Atha Cliath, and Cluichi agus Caitheams Aimsire, Amuigh faoin Aer I 
gConnamara, written by Brian Mac Suibhne was published in 1991 by Clo 
Iar-Chonnachta. 

Along with these publications, articles on games and rhymes, along with 
other aspects of children's folklore, have appeared from time to time, both in 
the Irish language and English, in Bealoideas, the Journal of the Folklore of 
Ireland Society, Ulster Folklife, An Stoc, The Journal of the Irish Folk Song 
Society, Irishleabhar na Gaeilge, and in articles by Connradh na Gaeilge, An 
Cumann le Bealoideas Eireann, and Oifig an tSolathair. Children's games and 
rhymes have also been published in other publications by the Folklore 
Commission in UCD, such as Sean O'Connell's book, Stories and Traditions 
from Iveragh. And, games have also appeared in books on the folklore of a 
particular county or counties that have been collected by locals in the area 
aided and advised in their collecting methods by The Folklore Comission. 
One such book would be Along the Black Pig’s Dyke, folklore from the 
Armagh area. This book also researched the School’s Collection, in the 
Folklore Archives in UCD, for games and rhymes of the area. 

Autobiographical, biographical and fictional works also have reference 
to children's games. They include: Borstal Boy, by Brenden Behan; Teems of 
Times and Happy Returns, by Dominic Behan; The Green Fool, by Patrick 
Gallagher; Dubliners, by James Joyce; Knocknagow, by Charles J. Kickham; 
Beyond the Hills: An Ulster Headmaster Remembers, by Haughton W. 
Crowe; Paddy the Cope: An Autobiography, by Patrick Gallagher; and Janey 
Mack, me shirt is black, by Eamonn Mc Thomais. 

38 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

The Function of Games and Rhymes in the Late 20th Century 

The more I read about and collect children's folklore in general and 
games and rhymes in particular, the more I realize how important they are on 
different levels. They are the kinds of activities that are taken for granted by 
most people and are even considered trivial. But there is more to them that 
meets the eye. They are a pure folk form. They are not taught or controlled 
by adults (although some adults try to do so), and they pass freely between 
children on a street, in a school, in a village, town and city and even hop over 
borders and bodies of water resulting in rhymes like, "Cinderella dressed in 
Yella," being sung by children in Bandon, Boston and Birmingham, with 
perhaps some slight variation, but with most of the words intact. We live in a 
world that has rapidly changed and in which more and more technological 
inventions change our behavior. Children now have a much greater variety of 
things to do, whether they watch TV, play video games, or explore "virtual 
reality" using CD ROM. These new developments are exciting and create all 
kinds of creative opportunities for children and mankind in general. But 
questions repeatedly asked by educators, parents, and play scholars are, how 
do they effect children's ability to interact with other children, how suitable 
are these inventions to a deepening of our understanding of each other, how 
do they benefit the notion of community, are children becoming more 
sedentary and obese, and less active, and what are the implications for how 
they effect learning, do we in fact know more about knowledge, life, and 
ourselves as result of modern technology, and will they make us more 
happy? These are important questions as we learn how to navigate the 
information superhighway, and deal with the knowledge explosion. 

Cross References 

Cross references have been done in relation to most of the Irish 
publications and articles on the subject of rhymes (in the English language 
only) over the past one hundred years or so. Unfortunately, at this time, it 
does not include any of the more than 1100 manuscripts that make up the 
"Schools Collection" that are housed in the Folklore Archives in UCD. 
Along with the Irish authors on the subject, I have included the two volumes 
by Lady Alice Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Ireland, 
Scotland and Wales, from the 1890s. This is because of her Irish informants 
from the counties of Cork, Down, Dublin, Kerry, Leitrim, and Waterford, 
who gave her information on games and rhymes from these areas. I have also 
included as part of my cross referencing, Roger Abraham's, Dictionary of 
Jump-Rope Rhymes, published in 1969, and last but certainly not least, 

39 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

I have included two publications by the greatest contributors to the area of 
Children's Folklore, Iona and Peter Opie. The publications include, The Lore 
and Language of Schoolchildren (1959), and The Singing Game (1985). The 
cross-referencing is done after the rhyme, or if there are a number of 
variants, after the final variant. 

Notes to the Rhymes 

Notes on each rhyme appear beneath each rhyme, or if there is more 
than one variant, beneath the first variant. The author's name is mentioned 
first followed by the year of publication in brackets. Then the page number, 
and when known, the place where the rhyme was collected along with the 
year or decade it was collected. If there was a different first line collected by 
someone else but the rest of the rhyme was the same, I have written the first 
line. Conversely, if the first line is the same but the rest of the rhyme is 
different, I have included the entire rhyme. 

Skipping Rhymes 

The classification system used in this chapter on, "Skipping Rhymes," 
was devised by Bruce Buckley. His article, in the summer 1966 issue of 
Keystone Folklore Quarterly, "Jump-Rope Rhymes: Suggestions for 
Classification and Study," as the title suggests, discusses the pros and cons of 
different classification systems for Jump-Rope Rhymes. While his system is 
not perfect, it does provide a good working model for the study of Jump-
Rope Rhymes. His system is broken down into Action skipping, Plain 
Skipping, Run In-Run out Skipping and Endurance Skipping. These 
are the four headings under which I will look at the Skipping Rhymes of 
Munster Children. 

Action Skipping 

In action type skipping, girls carry out different actions while skipping. 
The words of the rhyme tell the action to be performed. 

1. 

Cowboy Joe from Mexico, 
Hands up, stick 'em up,  
Drop our gun, pick 'em up. 
Cowboy Joe from Mexico. 
North, south, east and west, 
Jacobs biscuits are the best. 

40 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

If they're not, send them back,  
To the north, south, east and west. 

(Miss on "Mexico," you walk down to end of road and 
back up again. 
Miss on "Mexico" twice, you're out. 

Miss on "north .......... west," you have to tell which is 
N,S,E,W. If you don't, you're out.) 
 Cork City, Northside, (Spring 1981). 

1a. 
Cowboy Joe from Mexico, 
Hands up,stick 'em up, 
Drop you guns, pick 'em up. 
Cowboy Joe from Mexico. 
North, South, East and West, 
Jacobs Biscuits are the best. 
If they crack, send them back, 
North, South, East and West. 

Crosshaven, Co. Cork, Presentation Convent, 
(Spring 1980). 

lb. 

Cowboy Joseph Mexico, 
Hands up, stick them up, 
Drop your guns, pick them up. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's 
School, Bishopstown, 
(Spring, 1980). 

1c. 

Cowboy Joe from Mexico. 
Hands up, pick 'em up, 
Drop your guns, pick 'em up. 
o-U- T spells out. (Run out.) 

Ennis, Co. Clare (Spring 1981). Also used as a 
"counting out" rhyme, a process for starting a 
game. This process is known as "abbling" in 
Ennis. 

1d. 

41 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Cowboy Joe from Mexico, 
Lost his knickers in the snow. 
Cowboy Joe from Mexico, 
Hands up, stick 'em up, 
Drop your guns, and pick 'em up, 
Cowboy Joe from Mexico. 
North, south, east and west, 
Jacobs biscuits are the best. 
If they crack, send them back, 
To the north, south, east and west. 

Ballintemple area, Cork City, (Spring, 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969],33, 141; McCaughan [1971-2],20, (Belfast); Colgan, 
[1980],20, (Lisbum, Co. Antrim) 

2. 

Jelly on the plate, jelly on the plate, 
Going wibbly, wobbly, wibbly, wobbly, 
Jelly on the plate. 

Sausage on the pan, sausage on the pan, 
Twirl (or twist) around, twirl around, 
Sausage on the pan. 

Baby in the cradle, baby in the cradle, 
Ma,ma,ma,ma, 
Baby in the cradle. 

Money on the floor, money on the floor. 
Pick it up, pick it up, 
Money on the floor. 

Tomato on the floor, tomato on the floor, 
Squash it down, squash it down,  
Tomato on the floor. 

Egg on the pan, egg on the pan, 
Twist a loo, twist a loo, 
Egg on the pan. 

Robber in the house, robber in the house, 

42 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Kick 'im out, kick 'im out. 
Robber in the house. 

Sweets on the table, sweets on the table, 
Pick 'em up, pick 'em up. 
Sweets on the table. 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1981). 

(Brady [1975], 86; Leyden [1993],129; Behan [1958], Band 3; Abrahams 
[1969],284; McCaughan [1971-2],21) 

2a. 

Money on the ground, money on the ground, 
Pick it up, pick it up, 
Money on the ground. 
Jelly on the plate, jelly on the plate, 
Wiggly, woggly, wiggly, woggly, 
Jelly on the plate. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's Primary School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring, 1980). 
For verse one, girls in Mallow, Co. Cork, 
Ardfert, Co. Kerry, girls say "wibbly, wobbly." 

3. 

Fud judge, call the judge, 
Mammy's havin' a baby, 
Daddy's going crazy, 
Push him down the acrobats, 
First floor, stop, 
Second floor, turn around, 
Third floor, tip the ground, 
Fourth floor, get out of town. (run out.) 

Tralee, Co. Kerry, (Spring 1981). 

(Abrahams [1969] 148) 

Down the road in Killarney, girls sing the following version: 

3a. 

Fud judge, call a judge. 

43 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Mammy's got a new born baby judge. 
She wrapped it up in tissue paper. 
Threw it down the alligator, 
First floor, stop. 
Second floor, splits. 
Third floor, twist around 
Fourth floor, tip the ground, 
Fifth floor, all out. 

St. Oliver's School. Killarney,Co Kerry, 
(Spring, 1981). 

3b 

Rock, Rock call the Doc! 
Mammy's having a new born baby Doc. 
Wrap him up in tissue paper, 
Send it down the alligator, 
First floor, stop! 
Second floor, splits, 
Third floor, turn around, 
Fourth floor tip the ground, 
Fifth floor, get out of town. 

Limerick City, (Spring, 1981). 

4. 

I'm a little girl guide, 
All dressed in blue. 
These are the actions I can do. 
Salute to the officer, 
Bow to the Queen, 
Run around the corner (run out one side, around a 
turner and run back in.) 
And buy an ice cream. 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring, 1981). 

(Abrahams [1969],206; Brady [1975],86; McCaughan [1971-72],22) 

In the Glen area of Cork City in the Spring of 1980, girls sang about a 
"dolly all dressed in blue" that "can stand up straight, bend one knee, salute 
to the captain, and bow to the Queen." In the Mayfield area, "the girl guide is 
all dressed in "white" and "brown," while in Schull, Co. Cork, it's not a doll 
at all they sing about, but: 

44 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

4a. 

There was a little beet root, 
Dressed in pink. 
Her mammy didn't want it, 
 So she sent it to the ink. 
The ink didn't like it, 
So she sent it to the pen.  
The pen said close your eyes, 
And count to ten. 

A different colour again shows up in Ennis, Co. Clare. The colour is 
green. And instead of a dolly it's a "teddy bear all dressed in green, sent a 
letter to the Queen, the Queen didn't like it, so she sent it to the King, the 
King said close your eyes and count to l6"(with eyes closed). The same 
rhyme was sung in Tipperary town and Cork City but a "dolly" instead of a 
"teddy bear" is mentioned in Tipperary town and a "rag doll" enters the 
rhyme in the north side of Cork City, where girls count to 17. In Waterford 
City, the "dollie" is also dressed in green and is "put in a match box, and sent 
to the Queen." While in another Waterford City, there's a version that goes: 

4b. 

I have a little Teddy Bear all dressed in green. 
These are the actions he must do. 
Stand up straight, bend one knee, 
Salute to the officer and bow to the Queen. 
Run around the corner and into a shop(run out and come 
back) 
And out I come with my lollypop. 

Waterford City, Presentation convent, (Spring 
1980). 

5. 

Banana Splits, banana splits, 
(you have to have the rope between your legs on 
"splits") 
Banana, banana, banana splits. 
Hoppy splits, hoppy splits, (hop while you skip) 
Hoppy, hoppy, hoppy splits. 
Twirly splits, twirly splits, (twirl while you skip) 

45 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Twirly, twirly, twirly, splits. 
One eye splits, one eye splits, (close one eye) 
One eye, one eye, one eye splits. 
Two eyes splits, two eyes splits, (close two eyes) 
 Two eyes, two eyes, two eyes split. 
One arm splits, one arm splits, (one arm behind back) 
One arm, one arm, one arm splits. 
Two arm splits, two arm splits, (two arms behind back) 
Two arm, two arm, two arm splits. 

Crosshaven, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1981). 

(Abrahams 31) 

In Cork City, south side, girls go "hoppy," "one eye" and "two eyes split." 

In Presentation Convent, Tralee, girls sang: 

Sa. 

Banana, banana, banana, splits. 
Repeat over and over. 
(For "splits", you have to have the 
rope between your legs when you stop. 

Presentation Convent, Tralee, (Spring 1981). 

6. 

Not last night but the night before, 
Twenty four robbers came knockin' at the door. 
As I went down to let them in, 
This is what the said to me. 
Jason, Jason do the splits. 
Jason, Jason do the kicks. 
Jason, Jason turn around. 
Jason, Jason tip the ground. 

Mallow, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1981). 

Over in Doneraile, Co. Cork, I collected in the Spring of 1981, the first 
two lines are the same as Mallow but the verse has only two more lines: 

"I went down to let them in, 
Spanish lady do the splits, kick, turn around, tip the 
ground." 

46 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

The Ardfert, Co. Kerry version of this rhyme, which I picked up from girls at 
a boarding school in Ring, Co. Waterford, is much longer and encompasses 
the rhyme "Jelly on the Plate" on to the end of it. It goes: 

6a. 

Not last night but the night before, 
Twenty five robbers came knockin' at my door.  
I went outside to let them in, 
And this is what they said to me. 
Spanish Lady turn around, 
Spanish Lady tip the ground. 
Spanish Lady do the splits. 
Spanish Lady show your knee. 
Jelly on the plate, jelly on the plate, 
Wibbly, wobbly, wibbly wobbly 
Jelly on the plate. 
Sausage on the pan, sausage on the pan,  
Turn it over, turn it over 
Sausage on the pan. 
Robbers in the house, robbers in the house,  
Kick them out, kick them out, 
Robbers in the house. 

In Cork City, the home of the Irish Ballet Company in the early 1980s, 
"ballet dancers," instead of Spanish Dancers, "do the splits, do the kicks, turn 
around and tip the ground." 

(Opie [1959], 23, [Portsmouth, Dundee]; Abrahams [1969], 100: for the 
whole rhyme; Abrahams [1969], 180, for "Spanish Dancers" lines); 
Abrahams & Rankin [1980], 134, (Counting Out Rhyme)) 

7. 

Money on the ground, money on the ground 
You've got to pick it up, pick it up. 
Money on the ground. 
Jelly on the plate, Jelly on the plate,  
Wiggly, woggly,wigg1y, wogg1y, 
Jelly on the plate. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring 1980). 

(Abrahams 284; Leyden 129) 
47 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

8. 

Up the Missisippi, 
If you miss a loop you're out. (swing rope high)  
Hop the Missisippi, 
If you miss a loop you're out. (Hop on one leg) 
Down the Missisippi, 
I you miss a loop, you're out. (skip low) 
Smoke the Missisippi, 
If you miss a loop you're out. (pretend you're 
smoking) 
Swim the Missisippi, 
If you miss a loop you're out. (perform swimming 
strokes) 

(Cork City, Blarney St, (Spring 1979). 

In Ballintemple, Cork City, girls go: "up the Mississippi, down and 
twirl the Mississippi." The Listowel, Co. Kerry version collected in Spring 
1981, is similar to the Blarney Street version in Cork City, in its actions. 

In the Waterford version of the skipping rhyme girls say: 

9a 

Down the Mississippi where the boat go push.  
Up the Mississippi where the boat goes push 

(As each girl runs in she pushes the girl before her out of the rope on "push," 
thus also putting the rhyme in the "run in/run out" category of skipping 
rhymes.) 

(Abrahams 120) 

In Tralee, Co. Kerry, the version is different again and has the 
"Teddy bear" rhyme tagged on to the end of it. 

9b. 

Up the Missisippi, 
Where the girls are very pretty,  
Where the boys are very ugly, 
If you miss a loop you're out.  
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, twirl around, 

48 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Teddy bear, Teddy bear, tip the ground, 
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, say your prayers, 
Teddy bear, Teddy bear, go to bed. 

10. 

The Teddy Bear rhyme is sung by itself in some parts of Munster, such as: 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear go upstairs.  
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say your prayers. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn off the light. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say good night.  
Ennis Girls School, Co.Clare. 

(Daiken [1949], 64; Abrahams [1969], 545; Brady [1975],84; Ni Fhloinn 
[1982],70, [Cavan]; MacThomais [1982],19, [Dublin, 1920'2-30's]; Kane 
[1983],81, [Belfast 1910-20]; Meek [1985], 38; 
Leyden [1993],131) 

10a. 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear twirl around. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear tip the ground. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear go upstairs.  
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say your prayers. 

Cork City, Southside, (1981). 

10b. 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn around. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear touch the ground. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear go upstairs. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say your prayers. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn off the light. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say good night. 

Cuil Aodh National School, Co.Cork, 
(Spring, 1980). 

10c. 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear twirl all around. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear tip the ground. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear go upstairs.  
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say your prayers. 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn out the light, 

49 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say good night, 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear 1,2,3. 

Tipperary Town, (Spring, 1981). 

10d. 

Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear go upstairs, 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say your prayers, 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn off the light, 
Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear say good night. 

Clonminch Road, Ennis, Co.Clare, (Spring, 
1981). 

11. 

Telly on the telephone, 
Miss a loop you're out. 

Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, (Spring, 1981) 

(Each person skips for the length of the rhyme, then jumps out, to be 
immediately followed by another person who cannot miss a loop. Otherwise 
she has to take the rope.) 

(Brady 77) 

11a. 

There's somebody on the telephone, 
Calling up Maria. (Maria jumps in, other person jumps 
out.) 
Maria is on the telephone, 
Calling up Joanne.etc. (Joanne jumps in, Maria jumps 
out, 
without missing a loop.) 

Barrett's Terrace, Cork City (Spring, 1979). 

12. 

Christopher, Columbus was a mighty man, 
He sailed to the ocean in a tin can. 
The waves grew higher and higher and over. (skip 
higher as the rope is raised) 

50 



 

BUCKLEY 

(Abrahams 30) 

(Abrahams 53) 

SINGING GAMES 

Croom, Co. Limerick, (Spring, 1981). 

13. 

George Washington never told a lie. 
She ran around the corner, 
And stole a cherry pie. (run out and in again.) 
His father said for punishment, 
She has to run to the gate, 
And be back by ten. 

Tralee, Co.Kerry, (Summer, 1980). 

14. 

Charley, Charley stole some barley, 
From outside the baker's shop. 
The baker came out and gave him a clout, 
And made poor Charley hop all around the baker shop, 
Full Stop. (hop on one leg and then suddenly stop rope.) 

WaterfordCity, (Spring, 1981). 

(Abrahams 24) 

15. 

Bang, bang you're dead, 
Twenty bullets in your head, 
Drop your gun, pick 'em up. 
Bang,bang you're dead. 

Put out your hands for "drop your guns." 
Touch the ground for "pick 'em up." 
Touch the ground for "you're dead." 

Cork City. St Catherine's School, Bishopstown, 
Spring, 1980). 

16. 

51 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Little Black Doctor, how's your wife? 
Very well thank you, she's alright. 
She won't eat a biscuit, nor a tube of lipstick.  
O-U-T spells out. 
O-V-E-R spells over. 
U-N-D-E-R spells under. 
I-N spells in, 
Like a bottle of gin. 
Lady, lady tip the ground, 
Lady, lady twirl around, 
Lady, lady show off your shoe, 
Lady, lady right through 
A house, a fire, a fire brigade. 
A woman sat down with a drink and gin.  
Drink and gin was a very nice drink, 
So out pops you. 

Listowel, Co. Kerry, (Spring, 1980) 

(Brady 77) 

17. 

George Washington, went to France. 
To teach the ladies how to dance. 
This is how he taught them. 
Ladies, Ladies turn around. 
Ladies, Ladies tip the ground. 
Ladies, Ladies tip you shoe, 
Ladies, Ladies that will do! 

Meadowlands Estate, Tralee, Co. Kerry, 
(Spring, 1980). 

(Brady 85; Meek 9; Leyden 115, Ball Rhyme known as "Charlie Chaplin 
went to France" 
Daiken 34, Ball Rhyme) 

18. 

Shirley Temple is a star,  
S-T-A-R. 
She can do the Hokey Pokey, 
She can do the splits, 

52 



 

BUCKLEY 
SINGING GAMES 

She can turn all around, 
Just like this! 

Mallow, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1981). 

19. 

Monday night I'm all alone, 
Tuesday night on the phone, 
Wednesday night I call a friend. 
I call Jacinta. 
Oh, Jacinta, pretty, pretty Jacinta, 
All the boys and all the girls, 
They love Jacinta. 
Izzy, busy twirl around,(twirl.) 
Izzy, busy, tip the ground, (tip the ground.) 
Izzy, busy show your shoe. (put one foot out.) 
Izzy, busy I love you. 

Gurranabrather Ave, Cork City, (Summer, 1979). 

(Daiken [1949], 63; Brady [1975], 82; MacThomais [1982], 79, [Dublin 
1920's-30's]; Opie [1985] 339--4l,circ1e game) 

20. 

Piggy on the railway, 
Picking up sticks. 
Along came a driver, 
And broke piggy's nose. 
Oh said Piggy that's not fair, 
Oh, said the driver, I don't care. 
Piggy on one leg, one leg, one leg. (hop on one leg) 
Piggy on two legs, two legs, two legs. 
Piggy on three legs, three legs, three legs (+one hand) 
Piggy on four legs, four legs, four legs. 
(bend over while skipping so that your two hands touch 
the ground as you feet touch the ground.) 

Listowel, Co. Kerry, (Spring, 1980). 

(Mac CoIl and Behan, Band 1, Folkways Recording, FW 8501, [1958]; Opie 
[1969],37, (Originated around the turn of the century. Comes from the old 
Scots ditty "Pussy at the fireside suppin' up brose."). Opies have six variants 
"Paddy", "Piggy," "Polly," "Peggy," "Tommy," and "Teddy," Meek 
[1985],87; Abrahams [1969], 158; Abrahams/Rankin [1980], 189, "Paddy on 

53 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

the railway, picking up stones./Up came the engine and broke Pady's bones./ 
"Ah," said Paddy, "That's not fair."/ "Puff," said the engine, "I don't care.") 

21. 

Up the ladder, down the ladder, abc. 
Down the ladder, up the ladder, 123. 
(skip up and down the rope while skipping. 

Tralee, Co. Kerry, (Spring, 1980). 

(Leyden 136) 

22. 

Pineapple stand, 
Pineapple stand, 
Pineapple, pineapple, 
Pineapple stand. (Stand on rope at the end of rhyme.) 

Waterford City, (Spring, 1981). 

23. 

Over the moon, just like a spoon. 
The moon is light, and I'm so bright. 
Over the moon just like a spoon.(skip up and down the 
rope.) 

Waterford City, (Spring, 1981). 

24. 

All in together girls, 
Never mind the weather girls. 
When I count two, tip your shoe. 
When I count four, tip the floor. 
When I count six, do some tricks. 
When I count eight, tip the gate. (run out and tip a 
gate.) 

Cork City, Northside, (Spring, 1979). 

(Daiken [1949], 71 (Great Britain); Abrahams [1969], 6; Ni Fhloinn [1982], 
70, [Cavan]) 

25. 
54 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Upsy, downsy, twirl all a roundsy.  
Clap and if you miss a loop you're out. 
Waterford City, (Spring, 1980). 

26. 

Dr. Bannister lost one eye. (close one eye while skipping.) 
lost two eyes.(close two eyes while skipping.) 
lost one leg. (skip on one leg.) 

then one arm. (one hand behind the back.) 
then drop down dead. (roll out of rope.) 

Waterford City, (Spring, 1980). 

Plain Skipping 

Plain skipping means that someone skips without any particular actions 
other than jumping up and down to the rhythm of the rope while singing 
some rhyme. 

27. 

Singing the letters of the alphabet while skipping is a simple form of plain 
skipping. 

A,B,C .............X,Y,Z. 
X,Y,Z, sugar in my tea, 
Now I know my A,B,C.  
Will you play with me. 

Cork City, (Spring, 1980). 

(Brady (1975),75; Leyden (1993), 134; Abrahams (1965) 5) 

The alphabet is also used in a prophetic sense when girls want to find 
out who their boyfriend might be. Whatever letter the rope "downs" on, is the 
first letter of some boy's name she might know. It also enters the following 
little rhyme: 

28. 

Lemon and lime be on time, 

55 



 

SINGING GAMES 

56 

BUCKLEY 

Start with alphabet A,B,C.... 
(If you miss, you're "on the rope.") 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring, 1981). 

29. 

Skippy, skippy, skippy, the bush Kangaroo. 
Skippy, skippy, skippy, the bush Kangaroo. 
(Repeat as many times as you want.) 

Cork City. North Presentation Convent, 2nd 
class, (Spring, 1979). 

30. 

Chocolate Biscuits down the lane. 
If you want one spell your name.  
A-N-G-E-L-A. Angela. 

Clonmel, Co. Tipperary, (Spring, 1980). 

(Porcheddu [1992],122-3, Counting Out Rhyme, Cork 
City) 

30a. 

Chocolate Biscuits down the lane, 
If you want one spell your name.  
S-A-M-A-N-T-H-A, Samantha. 

Cork City, northside, (Spring, 1979). 

30b. 

Chocolate biscuits down the lane. 
If you want one spell your name.  
S-U-S-A-N-N-E, Susanne. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring, 1979). 

31. 

1,2,3,4,5, 
I caught a little fish alive, 
6,7,8,9,10. 
Then I let him go again.  
Why did you let him go? 
Because he bit my finger so. 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Which finger did he bite? 
The little finger on the right. 

Ennis Girls Primary School, Co. Clare, (Spring, 
1980). 

(Abrahams (1969)150-51 

32. 

Cinderella bright and yella, 
Went upstairs to kiss a fella, 
Made a mistake and kissed a snake. 
How many doctors did she meet? 
1----------------------------------10. 

Presentation Convent, 5th class. Tralee, Co. 
Kerry, (Spring, 1980). 

(Leyden (1993), 132; Abrahams (1969), 30; McCaughan [1971-2], 20 ; 
Porcheddu [1992],180, Counting Out Rhyme, Cork City) 

32a. 

Cinderella, dressed in yella, 
Went to the ball to meet her fella. 
She made a mistake and kissed a snake. 
That was the end of Cinderella. 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring, 1980). 

32b. 

Cinderella, dressed in yella, 
All dressed up to kiss her fella. 
By mistake she kissed a snake, 
How many doctors did she need? 
(Count up to as many as you can, and you miss, the 
other person is in.) 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring, 1979). 

32c. 

Cinderella, dressed in yella.  
Went upstairs to get her umbrella. 

57 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

On her way she met her fella. 
How many kisses did she give him? 
1,2,3, ............. etc. 

Mallow, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1979). 

33. 

Johnny in the water, Johnny in the sea, 
Johnny broke a window, and he blamed me.  
1 told Ma, Ma told Da. 
Johnny got a beating, Ha, Ha, Ha. 

Tralee, Co.Kerry, (Spring, 1980). 

33b. 

I had the German measles, 
I had them very bad. 
They put me in warm blanket, 
And put me in a van, 
The van was very shakey, 
I nearly fell out, 
When I got to hospital, 
I heard a baby shout, 
Mammy, Daddy take me home, 
From this hospital, from this home.  
I've been here a week or two, 
And now I want to be with you. 
Here comes Dr. Bannister, 
Coming down the banister, 
Half way down he ripped his pants,  
And now he's doin' the cha, cha, dance. 

Waterford City, (Spring, 1980). 

(Opie [1985],455, Handclapping rhyme, "I had the Scarlet Fever," 
Porcheddu [1992] 191, "recited just for fun." Cork City.) 

34. 

Little Willy Wagtail, 
Born in a sea shell. 
Christened in a handkerchief, 
Oh Willy Wagtail. 
I know a woman whose name is Miss,  
Every Sunday morning she walks like this. 

58 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

("block the rope with your foot on 'like this'''- 10 year old 
girl who was part of the game.) 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring, 1981). 

(Brady [1975], 74) 

35. 

Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy from Carrigaline, 
Washed her hair in turpentine. 
The turpentine made it shine, 
Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy from Carrigaline. 

Sacred Heart School, Glasheen Road,Cork, 
(Spring 1979) and Carrigaline, Co.Cork, 
(Spring, 1980). 

(Brady 57, [Ball Rhyme], [Dublin]) 

35a. 

Gypsy, Gypsy, Caroline, 
Washed her hair in turpentine, 
The turpentine makes it shine, 
Gypsy, Gypsy, Gypsy Caroline. 

Cape Clare Island, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1981). 

35b. 

Car, Car, Caraline, 
Wash her hair in turpentine, 
The turpentine made it shine, 
Car, Car, Caraline. 

Ennis Girls School, Co. Clare, (Spring, 1980). 

36. 

Policeman, Policeman don't catch me. 
For I've got a wife and family. 
How many children have you got? 
Twenty four and that's a lot. 
(count to 24.) 

59 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

(Daiken [1949], 69; Daiken [1963], 27; Brady [1975], 97; Behan & MacColl 
[1958], Band 3, Folkways 8501; MacThomais [1982], 107, (Street Chant), 
[Dublin 1920's-30's]) 

37. 

Mrs. Brown went to town, 
With her knickers hanging down. 
Mrs. Green saw the scene, 
And put it in the magazine. 

Tralee, Co. Kerry, (Spring 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969],130; Leyden [1993],132; Opie [1985] 441 [Handclpping]; 
Brady [1975], 65, [Ball rhyme]) 

38. 

Seven girls names I do know, 
Wish me luck 'cause here I go. 
One, Angela, 
Two, Mary 
Three, Stephanie. 
Four, Assumpta. 
Five, Jacinta, 
Six, Helen, 
Seven, Ann. 
(This format is used also as a ball bouncing rhyme.) 

Waterford City, Spring (1980). 

39. 

Down in the meadow where the grass grows green.  
A tomcat sat on a sewing machine. 
The sewing machine sews so fast, 
So fast it sews the tomcat's ass. 

Ennis Girls Primary School, Co.Clare, (Spring, 
1980). 

The following rhyme is widespread in Cork City and is used for plain 
skipping, but also has versions that involve endurance skipping (turning the 
rope very fast). Here is a plain skipping version. 

60 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

40. 

Down in the alley-o, 
Court hand Sally-o, 
See all the girlsio, 
Kissing all the boysio. 
Out comes missio, 
Have you seen my brother-o, 
Oh no missio, 
She's down in the alley-o. 
The rip, the rap, 
The sailor broke his back, 
Slips on a banana skin, 
And that was that. 

Cork City, The Glen area, (Spring, 1979). 

This rhyme might then lead into another rhyme to keep the rhythm going. 

Elsewhere on the Northside of Cork City, a different version is heard: 

40a. 

Down in the alley-o. 
Where they play release-o. 
See all the boys-e-o. 
Kissing all the girls-e-o, 
Up jumps Miss-e-o, 
Have you seen my daughtero, 
No, no, miss-e-o, 
She's down in the alley-o. 
Rip, rap, 
Sailor broke his back, 
Slipped on a banana skin 
That was that. 
Era, but, sure, I must, 
Learn to say my A, B, C . . . Z. 

Gurranabrather Ave. Cork, (Spring, 1979) 

(Daiken [1963], 45, MacThomais, [1982],144, [Dublin 1920's-30's]) 

61 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

In Presentation Convent, Tralee, girls sang this following rhyme, that 
was learnt in Garrettstown, Co. Cork by one of the girls in 5th class, while 
she was on holiday. It's a rhyme that was sung on the terrace that I lived on 
when I was growing up in the 1950s and was still being sung by my nieces in 
1979. 

40b. 

Down in the alley-o, 
Where they play release-e-o. 
See all the boys-e-o, 
Kissing all the girls-e-o. 
Up jumped miss-e-o. 
Have you seen my Mary-o, 
No, no miss-e-o, 
She's down in the alley-o. 
The rip, the rap, 
The sailor on the seashore, 
Please play a loop for me. 
Are you comin' , are you comin' , 
Are you comin', to the fair, 
We went, and we went, 
But the fair wasn't there. 

Barrett's Terrace, Cork, (1979) 

40c. 

Down in the alley-o 
Courting Sally-o. 
Picking up cinders, breaking windows. 
My mother said to be good, 
And not to interfere with the gypsies in the wood. 

Farranree, Cork City, (Spring, 1979). 

41. 

There's a boy over there. 
And he's winkin' his eye. 
He tells me that he loves me, 
But he's telling a lie. 
His hair is all curly, 
And his shoes are all shine.  
He ain't got no money, 
So he wont be mine. 

62 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Look whose coming down the street, 
Brenda Sheehan isn't she sweet. 
She's been married twice before, 
And now she's knocking on Brendan's door. 

Presentation Convent, Tralee, Co.Kerry, (1980). 
Barrett's Terrace, Cork City, (1950's & 1970s-
80s.) 

Around Gurranabrather Avenue on the Northside of Cork City, the same 
words to the above rhyme are sung added to by the following lines. 

41a. 

Mrs. Murphy is Brendan coming out? 
Yes my love at half past three. 
Half past three is much too late, 
So marry me in the morning at half past eight.  
How many kisses did she give him?  
5-10-15-20-25-30 etc. 
(When you "down" the rope, that's the number of 
kisses the girl gave.) 

The next rhyme, from Cape Clare Island, is a combination of "The Wind 
Blows High" and "Down in the Valley where the green grass grows," with a 
few lines from the song, "I'll tell me Ma," thrown in the middle. 

42. 

The rain, the rain, the rain blew high, 
The rain blew falling from the sky. 
Mary, Mary said she'd die, 
If she didn't get the fella, 
With the marble eye. 
He is handsome, he is pretty, 
He is the man from Kerry City, 
Let the girls say what they like, 
Padraigh Murphy will have a wife. 

Cape Clare Island, Co. Cork, (Spring, 1981). 

(Abrahams 209; Daiken [1949], 61, Belfast and Cork; Brady [1975], 92; 
Meek [1985], 59; Leyden 140; Behan, [1958], band 2, Folkways 8501; 

63 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

McCaughan, [1971-2], 22; Opie [1985],134-6, Circle Game, MacThomais [1982],49, 
[Dublin 1920's-30's]) 

In Ring, Co.Waterford,version, the rain "came tumbling from the sky," 
and the fella has a "roman" eye. He comes from any town or city you want, 
and the rhyme ends as follows: 

42a 

Will she marry him? Yes/No. (whatever you "down the 
rope" on) 
How many children? (count while you skip) 
What colour dress? (list colours while skipping). 

Ring, Co. Waterford, (Spring 1980). 

In one Tralee, Co. Kerry, version, it's "the wind" that "blows high," creating, 
"all the scattering in the sky." The rhyme then resumes as follows: 

42b. 

She is handsome, she is pretty, 
Tell me who she loves? 
He loves her, he kisses her. 
Oh my darling won't you tell your name to me? 

While another version from Tralee, (Spring, 1980) goes as follows: 

42c. 

The wind, the wind, the wind blew high. 
The wind came rushing from the sky.  
Gay thought she would die, 
All because of her poor boy. 
He is handsome, he is pretty, 
He is from Killkenny city. 
And if you want to know his name,  
His name is Colin Costello. 
Do you love him? Yes/No. 

43. 

64 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

She sells sea shells on the seashore. 
And the sea shells that she sells, 
Are sea shells no more. 

Crosshaven, Co. Cork, Presentation Convent, 
(Spring 1979). 

(Meek [1985], 79) 

Run In/Run Out Skipping Rhymes 

Run in/run out rhymes take different forms. A girl might be skipping 
alone and then calls in a friend to skip with her. Or, calling the friend in 
might be a signal for her to exit the rope at the same time. In some rhymes, a 
girl might skip for a number of loops, but in other rhymes she will only skip 
for one loop and be followed by another girl, who only skips for one loop 
and so on. In this kind of situation, where a girl skips for just one or more 
loops of the rope, the pattern for running in to skip and running out when it's 
your time, is that of a figure eight. Whatever the situation may be, timing is 
crucial and if a girl's timing is off, she'll "down" the rope, causing her to 
"take the rope." Also, if she doesn't enter on the right loop, she may also 
have to "take the rope." 

The following short rhyme is popular around Munster. 

44. 

Down the Mississippi if you miss a loop you're out.  
(This line is repeated over and over as one girl jumps in 
while another is exiting from the other side on "out." 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, Bishopstown, 
(Spring, 1980) 

44a. 

Down the Mississippi where the boats go push.  
(Repeat the line over and over with the girl jumping into 
the rope pushing the girl skipping out of the rope. 

Waterford City, (Spring, 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969],44) 

65 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

44b. 

In Waterford City, (Spring, 1980) also, girls say: 

Up the Missisippi where the boats go push.  
(Repeat the line over and over with one girl jumping in 
and pushing the girl who is skipping, out.) 

The same procedure goes on in Ennis, Co. Clare (Spring, 1980), but the 
rhyme is different. 

44c. 

Down in the meadow where the ghost goes boo. 
Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring, 1980). 

44d. 

In Ennis also, is heard the words: 

Up the Mississippi if you miss a loop you're out.  
(The same procedure is followed, whereby one girl 
jumps in and the girl before her exits). 

45. 

Christopher, Columbus was a mighty man, 
He sailed to the ocean in a tin can. 
The waves flew higher and higher and over. (skip 
higher as the rope is raised) 

Croom, Co. Limerick, (Spring, 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969], 30) 

45a. 

Christopher, Columbus was a mighty man,  
He sailed to America in a tin can. 
The wind it blew higher and covered his head. 
Close your eyes and count to ten. 

Limerick City, (Spring, 1980). 

66 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

46. 

George Washington never told a lie. 
She ran around the corner, 
And stole a cherry pie. (run out and in again.) 
His father said for punishment, 
She has to run to the gate, 
And be back by ten. 

Tralee, Co.Kerry, (Spring, 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969], 53) 

47. 

Vote, Vote, Vote for De Valera, 
And we call in Mary at the door, (Mary runs in) 
Mary is the one we all like the best, 
And we don't like Veronica anymore. (Veronica runs out) 
(The rhyme is repeated with Mary skipping alone and a 
new girl is called and Mary runs out.) 

Ennis, Co. Clare, 9Spring, 1980). 

(Brady [1975], 80; Abrahams [1969], 201; Daiken [1949], 69; Daiken 
[1963], 25; Behan & MacColl [1958], Band 4, Folkways 8501; 
MacThomais, [1982], 111, [Dublin, 1920's-30's]) 

In St. Patrick's School in Mayfield, Cork City, collected in the Spring of 
1979, girls sing "love" instead of "like", otherwise the rhyme is the same. 

On the Northside of Cork City also, girls sing the following version: 

47a. 

Vote, Vote, Vote for De Valera 
And we call in Michelle at the door 
If Michelle don't come in, 
There'll be war in Spangle Hill, 
And we won't like Orla anymore, shut the door. 

Meanwhile over in Tralee, Co. Kerry, girls sing: 

67 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

47b. 

Vote, vote, vote for DeValera,  
And we call in Deirdre, at the door, 
Elaine is the one, 
Who will have a lot of fun, 
And we won't call her in anymore, 
Shut the door, No.4. 

48. 

I like coffee, I like tea, 
I like Sarah in with me. (Sarah runs in) 
I hate coffee, I hate tea, 
I hate Sarah in with me. (Sarah runs out.) 

Croom, Co. Limerick, (Spring, 1980) & Sacred 
Heart School, South Douglas Rd, Cork (Spring, 
1979). 

(Daiken [1949], 33, Ball Game, [Co.Antrim] Abraham [1969], 85;Opie 
[1985],358; Porcheddu [1992], 143, [Counting Out Rhyme], (Cork City); 
Leyden [1993],130) 

In Doneraile, Co.Cork (Spring, 1979), the rhyme is extended to go as 
follows: 

48a. 

I like coffee, I like tea, 
I like Sarah in with me. 
I don't like coffee, I don't like tea, 
I don't like Sarah in with me. 
Now that she's in, 
I can't get her out, 
How many pushes must I give her? 
l-2-3-4 ........ (until she "downs"), 
Hard or soft? (hard or soft belts to get her out). 

In Ring, Co. Waterford, after the first two lines, girls sing the alphabet, 
whatever letter she "downs" on, tells her boyfriend's name. Say the rope 
downs on "P", then the boys name is used as follows: 

68 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

48b. 

I like coffee, I like tea, 
I like Michelle in with me. 
A,B,C, .......... P. 
Peter and me under a tree, 
Will I marry him? Yes/No! 

If the girl "downs" the rope on "yes," it's a way of prophesizing that she will 
marry him. The opposite also applies. 

48c. 

I like coffee, I like tea. 
I like sitting on a blackman's knee. 

Cork City, (Spring, 1979). 

49. 

As I was in the kitchen, 
Doin' a bit a stitchin', 
In came a boody man, 
And I ran out. (run out of rope, next girl runs in.) 

Crosshaven Co. Cork, (Spring, 1979), Ennis, 
Co. Clare, (Spring 1980), Cork City, (Spring, 1979) 

(Abrahams [1969], 12; Daiken [1949], 63 [Great Britain]; Daiken [1963], 33 
[Dublin]) 

49a. 

As I was in the kitchen, 
Doin' a bit a stitchin' 
In came a booby man, 
And I ran out. 
(You run out then and the other person after you 
comes in.) 

49b. 

In the southside of Cork City, girls use "boogey man," instead of "boody 
man" and "booby man." 

69 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

49c. 

In Doneraile, Co. Cork, there is a combination of two different rhymes. It 
goes: 

Seashells cockleshells, 
Evy, ivy over. 
Mother in the kitchen, 
Doing a bit of stitchin' . 
How many stitches did she drop? 
(Count up until you "down" the rope.) 

In another Cork City (Spring 1979) version, the following lines opens the 
verse: 

Bluebells cockidy-shells, 
Evor, ivor overhead. 
As I was in the kitchen, 
Doin' a bit a stitchin'.  
In came a boody man, 
And I ran out. 

(Abrahams [1969],18; Brady [1975], 83; Ni Fhloinn [1982], 70, (Cavan) 

51. 

Tiger Tim, swallowed a pin, 
That's the end of Tiger Tim. (run out) 

Cape Clare Island, Co. Cork. This rhyme can then lead into another rhyme to 
keep the flow going. 

(Brady [1975], 65 (Ball Rhyme)) 

51a. 

On the northside of Cork City, the following lines are added to the two lines 
above: 

Steve McGarrett, ate a carrot,  
That's the end of Steve McGarrett. 

70 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

52. 

I am a little girl guide all dressed in blue, 
These are the actions that I do. 
Stand up straight,bend one knee, 
Salute to the captain, and bow to the queen. 
Cork City, St. Catherine's Primary School, Bishopstown 
(Spring, 1979). 

(Daiken [1949], 65; Abrahams [1969], 70; McCaughan [1971-2], 22; Brady 
[1975],86) 

52a. 

I am a little rag doll all dressed in green. 
My mother didn't like me, she gave me to the queen.  
The queen didn't like me, she gave me to the King,  
The King said said shut your eyes and count to seventeen. 
(Count up to seventeen with your eyes closed. If you miss 
before seventeen, you go on the rope turning.) 

Cork City, St.Catherine's School, Bishopstown 
(Spring 1979). 

(Abrahams [1969], 78; McCaughan [1971-2], 20) 

52b. 

I have a little dolly all dressed in Blue. 
The Queen didn't like her, 
So she sent it to the King, 
The King said close your eyes, 
And count to sixteen. 

Ennis, Whitehall Estate, Co. Clare, (Spring 
1980). 

52c. 

I'm a little Dutch girl, 
All dressed in Green. 
These are the actions I must do. 
Salute to my master, 
Bow to my Queen, 

71 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Run around the corner, 
And buy an ice-cream. (Run out of rope and back in) 
How many ice creams did I buy? 

Limerick City, (Spring, 1980). 

52d. 

I have a little Teddy Bear, 
All dressed in green. 
These are the actions he must do. 
Stand up straight, bend one knee. 
Salute to the officer, 
And bow to the Queen. 
Run around the corner, (Run out of rope and back in.) 
And into the shop. 
And out I come with a lollypop. 

Waterford City, (Spring 1980). 

(Abraham [1969], 82) 

53. 

I had a little bumper car, No. 48. 
I went around the corner, 
And couldn't pull my brakes. 

C1onmel, Co. Tipperary, (Spring 1981). 

(Abrahams [1969], 80) 

53a. 

Bumper Car, Bumper Car, No.48. 
Turn around the corner, (Run out and back in.)  
And pull on the brakes. (stick leg out to stop rope.) 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

53b. 

I had a little Bumper Car 
His name is 48. 
I ran him around the corner, 
And then I pulled my brakes. (when rope stops, you 
have to stop with it.) 

72 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Presentation Convent, Tralee, Co. Kerry, 
(Spring 1980). 

53c. 

I had a little Baby Car, No.48. 
I went around the corner and, (run out and back in.) Then 
I pulled my bakes. (stop the rope with your foot.) 

Waterford City, (Spring 1980). 

53d. 

I have a little Bubble Car, No.48. 
I go around the C-O-R-N-E-R. (Run out and in while 
you spell 'Corner.') 

Cork City, Northside, (Spring 1979). 

53e. 

Bubble Car, Bubble Car, No.28. 
Turn corner, (Run out and around one of the girl's 
turning the rope and back in.) 
And pull down the brakes. (Stop the rope with your 
leg.) 

Mallow, Co. Cork, (Spring 1979). 

53f. 

I have a little Bunny Car, No. 48. 
Goes around the corner, (run out and back in.)  
And then it stops its brakes. (Stick out leg to stop 
rope.) 

Cork City, Northside, (Spring 1979). 

53g. 

I have a little Motor Car, No.48 
I went around the corner, (run out and back in.) 
And I had to put on my brakes. (block rope.) 
A policeman caught me, 
And put me into jail. 
How many years was I there? 

73 



 

SINGING GAMES 

74 

BUCKLEY 

1,2,3, ................ .30. 
(If you miss, first off the rope gets to jump.) 

Cork City, Southside, (Spring 1979) 

53h. 

I have a bobby car, No. 98. 
I go around the corner, (run out and in.) 
Then I pulling brakes, 
Just like this. (stop rope with leg.) 

Ballintemple, Boreenmanna Road, Cork City, 
(Spring 1979). 

53j. 

Bubble Car, Bubble Car, No. 28. 
Turn around the corner, 
And pull down my brakes. 

Mallow, Co. Cork, (Spring 1979). 

53k. 

I'm a little Bumper Car, No.48. 
I went around the corner. 
I forgot to pull my brakes. 
My brakes didn't work, 
I went tumbling down the hill. 
And into a duck pond, 
There I stood still. 

Croom, Co. Limerick, (Spring 1980). 

53m. 

I am a little Bunny Car, No.48. 
I live around the C-O-R-N-E-R, (Run out and in.) 
Pulling my brakes. 
The brakes didn't work, 
So I brought her to the G-A-R-A-G-E, (Run out and 
around one of the girl's turning the rope and back in) 
And then I pulled my brakes. 
(Go out and in again on "brakes." Rope must land 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

between legs. If not, repeat the line "So I brought her to 
the G-A-R-A-G-E, and "Pull the brakes again.") 

Crosshaven, Co. Cork, (Spring 1979). 

53n. 

I have a little Buggy Car, No. 48. 
I go around the corner, (run out and in.) 
And then I pull my brakes. 

Glasheen area, Cork City, and Barrett's Terrace, 
Cork City, (Spring 1979). 

Mayfield area of Cork City is similar except "drive" is used instead of 
"go." 

53p. 

I had a little buggy car, when I am 64. 
I go around the c-o-r-n-e-r, 
And then I pull my brakes. (rope must stop between your 
legs. 
If it doesn't, you're out. If it does, you go to the end of the 
line.) 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, Bishopstown, 
(Spring 1979). 

53q. 

I had a little motorbike, it's number was 48. 
I went around the corner, 
And forgot to put on the brakes 
The policeman caught me and put me in jail, 
How many years was I there? 
("Start skipping fast and keep trying to skip as long as 
you can. When he misses, then you go out."  
Fieldnotes-girl playing in the game.) 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School,  
Bishopstown, (Spring 1979). 

54. 

George Washington went around the corner. (run out 
and in.) 

75 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

And bought a penny pie. 
He slapped it in the face of his father. 
And his father said, 
George do not tell a lie. 
You were very bold George. 
Don't do it again. 
You were very bold George, 
Don't do it again. 
Jump out now and leave me alone. (girl jumps out.) 
George don't do it again. 

Presentation Convent, 5th class. Tralee, Co. 
Kerry, (Spring 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969], 53) 

54a. 

Little George Washington never told a lie. 
He ran around the corner, (run out around the turner and 
back in before the next line ends) 
And stole a cherry pie. 
How many pies did he steal? 
(Count up to ten.) 

Cork City, Southside. St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring 1979). 

54b. 

Georgie Porgy puddingy pie, 
Ran around the corner, (run out and in.) 
And stole a penny pie. 
When he went home he told his Dad. 
Run around the corner, 
And be back by 10. (run out and back by 10.) 
1 .............. 10. 

Tralee, Co. Kerry. Presentation Convent, 5th 
class, (Spring 1980). 

55. 

There is a lady on the mountain,  
Who she is, I do not know? 
All she wants is gold and silver,  
And she wants is a fine young man. 

76 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

So I call in my Collette dear, (Collette runs in.) 
While I run out to play. (girl runs out.)  
Repeat again. 

Cork City Southside, (Spring 1979). 

(Gomme [1894], Daiken [1949], 75, (Circle Game); Abrahams [1969], 155 
[Texas 1963]; McCaughan [1971-2], 23, [Belfast 1968]; Brady [1975],103, 
Circle Game, [Dublin]; Leyden [1993],14) 

56. 

Two little dicky birds, 
Sitting on a wall. 
One named Peter, other named Paul. 
Flyaway Peter, flyaway Paul, (run out) 
Come back Peter, come back Paul. (come back to skip.) 

Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

(Daiken [1949], 69; Abrahams [1969],198; Brady [1975],81, [Dublin]; 
Leyden [1993],130) 

56a. 

Two little dicky birds, 
Sitting on a fence. 
One named Peter, the other named Paul. 
Flyaway Peter, flyaway Paul. (run out) 
Come back Peter, come back Paul. (come back to skip.) 

Cuil Aodh, Co. Cork, (Spring 1980). 

57. 

There's somebody under the bed. 
I don't know who it is. 
I got a shock in earnest, 
And I called Joanne in. 
Joanne light the candle, 
Joanne light the gas. 
Run in, Run out, 
There's somebody under the bed. 

Cork City, Northside, (Spring 1979). 

77 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

(Daiken [1949], 63, [Great Britain]; Abrahams [1969], 190-1; Brady [1975], 
78, [Dublin]; Leyden [1993],126; MacThomais [1982], 63, [Dublin 1920s-
30s] ) 

58. 

Susanne on the telephone, 
Calling in Georgina. 
Georgina on the telephone, 
Calling in Mary. 
Mary on the telephone, 
Calling in Sheila. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring 1979). 

The girl skipping calls another girl in to skip with her. Then the new girl 
calls in another girl who is next in line to skip with her. As the new girl 
comes in, a girl is going out the other side of the rope. 

(Brady [1975], 77, [Dublin], Jinny on the telephone, /Miss your loop you're 
out/O- U - T spells Out. 

59. 

All in together girls, 
Never mind the weather girls, 
When it is your birthday please jump out, 
Jan. Feb ......................... December. 
Is it the first, the second, the third ....... etc. 
(Jump out on the month of your birthday. Then, when all 
the girls have jumped out for their birthday, everyone 
jumps in again for the days of the month, and jumps back 
out for the day their birthday falls on. 

Cork City, St. Catherine's School,  
Bishopstown, (Spring 1979). 
Tra1ee, Co.Kerry, (Spring 1980), Limerick City, 
(Spring 1980) Waterford City, (Spring 1980). 

(Daiken [1949], 71, [Great Britain]; Abrahams [1969],6, [Texas]; Brady 
[1975], 95, [Dublin]; NiFhloinn, [1982], 70, [Cavan], from "Schools 
Collection," 1937-8 ) 

78 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

59a. 

All in together 
This frosty weather, 
When I count your birthday 
The rope must be empty. 
Jan. Feb.March ........ Dec. 
Monday, Tuesday ........ Fri. 
One, one and a half, 
Two, two and a half, 
Three, three and a half. 
Four, four and a half….. 
Five ........ eleven or twelve. 

Ennis Girls Primary School. Co. Clare, (Spring 
1980). 

Endurance Skipping 

Endurance skipping means that a test of endurance is put to the person 
while skipping. This usually involves turning the rope faster than normal to 
see how fast and how long the person can skip. It's also associated with lines 
in the rhymes that have a "prophetic" aspect to them, like, "How many 
children will you have?" Also these "prophetic" lines have the tendency to be 
tagged on at the end of a rhyme, but they can also stand alone as rhymes unto 
themselves as in the following rhymes, some of which are only one line long. 

60. 

Salt, mustard, ginger, cayenne pepper. 
 Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

(The rope is turned more quickly as the one line verse progresses from salt to 
pepper. The line is then repeated until the girl skipping' downs' the rope). 

(Gomme [1898], 204, [Deptford, England]; O'Suilleabhain, [1942], 
668,[Ireland?]; Daiken [1949],63, [Great Britain]; Abrahams [1969], 175, 
[Texas], Brady, [1975], 78, [Dublin]; Kane [1983], 80, Skipping & Ball 
Rhyme, [Belfast]; Leyden [1993],126) 

79 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

61. 

High, low, jolly, pepper. 
 Limerick City, (Spring 1980). 

For "high," the rope is raised off the ground and then turned. The person 
skipping then has to jump higher when skipping.  For "low," she has to skip 
lower than normal. For "jolly," she twirls around. For "pepper," the rope is 
turned fast. 

(Abrahams [1969], 63) 

In another Limerick version, the one line goes as follows: 

61a. 

High, low, quick, slow, medium, pepper (fast). All the others are self 
explanatory. 

In Cork City (Spring 1979), the version is more elaborate. 

61b. 

High, low, medium, slow, jolly, rocky, happy, pepper. 

For "high," you turn the rope high. 
For "low," you turn the rope low. 
For "medium," you turn the rope in a "normal" fashion, neither fast nor 
slow. 
For "slow," you turn the rope slowly. 
For "jolly," the rope is "wriggled" and the girl jumping has to jump over it 
and go down low as she does it. She does it ten times. 
For "rocky," shake the rope as you are turning it, creating an unevenness as 
the rope turns. 
For "happy," you hop over the rope. 
For "pepper," the rope is turned very fast. 

(Abrahams [1969], 63) 

61c. 

In St. Catherine's School in Bishopstown, Cork, girls sing the same 
rhyme, but instead of saying "jolly", they say "dolly." For "dolly," you go 

80 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

down low and skip. Whatever of these you "down" on, "you have to do ten 
times with the rope going real fast." (Fieldnotes-one of the girl's skipping). 

In Tralee, Co. Kerry, girls sing: 

61d. 

High, low, medium, walky, talky. 

The same explanation holds for "high," "low," "medium," as in 61b 
above. For "walky," the girls turning the rope walk while turning the rope, so 
that sometimes you might find yourself skipping sideways. For "talky," the 
girl turning the rope talks to you while you are skipping. They ask you five 
questions like: 

Where do you live? 
Whose your boyfriend? 
What's your age? 
Then you turn to the other girl and she asks you more 
questions. 

Oak Park, Tralee, Co.Kerry, (Spring 1980). 

61e. 

High, low, jolly, pepper. 
 Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

61f. 

High low, medium, slow. 
 Ennis, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

62. 

Roundy, Suzi, bluebell, pepper. 
(Faster and faster ten times.) 
If you "down," on "roundy," you twirl around or walk 
around in circles. 
For "Suzi," you skip for 13 ordinary steps. 
For "bluebell," jump from side to side over the rope.  
For "pepper," skip ten times at a fast pace. 

Cork City, Southside, (Spring 1979). 

81 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

The following rhyme, sung in Tra1ee, Co. Kerry, and has an endurance line 
at the end that goes, "tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor," during which time the 
rope is turned fast. 

63. 

Mrs. Brown she lives by the shore. 
She's got children three and four.  
The eldest one is twenty one.  
And she's going to marry a  
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. 

Mrs. Brown: (Daiken [1949], 64 [Great Britian]; Abrahams [1969],131; 
Brady [1975],65, [Dublin]). Tinker, Tailor etc: (Daiken [1949], 63, [Great 
Britian, 68, [Dublin]; Daiken [1963], 26, [Dublin]; Brady [1975], 90, 
[Dublin]; Leyden [1993], 135) 

Another Tra1ee, Co. Kerry, collected in Spring 1980, the version goes as 
follows: 

63a. 

Mrs. Brown lived by the shore. 
She had children two and four. 
Oldest one is twenty four. 
She's going to marry a 
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, 
Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief. (Speed up the 
rope.) 
She's going to marry in high heels, low heels, flat heels. 
Is she going to wear rags, cotton, silk, wool? 
(For the last three lines, the rope is speeded up.) 

(Leyden [1993], 135-6, for the last two lines). 

Sometimes girls in Tra1ee, Co. Kerry sing the following by itself: 

63b. 

Who will you marry? 
Tinker, tailor, Beggerman, sailor. (Whomever you down 
on, you'll marry). 

82 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

Will you be a Queen, Princess, or a maid? 
Will you wear high heels, low heels, 
Ragged shoes, patched shoes? 
What will you go to Mass in? 
Carriage, car, walk or a horse? 
Then whatever the girl "downed" on, in each line, is 
called out at the end of the rhyme. 

Presentation Convent, Tralee.Co. Kerry, 
(Spring 1980). 

63c. 

Another Tralee, Co. Kerry version ends with the following lines: 

1,2, Tinker, Tailor, Captain, Sailor, 
Lord Mayor, General, Duke, 
Went to London all dressed in Blue. 

A Cork version sung by girls in the Northside (Cathedral Road) is similar to 
the first Tralee version (#63 above) with a few minor changes. 

63d. 

Mrs. Brown she lives by the shore. 
She has children three and four. 
And the eldest one is twenty four, 
And she's getting married to the boy next door. 
Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor. (Speed up rope.) 

Another Cork City version goes as follows: 

63d. 

Old Misses Brown, 
She lives by the shore. 

Mercy Convent Primary School, Southside, 
Cork City, (Spring 1979). 

In the Glen area of Cork City, girls sing: 

83 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

63e. 

Mrs. Brown she lives by the shore. 
She's got children three and four. 
And the eldest one is twenty four. 
And she's getting married to the boy next door. 
Sing 1,2,3. 
Tinker, tailor, captain, sailor, (Speed up rope.) 
Lord Mayor, general, Duke, 
Cowboy London dressed in blue. 

64. 

I had a motorbike, No. 48. 
I went around the corner, (Run out and in.) 
And never pulled my brake. 
A policeman caught me, 
And put me in jail. 
How many years was I there? (The rope speeds up.) 

Cork City, Southside, (Spring 1979). 

(Abrahams [1969], 80) 

65. 

Cinderella, dressed in yella, 
Went downtown to buy an umbrella. 
On her way she met a fella. 
How many kisses did she get? 
1 10. Skip fast. 

Presentation Convent, 5th class, Tralee, Co. 
Kerry, (Spring 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969], 30-31; McCaughan [1971-2], 20, [Belfast]; Leyden 
[1993],132) 

65a. 

Cinderella, dressed in yella, 
Went upstairs to get her umbrella. 
On her way she met her fella, 
How many kisses did she get? 
5-10-15-20 ............ ! (Skip fast.) 

Mallow, Co. Cork (Spring 1979). 
84 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

65b. 

Cinderellla, dressed in yella, 
Went upstairs to kiss her fella. 
By mistake she kissed a snake 
How many kisses did she give him? 
1,2,3 ............... etc. 
(Skip faster and faster until you down.) 

Ennis Girls School, Co. Clare, (Spring 1980). 

66. 

Fire, fire, false alarm, 
I fell into my boyfriend's arms. 
How many kisses did he give me? 
1,2,3,4, ......... etc. (skip fast.) 
(If you miss, you go to the end of the line. 

Cork City, Southside.St. Catherine's School, 
Bishopstown, (Spring 1980). 

(Abrahams [1969],49) 

67. 

Jelly on the plate, 
Jelly on the plate, 
Wibbly, Wobbly, Wibbly,Wobbly. 
Jelly on the plate. 
Sixpence on the floor, 
Sixpence on the floor, 
Go pick it up, go pick it up. 
Sixpence on the floor. 
Baby in the pram, 
Eating bread and jam. 
How many slices did she get? 
5-10-15-20-25-30 ........... ! (Turn the rope fast.) 

Mallow.Co Cork. 

(Abrahams [1969], 99; Brady [1975],86; Leyden [1993],129) 

85 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

67a. 

Jelly on the plate, 
Jelly on the plate, 
Wibbly, wobbly, wibbly wobbly, 
Jelly on the plate. 
Sausage on the pan........ 
Turn it over, turn it over, 
Sausage on the pan. 
Baby on the floor......... 
Pick it up, pick it up, 
Baby on the floor. 
Robber in the house........ 
Kick him out, kick him out, 
Robber in the house. 

Ballytruckle, John's Hill, John's Park, 
Waterford City. 

The next rhyme, a divination rhyme, is a combination of two rhymes, 
"Strawberry Custard" & "John And Mary went for a ride." 

68. 

Strawberry custard, cream on top.  
Tell me the name of your sweetheart. 
A .............................. Z. 
John and Mary went for a ride,  
Around the countryside. 
John asked Mary will you be my bride. 
Yes/No. 
Maybe so. (Skip fast for last two lines.) 

Listowel, Co. Kerry. 

("Strawberry custard etc": Gomme 2, [1898],202; Opie, [1947],22; Daiken 
[1949],67, [Tipperary], 70 [Great Britian];Abrahams [1969], 73, 

(John and Mary etc: Abrahams [1969], 99-100, [Texas]) 

68a. 

John and Joan went for a ride. 
John asked Joan would you be my bride. 
Yes, No, maybe so. 

86 



 

BUCKLEY SINGING GAMES 

How many kisses did he throw? 
10,20,30,40 ........................ 100. 
How many children did he get? 
Were they triplets, twins? 
What kind of house- palace, cottage, house? 
Will you be a tramp, queen or princess? 

Waterford City. 

69. 

S-H-O-P, 
S-H-O-P.  
S-H-O-P, 
Repeat while turning the rope fast. 
If you "down on" 'S', you skip slow.  
If you down on 'H', you hop on one leg.  
If you down on 'O', you skip ordinary.  
If you down on 'P', you skip fast. 

Limerick city. 

70. 

Firecracker, firecracker, 
Bumb, bumb, bumb. 
The boys got the muscles, 
The teachers got the brains. 
The girls got the sexy legs, 
And we won the game. 
Extra, Extra, read all about it. 
We won the game. 
I give you a nickel, 
I give you a dime, 
And I'll bet you, 
I'll be back in time. (run out and back by a certain time.) 

Croom, Co. Limerick. 

WORKS CITED 

Abrahams, Roger, ed. Jump-Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of 
 Texas Press for The American Folklore Society, 1969. 
Abrahams, Roger. & Rankin, Lois. Editors. Counting-Out Rhymes: A Dictionary. 
 Austin: University of Texas Press for The American Folklore Society, 1980. 
Adams, J.R.R. "Children's Games in County own a Century Ago." Ulster Folklife, 
 37,1991: 13-21. 

87 



 

SINGING GAMES BUCKLEY 

Austin, Roger. "Playground Culture in Northern Ireland." Ulster Folklife, 35, 
 1989: 109-112. 
Brady, Eilis. All In! All In! A Selection Of Dublin Children 50 Traditional Street 
 Games With Rhymes And Music. Dublin: Comhairle Bhealoideas Eireann, 
 1975. 
Castleblayney Community Enterprise. Along the black  pig’s dyke -folklore from 

Monaghan and south Armagh. Castleblayney, 1993.  
Colgan, Brendan. Let’s Play: Children’s Games. Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1980. 
Daiken, Leslie. Children’s  Games Throughout the Year. London: B.T.Batsford 

Ltd, 1949.  
______, Out Goes She: Dublin Street Rhymes. Dufour Editions, 1965.  
Gomme, Alice. The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Volume 
 I. 1894. Ed. David Nutt. London. New York: Dover Publications, 
 Incorporated, 1964. 
_______, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland, Volume II. 
 1898. Ed. David Nutt. London. New York: Dover Publications, Incorporated, 
 1964. 
Kane, Alice. Songs and Sayings of an Ulster Childhood. Ed. Edith Fowke. Dublin: 
 Wolfhound Press, 1983. 
Leyden, Maurice. Boys and Girls Come Out To Play: A Collection of Irish Singing 
 Games. Belfast: Appletree Press, 1993. 
MacColl, Ewan. & Behan, Dominic. The Singing Streets: Childhood Memories of 
 Ireland and Scotland. Sleeve Notes by Kenneth S.Goldstein. Folkways 
 Records: FW 8501, 1958. 
MacThomais, Eamonn. Janey Mac Me Shirt is Black. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 
 1982. 
McCaughan, Michael. '''Cinderella Dressed in Yella': Some Belfast Skipping 
 Rhymes." Ulster Folk Museum Yearbook, 1971-72. 
Meek, Bill. Moonpenny: A Collection of Rhymes, songs and play-verse for and by 
 children gathered in Ireland. Cork City: Ossian Publications, 1985. 
Ni Fhloinn, Bairbre. "The Heart of Breiffne: The Traditions, Ballads, Legends & 
 Folklore from Mid-Cavan 1978-83." Kids' Stuff. Ed. Anna Sexton. Cumann 
 Staire Leathratha: 65-88. 
Nic Amhlaoibh, Brona. "Margadh na bPaisti." Bealoideas. 1980-81: 59-73.  
Nihil, I. J. "Forosa: A Study o Some Children's Games." Ulster Folklife, 12 
 (1966): 14-17. 
O'Boyle, Carmel. Cut The Loaf:  The Irish Children’s Songbook. Cork City: The 
 Mercier Press, 1986. 
O'Conchubhair, Padraigh. "Children's Games From Offaly." Bealoidas. (1947): 
 186-200. 
Opie, Iona & Peter. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Oxford: Oxford 

University Press, 1959.  
______, The Singing Game. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.  
Porcheddu, Annarella. "Children's Games And Rhymes In Cork City." Diss. 
 University College Cork, Ireland, 1991. 

88 



 
 

 THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL: 
A DILEMMA IN EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY GIRL SCOUTING 

LAUREEN TEDESCO 
In the late teens and early 1920s, when the Girl Scouts Incorporated were 

sending field workers across the nation to train troop leaders and establish the 
growing organization's reputation, girls and Boy Scouts of America 
Scoutmasters tackled the problem of Girl Scout training in their own way: the 
Scoutmasters, independently or at the request of local girls, taught the girls 
the basics of Boy Scout training and then wrote to national Girl Scout 
headquarters for help. The letters often expressed urgency on the part of the 
girls who had asked the letter-writers to get Girl Scout materials for them. 
One letter asks, "Would you kindly reply by return mail as the girls want to 
get their uniforms as soon as they pass their test" (Whitehead 22 Nov. 1920). 
A Birmingham, Alabama, Scoutmaster justified his involvement as "a duty 
that I owe these girls," who had recruited his help (Edmy 27 Nov. 1921). The 
father of a Boy Scout in Davenport, Iowa, reported to Boy Scout headquarters 
that eighteen girls had called at his home to ask him to find out whether Girl 
Scouts existed in this country 
(the letter was forwarded to the Girl Scouts) (Andrews 14 Oct. 1918). A 
Largo, Florida, Scoutmaster addressing Girl Scout staff members as "Dear 
Co-Workers" reported that local girls wanted "some organization similar to 
the Boy Scouts of America" (Roberts 19 Nov. 1921). Some of these men 
volunteered to lead Girl Scout troops themselves (See, for example, Parkins 
10 Mar. 1922). Others asked for help in finding a woman leader who could 
build on the foundation they had laid. 

These Boy Scout workers' perception that the separately run Boy Scout 
and Girl Scout institutions were doing essentially the same work mirrored a 
popular perception that persists today. The Scoutmasters' willingness to give 
girls the apparently universal "basics" of Scouting highlights a central 
question about the founding of the Girl Scouts: How much was founder 
Juliette Low seeking to offer girls the same program, broadening the scope of 
activities available to girls and women, and how much were she and early Girl 
Scout officials softening or "feminizing" the core Scouting material?1 The 
men who wrote to Girl Scout headquarters either missed the gendered 
adaptations that Low had made and that British Boy Scout founder Robert 
Baden-Powell had earlier built into the Girl Guide program, or they 
understood the shared (masculine) heritage of the girls' and boys' programs. 
To some degree, the adults who sponsored Girl Scout troops, allowed their 
daughters to join them, and provided the infrastructure needed for camping 
and service projects saw the common Scouting tenets and activities as 
transcending gender differences, or as relevant to girls 



 

THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL TEDESCO 

as well as to boys. And the girls' eagerness to get their uniforms underscores 
the appeal and novelty of the military-inspired features of the program in the 
World War I era. While at the national level, the separately run Boy Scouts of 
America emphasized its distinctly masculine identity and sought distance 
from the Girl Scouts Inc., the girls' organization often highlighted the 
similarities between the two programs, pursuing parallel activities and health 
training for girls. 

Girl Scouting before the 1930s drew on both feminine gender codes and 
masculine symbolism, its gendered status complicated by the organization's 
borrowings from the Boy Scouts, Low's deliberate re-appropriation of Boy 
Scout forms and symbols, and the mixture of male and female iconography 
used in the first four handbooks.2 Girl Scout handbooks appropriated the 
figures of the pioneer and the soldier, offered girls male examples from the 
frontier era and the Great War, and chose as their exemplary women those 
who excelled in nontraditional endeavors, though emphasizing the 
homemaking skills of the most famous, Louisa May Alcott. In this essay, I 
examine the masculine heritage of the Girl Scouts, as well as the program's 
seemingly genderless emphasis on exercise and public safety, in the 1920 
Girl Scout handbook, Scouting for Girls, the organization's longest and most 
military instruction manual. The handbook's army analogies were particularly 
attractive during and just after the Great War, when American girls and 
women had turned out for war work in record numbers.3 The military models 
offered to girls and adult women-at a time when they could not join the 
armed forces enabled an imagined identity that was strong, capable, and 
rewarded. The program's relatively new outdoor activities for girls-camping, 
hiking, and military drill-passed muster with adults because they met a 
perceived need for health and outdoor exercise in the nation's future mothers. 
The pioneer-life aspects of the Girl Scouts' camping, nature study, and 
woodcraft skills assuaged fears that technology would rob young Americans 
of resourcefulness. At the same time that it allowed girls to play with hatchets 
and send coded messages with signal flags, Scouting for Girls trained girls in 
efficient "modern" ways of handling the historically feminine provinces of 
home, sick relatives, and children. Girls learned traditional morality, such as 
an emphasis on sexual purity, in more up-to-date packaging. 

Before the Girl Scouts began in the United States in 1912-13 (first as 
Girl Guides and a year later rechristened as Girl Scouts), British girls had 
appropriated the activities described in Baden-Powell's 1908 Scouting for 
Boys (Mitchell 119). Girls' public appearance at Baden-Powell's Crystal 
Palace inspection of the Boy Scouts, however, spurred Baden-Powell to 
develop a tamer girls' program, the Girl Guides, to entice girls away from 
Boy Scouting. Still, Scouting-style activities for girls got some 

90 



 

TEDESCO THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AM ERICAN GIRL 

endorsement from adults on both sides of the Atlantic, and even Baden-
Powell's more "womanly" program, developed with his sister Agnes, allowed 
girls to follow tracks across the moors, practice signaling, and bandage 
imagined victims of severe injuries. One British Girls' Reader editor praised 
scouting as "'a wholly fresh phase of woman's activity,' for 'healthy, open-air, 
adventure-loving young women, who go about their work of tracking, 
spying, signaling and what-not with a zeal and intelligence that may well set 
an example to their male confreres'" (qtd. in Mitchell 122). 

On this side of the Atlantic as well, fresh-air adventure for girls received 
hearty adult approval, via "woodcraft" organizations such as the Camp Fire 
Girls (1912), the Girl Scouts, and the YWCA's Girl Reserves (1918). 
Outdoor adventures akin to scouting appeared in American girls' series 
fiction of the 1910s, with Outdoor Girls, Pioneer Girls, Wide-Awake Girls, 
Red Cross Girls and a host of heroines with their own series taking overnight 
trips, rescuing accident victims, and hiking outdoors. The unofficial Camp 
Fire Girl and Girl Scout series by various authors further capitalized on the 
contemporary climate for girls' outdoor activities, also apparent in Lina and 
Adelia Beard's, On the Trail: An Outdoor Book for Girls (1915). Sally 
Mitchell places the scouting phenomenon in Britain in a chapter of The New 
Girl, devoted to "Being a Boy," exploring turn-of-the (twentieth)-century 
girls' adoption of male personae. 

The Girl Scouts-like the slightly tamer Girl Guides-used the foundation 
of Baden-Powell's initial Scouting program for boys, with its models of 
organization, awards, and moral pledges as well as its "scouting" or 
wilderness survival training. The feminine overlay included extensive 
homemaking training, moralistic injunctions to do only those things that 
could comfortably be exposed to group scrutiny, and an emphasis on 
childcare and female health. Girl Scouts earned more home-making badges 
than outdoor ones and had to demonstrate childcare, nursing, and personal 
health skills to achieve the highest rank, First Class. Still, Girl Scouts wore 
khaki uniforms visually echoing the Boy Scouts', could earn military inspired 
lifesaving medals, learned the signaling codes used by the Army and Navy, 
and marched in patriotic parades during the Great War. Recommended 
reading for Girl Scouts and their officers included the Boy Scout and 
Scoutmaster handbooks (1920, 540, 544-45).4 

The Girl Scout organization benefited from a growing public belief that 
boys and girls should have similar recreational opportunities. Although the 
Boy Scouts' chief executive campaigned against the Girl Scout name for 
seven years through letters and social pressure for the girls' group to become 
Camp Fire Girls or Girl Guides, his workers in the field sometimes missed 
the message that Girl Scouting must differ from Boy Scouting for the boys' 
program to remain "manly." The instructional texts emphasized 

91 



 

THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL TEDESCO 

the "womanly" character of Girl Scout training, but Girl Scout officials 
politely, but steadily, resisted Boy Scout Executive James E. West's pressure 
to change the name,5 expressing in internal communications their 
commitment to offering equal experiences to girls. Their belief in separate 
spheres-in a woman's domain of influence through good home and social 
management-seems at times incongruously balanced with their insistence that 
girls be offered some of the same experiences as boys. The incongruity can 
perhaps be explained by the conservative character-training program that 
Scouting activities for both boys and girls framed. The underlying program 
sought to restrain precocious sexuality and instill ardent patriotism and civic 
service. As Mary Rothschild and Georgeanne Scheiner note, in the 1920s 
"Girl Scouting saw itself as a conscious promoter of 'up-to-date womanhood' 
but also as a bulwark against flappers and American moral decline" (317). 
Girl Scout organizers sought to preserve the sexual mores and domestic focus 
of traditional womanhood, with a modern recognition of career opportunities 
and voting powers. They also, however, offered novel experiences to pre-
teen and adolescent girls, experiences that included trying on the 
independence and self-reliance expressed in the group-sanctioned uniforms. 

The mature expression of early Girl Scouting's dual impulses towards 
appropriately feminine training for girls and gender parity appears in the 
1920 Girl Scout handbook, Scouting for Girls. Prepared during World War I, 
drawing from the nation's experiences at war, Scouting for Girls reflects 
shifting expectations of what girls "can do to help their country," as the title 
of the earlier handbook puts it. The 1920 handbook outlines ways to give 
social and government service, includes pictures of the military-style 
insignia and life-saving medals a girl could earn, and depicts Girl Scout 
camps with tent-lined streets laid out in military-camp formation and a 
bugle-accompanied flag-raising at dawn. The instructional and motivational 
text challenges girl readers to develop the physical stamina necessary to 
climb a high mountain and draws analogies between soldiers in the Great 
War and Girl Scouts saving lives. Its 558 pages contain articles by experts on 
home nursing, nature study, and outdoor living, attempting to transmit to the 
10 to 18-year-old Girl Scout the knowledge and experience needed to earn 
badges on citizenship, pioneering, star gazing, and telegraphy, as well as the 
more traditionally feminine child nursing, cooking, and gardening. In 
addition to group badges for Scout Aide, Woodcraft Scout, Scout Neighbor, 
and Land Scout, all of them including components of health or homemaking, 
there are instructions for military drill, with variations in the types of 
marching steps and orders to give so that the groups of Girl Scouts will pivot 
and file off in columns. These activities are presented as means to discipline 
and impressive displays for the public. 

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No subsequent Girl Scout handbook has held so much information, 
expected so much of the reader, or supplemented so thoroughly the 
traditional expectations of girls with physical challenges and the tools for 
outdoor exploration. Written at the time of a peculiar conjunction of 
Progressive-era interest in social welfare through play and a war-expanded 
need for everyone's help, Scouting for Girls spoke to the 10 to 18-yearold girl 
as a capable, efficient being who could prepare herself to have the only cool 
head in an emergency. Its admonitions to her appealed to her desire to make 
large contributions to society, presenting personal hygiene, safety 
knowledge, and physical fitness as preparations for hero(in)ism. This 
instruction manual was the organization's first to develop technical pictures 
of girls saving the drowning and using semaphore flags, instruction which, in 
the two earlier books, 1913 and its revision in 1916, used drawings of Boy 
Scouts (1913, 24) or soldiers (1916, 77) for signaling and of boys for 
lifesaving (1913, 92-93; 1916, 122-23).6 The 1920 handbook represents the 
organization's increasing adaptations to its audience of girls, but it also 
displays the Girl Scouts' continued appropriation of the uniform color, 
insignia, and opportunities of the unaffiliated Boy Scouts of America. Low 
and her first national secretary wanted to use the Boy Scout emblem, the 
fleur-de-lis, as the Girl Scout symbol, but Chief Scout Executive James West 
politely objected, suggesting instead the trefoil, or three-leafed clover, that 
Baden-Powell had assigned to the British girls' program (West, letter to 
Johnston, 9 July 1913).7 The Boy Scouts of America at the national level 
jealously guarded its uniform, name, and insignia with patents, trademarks, 
and legal action against imitators (Macleod 156-57). The organizational 
similarities, the breadth of the handbook, and the image of Girl Scouts as 
near-adults lasted only as long as this handbook was in effect: the 1927 
revision of Scouting for Girls cut the length by 94 pages and removed many 
of the analogies to soldiers. By the time of the minor 1929 revision of the 
handbook, the uniform color had become grey-green, the handbook itself 
featured a green rather than a khaki cover, and troop "officers" (Lieutenant 
and Captain) had become "leaders" (Girl Scouts of the USA, Highlights 10). 
In their early incarnations, though, the captain, lieutenant, optional second 
lieutenant--a girl 16 or older--and corporal, or assistant patrol leader, 
represented the military values of authority and obedience. 

The pseudo-military appearance of the khaki-clad Girl Scouts and their 
khaki-clad handbook were a passing phenomenon, a reflection of an 
unparalleled moment in women's and girls' history. At a time when women 
did not serve in the U.S. armed forces, the program's inclusion of drill and 
military uniforms opened an imaginary portal to a realm of ritual and 
service from which women were excluded. General public acceptance of 

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the military features of the program suggests that its values outweighed 
American conceptions of gender norms. 

The Girl Scout program, like the analogous one for boys, used pledges 
and laws-a series of statements about the positive character traits of all 
members-as the repeated, spoken affirmations that accompanied the girls' 
ceremonies and weekly meetings. These laws asserted the honor, loyalty, 
helpfulness, friendliness, courtesy, obedience, cheerfulness, and thrift of the 
Girl Scout, as well as her kindness to animals and her physical and moral 
cleanliness. Initial entrance as a "tenderfoot" required memorizing the Girl 
Scout motto, slogan, laws, and promise, and leaders were to incorporate 
these statements of faith into their regular activities. In consequence, 
seemingly values-neutral Girl Scout pastimes carried the ideals of the 
national organization. The motto and slogan, "Be Prepared" and "Do a Good 
Turn Daily," conveyed an ethic of service, as did the promise, "On My 
Honor, I will Try: / To do my duty to God and my Country. / To help other 
people at all times. / To obey the Scout Laws" (1920 [xii]). Service in the 
promise is religious, patriotic, and social. It is left to the individual to 
determine what counts as service to God, country, and others, and when one 
is doing one's best. However, the rest of the handbook, and, one presumes, 
troop leaders' instruction, gives a context to the kinds of preparation and 
service that "count" in the Girl Scout ethos. 

The badge and rank ceremonies prescribed in the handbook echo 
military rites and underscore the ideology of the program. For example, the 
presiding Girl Scout official tells First Class candidates, "'You should 
thoroughly understand by now the meaning of duty to God and Country, the 
privilege of helpfulness to others, and the seriousness of the Scout Laws'" 
(50). The First Class Girl Scout promises to pay back "in generous service" 
the effort that many people contributed to her achievement of First Class 
(51). When a Girl Scout meets the requirements for Scouting's highest 
award, the Golden Eaglet--now obsolete--the Girl Scout official emphasizes 
to the Golden Eaglet "'that you understand now even better than the average 
Girl Scout that your great principles of duty to God and Country, 
helpfulness to others, and obedience to the Scout Laws, are lessons that no 
Scout can fully learn as long as she lives'" (53). This understanding stems 
from the Girl Scout "training." 

Recurring themes in the handbook clarify the focus of Girl Scout 
preparedness: Girl Scout training can prevent accidents or rescue people 
involved in them; Girl Scout activities such as camping and hiking ensure 
girls' physical health; and members of the organization learn efficient 
methods of housecleaning and childcare. The handbook represents 
membership in the Girl Scouts as strategic preparation for womanhood in 
the twentieth century. It calls for a return to the broad-scale usefulness of 
pioneers, but wants girls to combine old-style resourcefulness with the 

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new household efficiency and civic action expected of twentieth-century 
women. The woman of tomorrow, while doing some of the same activities 
as the woman of yesterday, has a new self-confidence and pride of 
accomplishment: The Girl Scout makes bandages and clothes, bathes babies, 
or gets meals "quick[l]y and cheerfully," and takes pride in her badges and 
"the sense of independence that comes from all this skill with her hands" 
(35). First Aid gives the Girl Scout "a real glow of pleasure to feel that... she 
may be able to save a life some day," and invalid cooking and nursing "may 
make her a valuable asset in case of any great disaster or epidemic" (35). Girl 
Scouts did, in fact, help during the flu epidemic of 1918. 

I am emphasizing in this article the adventurous and nontraditional 
aspects of the 1920 Girl Scout handbook, but the adventurous sections of the 
handbook are interspersed with more routine expectations of girls. The 
grandly named Scout Aide designation, for example, goes to girls who earn a 
group of badges in home economics, child care, First Aid, home nursing, 
public health, and personal health. The text seeks to establish the primacy of 
these skill sets: 

This badge will probably be regarded by the outside world 
as the most important decoration the Girl Scouts can win, 
and all Scouts who will try for it should realize that those 
who wear it will represent the organization in a very 
special sense and will be eager to prove their practical 
knowledge and ability in the important subjects it stands 
for. (105) 

Household economics, the "Scout Aide" section of the handbook asserts, is 
"the great general business and profession of women" (105). The text 
optimistically expects Girl Scouts and voting women to wield power over 
home and health issues: "Practical knowledge of Personal Health, Public 
Health and Child Care will add to the efficiency and happiness of this nation, 
and the women of today have a better chance to control these things than 
ever before" (105). The organization's domestic feminism, and its emphasis 
on intelligently handled home management, place it firmly within the home 
economics movement.8 

At the same time, the text challenges the reader to prepare herself 
physically and mentally for whatever circumstances might require. The 
preparation primarily involves safety knowledge, first-aid training, and 
physical fitness, as well as developing keen observation skills and visual 
judgment of distances, heights, and bulk measurements. The motivational 
text calls the attitude of being a giver rather than a taker "the spirit that 
makes the older Scout into a fine, useful, dependable woman, who does 

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so much good in her community that she becomes naturally one of its 
leading citizens, on whom everyone relies, and of whom everyone is proud. 
It may end in the saving of a life, or in some great, heroic deed for one's 
country" (6). While the latter phrase sounds like war service, the reader is 
reminded that life-saving and grand patriotic acts are simply "bigger 
expressions of the same feeling that makes the smallest Tenderfoot try to do 
at least one good turn a day" (6; emphasis in original). Even so, lifesaving is 
one of the goals of Girl Scout preparation enumerated in Section II, 
"Principles of the Girl Scouts." The Girl Scouts is also preparing for "the big 
duties" (presumably marriage and children) and training her body to be "the 
fine machine it was meant to be" (3). Personal health and vigor, home 
efficiency, and emergency preparedness are the stated goals of Girl 
Scouting. Community service is also a version of "do a good turn daily" (3). 
As the text explains: 

This is the spirit that makes the older Scout into a fine, 
useful, dependable woman, who does so much good in her 
community that she becomes naturally one of its leading 
citizens on whom everyone relies, and of whom everyone 
is proud. It may end in the saving of a life, or in some 
great, heroic deed for one's country. (6). 

The hope of performing a grand act is continually dangled before the Girl 
Scout, but she is also trained for the mundane daily tasks that are more likely 
to be her lot. 

The Scout: A Pioneer Ideal for the Twentieth Century 

The handbook's central metaphor for the girl is the scout, the (male) 
handyman of the frontier. The passages on scouts and their hardiness refer to 
an idealized pre-technological era when men and women could fend for 
themselves. These passages' references to the resourcefulness of earlier 
Americans offer a key to the cross-gendering of the model for the young girl. 
Worries about the rising generation's self-sufficiency trump concerns about 
appropriately gendered behavior. Section IV, "Who Are the Scouts?" 
invokes the tougher pre-machine-age past: Although "[o]ur pioneer 
grandmothers might have been frightened by the sight of one of our big 
touring cars, for instance, or puzzled as to how to send a telegram, ... they 
knew an immense number of practical things that have been entirely left out 
of town-bred lives, and for pluck and resourcefulness in a tight place it is to 
be doubted if we could equal them today" (17). The text decries the laziness 
and helplessness bred by the attitude embedded in the Kodak advertising 
slogan "You push a button and we do the rest" (17). 

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On the frontier, "there was no button to press, as we all know, and nobody to 
'do the rest': everybody had to know a little about everything and be able to 
do that little pretty quickly, as safety and even life might depend on it" (17; 
emphasis in original). The anxiety that technology is edging out practical 
knowledge reflects the same concern that fueled John Dewey's educational 
philosophy. 

While Scouting for Girls offers several young girls as examples of grit 
and determination on the frontier, its foundational models of the self reliant 
person are male, "the old 'Scouts,' of whom Natty Bumpo, in Cooper's 
famous old Indian tales is the great example" (17). The frontier scouts 

were explorers, hunters, campers, builders, fighters, 
settlers, and in an emergency, nurses and doctors 
combined. They could cook, they could sew, they could 
make and sail a canoe, they could support themselves 
indefinitely in the trackless woods, they knew all the 
animals and plants for miles around, they could guide 
themselves by the sun and stars, and finally, they were 
husky and hard as nails and always in the best of health 
and condition. (18) 

This romanticized image of the Scout--living, incidentally, without women's 
contributions--is the central metaphor of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouting and 
appears "whole" in the 1920 Girl Scout handbook. The 1927 edition 
regenders the passage, making it refer to "our pioneer grandmothers" (14) 
rather than to men. Because the American program echoed the "Scout" name 
in the second year of its version of "Girl Guiding," the 1920 passage on male 
"Scouts" presents the same standards for girls. While one might view Girl 
Scouting as "softer" than Boy Scouting, the 1920 text enables a self-vision 
for Girl Scouts that relies on further male examples, the scout as policeman, 
and the cowboy. The scouts "had to act as rough and ready police (for there 
were no men in brass buttons in the woods!) and be ready to support the 
right, and deal out justice, just as our 'cow-boys' of later ranch days had to 
prevent horse stealing" (18). 

The handbook makes its transition from "scouts" to Girl Scouts via 
examples of nineteenth-century "brave, handy girls, who were certainly 
Scouts if ever there were any" (21). These girls include the Quebecoise 
Magdeleine de Verchères, who fended off an Indian attack with the help of 
her younger brothers for eight days (21), pioneer and future suffrage leader 
Anna Howard Shaw (25-26), and wilderness guide Sacajawea (21-22). The 
Girl Scouts could also gain inspiration from the handbook's 

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accounts of Russian girls assisting in the Russian Revolution by delivering 
state secrets for revolutionary leaders (30). Seemingly endorsing the 
revolution, the text recommends similar readiness on the part of American 
Girl Scouts: "All we have to do is to fix Scout habits in our hearts and hands, 
and then when our Country calls us, we shall be as ready as the little Russian 
Scouts were" (31). In the same way that folklorist Jay Mechling yearned for 
life-saving opportunities as a young Boy Scout (36), Girl Scouts could hope 
for opportunities for bravery or helpfulness during a war: "Instances like 
these are very exceptional; they could not occur to one in ten thousand of us; 
but we stay-at-homes can always remind ourselves that it was the obedience, 
the quickness, and the skill learned in quiet, every-day Scouting that made 
these few rise to the opportunity when it came" (31). 

Camping and the Twentieth-Century Girl 

The handbook emphasizes camping and hiking as the means to health 
and as preparation for patriotic service. The aspects of camping highlighted 
in this handbook are those that recover a supposedly lost connection to 
nature and those that build stamina. As the section on "Girl Scout Camping" 
puts it, "A Girl Scout likes to hike and camp. She learns to know the stars 
and becomes acquainted with the plants and animals about her. She gains 
independence from her ability to help herself, and health and strength from 
exercise in the sunshine and fresh air" (313). 

Camping's development of self-reliance is particularly touted in the 
passages excerpted from the writings of Baden-Powell and his wife Olave. A 
Girl Guide handbook passage entitled "How Camping Teaches the Guide 
Law" tells of a man going naked into the American woods to learn to supply 
all of his needs-including clothing-for himself: 

In this way, he lived for over a month in the wild, and 
came out in the end very much better in health and spirits 
and with a great experience of life. For he had learned to 
shift entirely for himself and to be independent of the 
different things we get in civilization to keep us going in 
comfort. (Robert and Olave Baden-Powell, qtd. in 1920, 
36). 

The Baden-Powells use this story to explain the frequent camping in the Boy 
Scouts and Girl Guides: '''[I]n camp life we learn to do without so many 
things which while we are in houses we think are necessary, and find that we 
can do for ourselves many things where we used to think ourselves helpless'" 
(Baden-Powells, qtd. in 1920, 36). The passage hints 

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at Robert Baden-Powell's anxiety about "softness," or race degeneration, an 
anxiety that fueled the eugenics movement that sought to breed a genetically 
superior generation.9 

It wasn't only the British Baden-Powell who sought to recover lost 
reserves of physical and moral strength. The relatively new sport of leisure 
camping via Girl Scouting resonated with early twentieth-century Americans 
seeking simplicity and a connection to the past. Horace Kephart, whose 
Camping and Woodcraft manual is liberally excerpted in the "Camping for 
Girl Scouts" section of Scouting for Girls, specialized in wilderness survival. 
Kephart moved to a remote mountainous region of western North Carolina 
after a nervous breakdown, a crisis in his marriage, and the loss of his job as 
a library director, seeking to "realize the past in the present" (Ellison 352). 
His 1906 Camping and Woodcraft, drawing on his backwoods experiences, 
"became in time the standard work in its field" (352-53). Kephart's attempts 
to recover his equilibrium through outdoor life are akin to the 1920 
handbook's laments over a fading pioneer heritage and its admonitions to the 
reader to learn to shift for herself outdoors without mechanical aids other 
than a compass. Kephart's inclusion in the Girl Scout manual suggests--as 
does the handbook's reference list of camping manuals aimed at girls as well 
as boys10--that camping for girls was becoming an accepted part of American 
culture as city dwellers increasingly retreated to nature, even if they didn't 
stay there. 

The girl camper gets to perform novel duties and carry dangerous 
equipment. The camping group is advised to carry a hatchet (341), and the 
wood scout, the youngest girl in the eight-member Girl Scout patrol, "carries 
a spade, pick axe and cutting axe" (326). The "handy scout" oversees all 
tools and makes furniture and bridges, as well as being "field engineer, 
carpenter, ... the general maker, mender, patcher, splicer and tinker," 
repairing tents and clothing as well (326). The "lighter" "has care of the 
lamps, lanterns, candles, matches, oils, and all 'leaky' stuff' and "must keep 
the camp well illuminated" (326). She also is responsible for sending 
telegraphs and solving electrical problems. The camping experience 
simultaneously offers new responsibilities and the fun of playing with 
dangerous things. Since girls had not typically gone on hunting trips, these 
experiences were newer for them than for Boy Scouts. Also, the instructions 
expect independence of the girls, with no males and no adults other than the 
captain and lieutenant on hand. 

Drawing on male-authored texts, the camping material emphasizes 
physical toughness. For example, the "Camping for Girl Scouts" section 
opens with Walt Whitman's poem "The Open Road": "Henceforth I whimper 
no more, postpone no more, need nothing, / Strong and content, I travel the 
open road..." (313). Like the Kipling poem "The Red Gods" that appears in 
the mountain-climbing section, the Whitman poem 

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celebrates physical vigor and knowledge of outdoor lore. While "The Red 
Gods" features unnamed male protagonists, the Girl Scout material advises 
girls to adapt themselves to the demands of camping. Clothing choices also 
come into play: "When living out of doors, one may make shift for shelter, or 
even go hungry for a space, but there is no substitute for comfortable 
clothing that is safe to use if one would keep well" (317). Instead of wearing 
skirts, which dangerously limit hikers' range of motion, the Girl Scout should 
wear "knickerbockers or bloomers" (314). The Girl Scout is advised how to 
care for her feet so she can endure hikes: she is to change her socks daily, 
never wearing damp ones, and to wear sensible shoes (315) because "no 
army is stronger than its feet" (316). 

To cover ground more quickly in the country, the Girl Scouts are to use 
the Scout's pace of alternating a fixed number of steps running and the same 
number of steps walking. They are to commit to the Girl Scout training to 
learn some simple camping rules and build strength and outdoor know-how 
by hiking, missing their hikes for only "the worst weather"; even "Soft rain 
or snowstorms are very pleasant to hike in" (314). 

Apart from this advice to hike in light rain or snow, the camping 
instructions enable Girl Scout officials to present health advice in an 
adventure context. For example, the Girl-Scout-sponsored text suggests, 
"Keep the feet straight when walking. If a Girl Scout notices the tracks of an 
Indian, the first hikers in this country, she will find them invariably straight 
forward" (316). This advice to girls on posture uses a presumably male 
Indian as its model and follows up the point with a military reference: 
"Scientists have invariably agreed that the dancing school habit of turning 
out toes is one of the causes of flat feet, which disqualified so many men for 
army service" (316). 

Mountain-climbing represents the crowning achievement of the 
accomplished Girl Scout camper and hiker. In a section entitled "Mountain 
Climbing" by Eloise Roorbach, we learn that 

Mountain Climbing is the final test of a Girl Scout's 
perseverance in following a trail, in endurance, courage 
and woodcraftmanship. . . . No Girl Scout's education is 
complete until she has seen mountain peaks like waves of 
the sea flashing with snow white foam, piercing the blue 
sky as far as the eye can reach; clouds forming below her 
feet; breathed rare air found only in high places drunk 
from the pure source of rivers, and heard the mighty roar 
of waterfalls. A climb to a high mountain top is an 
experience that will enrich and influence the entire after 
life of whoever has had the hardihood and wisdom to 
accomplish it. (367) 

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As elsewhere in the handbook, this text challenges the Girl Scout to develop 
the needed strength and endurance for the task. Before tackling "this last test 
of scouting," one should "be in perfect physical trim, be able to sleep on the 
ground, have learned to live simply" (367). The author's own mountain-
climbing trip to the new Roosevelt National Park there "found her in better 
physical trim, vigor, strength, and with keenness of vision and joy of life 
increased daily" (370). The considerable space the handbook devotes to 
practical instruction in outdoor recreation demonstrates the social 
acceptability of these vigorous sports for women. 

Being Prepared for Emergencies 

Throughout the handbook, safety, particularly related to new 
technologies, arises as a concern. The Girl Scout is to learn safety measures 
on her own account and must be prepared to rescue the drowning, provide 
artificial respiration, and put out fires or give First Aid. Readying herself for 
these practical needs establishes the girl's Scout identity: "If the Scout with 
the badge keeps her head and shows herself steady, reliable and willing, 
when called upon to help in illness or emergencies, she proves herself a true 
Scout who is living up to the Scout motto of 'BE PREPARED'" (217). 
Baden-Powell suggests that the well-trained Girl Guide (or Scout) can avoid 
the hysteria and revulsion that some people exhibit in an emergency: '''When 
you see an accident in the street or people injured in an air raid, the sight of 
the torn limbs, the blood, the broken bones, and the sound of the groans and 
sobbing all make you feel sick and horrified and anxious to get away from it-
if you're not a Girl Guide. But that is cowardice: your business as a Guide is 
to steel yourself to face it and to help the poor victim'" (Baden-Powell, qtd. 
in 1920, 29). 

While they appeal to the reader's self-importance and thirst for 
adventure, the Girl Scout writers are serious about the safety information 
and about a sense of modernity that is curiously nostalgic in its model of 
womanhood. The Girl Scouts, in fact, with other youth organizations, 
became an important conduit of safety knowledge. 

Among the rather routine safety advice in the handbook are admonitions 
to pay attention to one's surroundings on the street and to avoid strange dogs. 
The Girl Scout is also to prevent fires at home by keeping cloth, paper, and 
fabrics away from flames and keep stairs and hallways clear, and redressing 
"innumerable other careless things which will occur to you" (166). The 
modernization of America, with its burgeoning cities, produced the need for 
advice about using public transportation: "In getting off [street]cars you 
should face in the direction in which the car is going. A simple rule is to get 
off by holding a rod with 

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the left hand and putting the right foot down first. This brings you facing the 
front of the car and prevents your being swept off your feet by the 
momentum of the car" (165). Readers also get information on preventing and 
treating electric shock (198-99), preventing and extinguishing fires fueled by 
kerosene, gasoline, or benzene (202), and avoiding natural gas fires (202). 

If there is a fire in the building, the Girl Scout is to "[k]eep cool, in order 
to remember what to do, and do it quickly" (200). She is given not only 
knowledge but authority: "Turn in a fire at once. Send someone else if 
possible who may not know what to do to the fire" (200). The Girl Scout, 
presumably, will know because of the handbook she has studied. She is, 
though, to follow the instructions of the firefighters when they come because 
"they know exactly what to do" (201). She should "Keep the doors and 
windows closed if possible to prevent draughts from fanning the flames to 
fiercer effort" (201). If she must enter a burning building she should "leave 
some responsible person guarding the door, in order that it may not be left 
open by some one in excitement and the flames fanned beyond control" 
(201). The child or teen is apparently making the decisions about who is 
responsible. Whether real situations ever worked out this way, girls in the 
text are presented as potential rescuers and people in charge. 

The Girl Scout handbook simultaneously gives children additional rules 
to follow and admits them into a world of adult knowledge and superiority 
that many children covet. The rescue charge is empowering and genderless. 
The child learns what to do for a rather thorough list of accidents. She is to 
"give the most help and relief immediately, before expert help can arrive, and 
to have the victim in the best condition possible for the doctor when he 
comes, in order that he may not have to undo whatever has been done before 
he can begin to give the patient relief from his suffering" (166). The text 
details the now-familiar First Aid procedures, such as keeping the crowd 
back, loosening the patient's clothing, turning the head so the patient won't 
choke on his or her vomit, and arranging to move the person by fireman's lift, 
a seat of four arms and hands, or an improvised stretcher (167-69). The Girl 
Scout learns to deal with heat exhaustion, choking, and dislocations and 
fractures (17678), and she learns to make a range of bandage types and 
determine which body part each bandage works best for. The current 
saturation of Red Cross teaching makes these concepts familiar to us; the idea 
of children and teens providing such care was radical in the World War I era 
and the 1920s. The rescue material presumes a fit, capable girl reader, or 
encourages her to become that, and the technical instructions take the girl 
reader seriously. 

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Monitoring the Young Girl's Health 

In addition to caring for the health of the people around her, the Girl 
Scout was to monitor and safeguard her own health. The health messages in 
Scouting for Girls represent a core value that I believe made Girl Scouting's 
less traditional activities for girls acceptable to parents and volunteers. The 
text recommends outside play to give the body the air, heat, and sunlight it 
needs (263), and suggests when in a day to drink six glasses of water. To 
earn the "Health Winner" badge required for the Scout Aide designation, 
girls had to fill in a health chart to track their growth and ensure that they had 
daily bowel movements, twice-weekly baths, and daily exercise, outdoor 
work, and play (271). The girl was to compare her height and weight to a 
national standard for her age, and if she were underweight, she could follow 
the advice in the manual (269-70). Although one might argue that the girls 
are being protected as potential mothers of the nation, Girl Scouting's 
approach to health is the same as Boy Scouting's and offers the same 
remedies: outdoor exercise, active games, and self-monitoring. A 1924 
school health textbook by physician Woods Hutchinson offers the same 
advice of cultivating play for health, suggesting that girls read the Boy Scout 
handbook as well as joining girls' groups (156). 

The text recommends that girls practice daily setting-up exercises--a 
series of stretches (65). The girl reader is introduced to the setting-up 
exercises as a way of "oiling and testing" the machine of the body (273). If 
one neglects this, "the machinery gets rusty and clogged, or the instrument 
gets out of tune and makes horrid noises" (273). The text suggests a morning 
tune-up "before you put on your clothes" and at night to "rest the tired parts 
and exercise the parts that have not been used, so you can even things up" 
(273). Setting-up exercises, like much else in Girl Scouting, have a military 
origin. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the "setting-up drill" or 
"setting-up exercise" as "a course of gymnastic exercises used to give an 
erect carriage"; its first entry, A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises 
(1862) by Archibald Maclaren, refers to "The setting up and position drill of 
recruits." 

Another military-derived drill, marching maneuvers, had health benefits 
and helped captains to handle troops "in an orderly and dignified manner" 
(84). Drill, used in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for boys' 
physical fitness classes, offered adult instructors control. The 13 pages 
devoted to "Girl Scout Drill" praise drill formations as ways to give "an erect 
carriage, alert habit of obedience, and ability to think or act quickly" (84). 
Tenderfoots learn to stand at attention, mark time, march, and do half-step, 
side step, and back step, all in quick time or double time (88). They learn to 
march by flank, move to the rear, and change step. The more complex 
Second-Class Drill includes "oblique march," in which 

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THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL TEDESCO 

Girl Scouts march at an angle in two facing columns, and turning on fixed 
and moving pivots (94). The even harder First-Class Drill includes 
diminishing the front of a column of squads. At the weekly meetings, while 
lined up for drill, the Girl Scouts underwent military inspection. The Captain 
checked the girls "for posture, and for personal appearance, which should be 
neat and clean in every particular, and uniform, which should be correct as 
to style, length, placing of insignia, etc." (56). Traditional expectations of 
good grooming and posture for girls thus assumed the novelty of soldierly 
training. 

Conclusion 

Girl Scouting of the early twentieth century provided a blend of 
separate-spheres thinking with attempts to offer girls the same outdoor 
opportunities available to boys. The organization was committed from its 
founding to instructing the girls in the details of traditional domesticity, but 
Low and other leaders insisted on procuring for girls the hiking and camping 
experiences, exercise, and military-style uniforms that Boy Scouts enjoyed, 
albeit in an altered fashion. The women who re-made the Girl Scout program 
from Boy Scout and Girl Guide models found ways to combine boys' 
pursuits with those more traditionally offered to girls. In doing so, they 
created a uniquely twentieth-century venture that has twenty-first-century 
resonances. Whatever their gains outside the home, most American women 
still have responsibility for work within the home, and the Girl Scouts 
continue to offer a girls-only program that addresses questions of gender-
equity as well as providing some training in domestic tasks. As historian 
Leslie Paris has said of girls' summer camps, Girl Scouting's "capacity for 
allowing girls to reinvent themselves was an important part of [its] power 
and appeal" (49). The 1920 handbook allowed girls to reinvent themselves as 
"male"--capable, independent, leaders--while at the same time fitting into the 
culture in which they were raised and meeting the expectations of their 
families and peers. Today, when Girl Scouting focuses on addressing 
problems commonly facing girls and seeks to expand girls' opportunities in 
math, the sciences, and technology, the anachronistic lessons in signaling and 
knot-tying still address those early fears that technology would replace 
American's ability to fend for themselves. The Scouting game cloaked 
traditional messages for children's and girls' behavior, but it also opened 
some new imaginative possibilities. 

NOTES 

       1 Charles E. Strickland praises Low's perseverance in overcoming her "Southern belle" 
upbringing to create new roles, noting her private championship 

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TEDESCO THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL 

of women's suffrage though the organization remained silent on the matter before 1920. Mary 
Aickin Rothschild argues that Girl Scout officials promoted domestic feminism, deliberately 
widening girls' opportunities within the context of marriage expectations and an updated version 
of the well-prepared homemaker (115). Sherrie A. Inness, on the other hand, sees the program's 
active aspects as promoting a "fleeting sense of agency" masking its conservative agenda of 
pointing girls toward marriage and motherhood that terminate careers (234). Julia Kirk 
Blackwelder contends that the Girl Scouts in the teens and twenties taught girls to expect a 
career as well as marriage and children, noting that middle-class girls--Scouting's largest 
audience--could afford that novel expectation (86). 

2 Katie Kent briefly notes the contradictory impulses in the Girl Scout organization of "an 
emphasis on patriotism, duty, religiosity, and purity" and "the establishment of a social sphere 
for women in which they could wield power, assume male military titles, aid in national defense, 
and participate in physical activities formerly denied them" (353). 

3 For an account of women's organized efforts during the Great War, see William J. Breen, 
chapters seven to eight. 

4 The 1920 handbook urges Captains and Lieutenants to read the leaders' handbooks of 
what it dubs allied organizations, the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, YWCA Girl Reserves, and Girls' 
Clubs of the National League of Women Workers (545), which show that despite differing 
terminology, "our ultimate aim and our broad general principles are precisely the same" (544). 

5 See Rothschild's "To Scout or to Guide?" for a discussion of West's opposition to the Girl 
Scout name and the to-him overly boyish nature of the girls' scouting activities. 

6 For ease of reference, I cite the handbooks by their publication years rather than their 
authors' names. The three different authors and two different titles of the four manuals cited 
make the usual reference by author or author and brief title difficult for the reader to follow. The 
1913 handbook, How Girls Can Help Their Country, lists Savannah naturalist W. J. Hoxie as its 
author, though anecdotal evidence suggests that Juliette Low revised the Girl Guide material that 
formed its core (see Schultz and Lawrence 320). The 1916 handbook of the same title lists Low 
as the copyright holder, but the title page names only Robert and Agnes Baden-Powell, as the 
authors of the text adapted for the American book. The 1920 handbook, Scouting for Girls, 
names "Girl Scouts" as its author and "Girl Scouts Inc." as its publisher, as does the significantly 
abridged 1927 handbook of the same title. 

7 The Girl Scouts did, in fact, adopt the shamrock, or trefoil, as their insignia. 
8 Rima D. Apple and Joanne Pas set link Girl Scouting and high school home 

economics classes in an illuminating way to examine girls' socialization into domesticity. 
9 Michael Rosenthal examines at length Baden-Powell's and the British government's 

worries about the deterioration of the British "race" in Chapter 5 

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THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AMERICAN GIRL TEDESCO 

of The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. 
10 The recommended camping books include Camping and Hiking, Campward Ho!, The 

Boy Camp Manual, The Camp Fire Girls' Vacation Book, and Camp Kits and Camp Life as well 
as Wilderness Homes. The range of this list and the inclusion of other organizations' resources 
as well as works on the playground movement indicate that Girl Scout officials saw themselves 
as participating in a broader recreational movement whose proponents had similar aims. 

WORKS CITED 
 
 
Andrews, Howard R. Letter to Colier [Colin] H. Livingstone. 15 Oct. 1918. "Boy 

Scouts of America—Controversy; Comments—Local Scouts; Alabama-
Wisconsin." File box. Girl Scout Archives. National Historic Preservation 
Center. Girl Scouts of the USA, New York. 

Apple, Rima D., and Joanne Passet. "Learning to Be a Woman: Lessons from 
 Girl Scouting and Home Economics, 1920-1970." Defining Print Culture 
 for Youth: The Cultural Work of Children s Literature. Ed. Anne Lundin and 
 . Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2003. 139-54. 
Beard, Lina, and Adelia Beard. On the Trail: An Outdoor Bookfor Girls. New 
 York: Scribner's, 1915. 
Blackwelder, Julia Kirk. Now Hiring: The Feminization of Work in the United 
 States, 1900-1995. College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1997. 
Breen, William J. Uncle Sam at Home: Civilian Mobilization, Wartime Federalism, 
 and the Council of National Defense, 1917-1919. Contributions in American 
 Studies 70. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984. 
Edmy, J. B. Letter to Girl Scout National Headquarters. 27 Nov. 1921. Typescript 

copy. "Boy Scouts of America—Controversy; Comments--Local Scouts: 
Alabama-Wisconsin." File box. Girl Scout Archives. National Historic 
Preservation Center. Girl Scouts of the USA, New York. 

Ellison, George. "Kephart, Horace Sowers." Dictionary of North Carolina 
Biography. Vol. 3, H-K. Ed. William S. Powell. Chapel Hill: U of North 
Carolina P, 1988. 352-53. 

Girl Scouts Inc. Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts. New 
 York: Girl Scouts Inc., 1920. 
_______. Girl Scouts Inc. Scouting for Girls: Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts. 
 Abridged ed. New York: Girl Scouts Inc., 1927. 
Hoxie, W. J. How Girls Can Help Their Country. 1913. Facsim. ed. New York: 
 Girl Scouts of the U.S.A., 1972. 
Hutchinson, Woods. Building Strong Bodies. The Woods Hutchinson Health 
 Series. Boston: Houghton-Riverside, 1924. 
Inness, Sherrie A. "Girl Scouts, Camp Fire Girls, and Woodcraft Girls: The Ideology 

of Girls' Scouting Novels, 1910-1935." Continuities in Popular Culture: The 
Present in the Past and the Past in the Present and Future. Ed. Ray B. Browne 
and Ronald J. Ambrosetti. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 
1993. 229-40. 

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TEDESCO THE LOST MANHOOD OF THE AM ERICAN GIRL 

Kent, Katie. "Girl Scouts." Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing. Ed. Cathy N. 
Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. 352-53. 

Parkins, J. H. Letter to Sybil M. Gordon. 10 Mar. 1922. Typescript copy. "Boy 
Scouts of America--Controversy; Comments--Local Scouts: Alabama-
Wisconsin." File box. Girl Scout Archives. National Historic Preservation 
Center. Girl Scouts of the USA, New York. 

Roberts, G. C. Letter to Girl Scout Headquarters. 19 Nov. 1921. Typescript copy. 
"Boy Scouts of America--Controversy; Comments--Local Scouts: Alabama-
Wisconsin." File box. Girl Scout Archives. National Historic Preservation 
Center. Girl Scouts of the USA, New York. 

Rothschild, Mary Aickin. "To Scout or To Guide? The Girl Scout-Boy Scout 
 Controversy, 1912-1941." Frontiers 6.3 (1981): 115-21. 
Rothschild, Mary, and Georgeanne Scheiner. "Girl Scouts." Girlhood in America: 
 An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Ed. Miriam Forman-Brunell. Santa Barbara, CA: 
 ABC-Clio, 2001. 316-20. 
Schultz, Glady Denny, and Daisy Gordon Lawrence. Lady from Savannah: The 
 Life of Juliette Low. 1958. New York: Girl Scouts of the USA, 1988. 
Strickland, Charles E. "Juliette Low, the Girl Scouts, and the Role of American 
 Women." Woman’s Being, Woman’s Place: Female Identity and Vocation in 
 American History. Ed. Mary Kelley. Boston: Hall, 1979.252-64. 
Whitehead, George. Letter to Mary C. Clendenin, 22 Nov. 1920. "Boy Scouts of 

America--Controversy; Comments--Local Scouts: Alabama-Wisconsin." File 
box. Girl Scout Archives. National Historic Preservation Center. Girl Scouts of 
the USA, New York. 

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"AUNT BETTS' ATTIC": MONROE, MICHIGAN 

I was in Monroe, Michigan, just about an hour southwest of Detroit, in 
October of 2004 to attend my younger son's wedding. Having some time on 
our hands, my wife and I, accompanied by our older son and his wife, 
decided to visit the Monroe County Historical Museum. We knew little else 
but that they had an extensive exhibit of historical materials about General 
George Armstrong Custer, who had once resided in Monroe. I enjoyed the 
Custer exhibit as I had expected to, but I was delightfully surprised to 
discover an exhibit entitled "Aunt Bett's Attic." 

Elizabeth Upham McWebb, usually called Aunt Betty or Aunt Bett to 
her relatives and youthful fans and known for her "Little Brown Bear" 
stories, donated a life-long collection of children's games and toys to the 
Monroe Museum. There are awards there from individuals, organizations, 
and government officials, as well as a bust of Aunt Bett herself and two life-
sized papier maché figures-"Grandma," seated in a chair, and "Maude," her 
favorite elementary school teacher-that she made herself. But the bulk of the 
collection consists of dolls, dollhouses, stuffed animals, and a variety of 
other toys, some of which were given to her as gifts or were used by her as 
storytelling props. Most of these items are early mid-twentieth century and 
are in excellent condition. There is also a typewriter table and set of paints 
that Aunt Bett used to decorate souvenir cups that she presented to friends 
and admirers, and her signature hat and locket are displayed on the bust. 

As Simon Bronner has observed on various occasions, the study of 
children's material culture has a long way to go. If you are in the Detroit area 
and can spend the time, you might want to visit the Monroe County 
Historical Museum and take a look at "Aunt Bett's Attic." 

Monroe County Historical Museum 
126 South Monroe Street 
Monroe, Michigan 4861-2275 
Telephone: 734-240-7780 

C.W. Sullivan III 
East Carolina University 

If you know of other, perhaps out-of-the-way museums that have collections 
of children's material culture, please do a short write-up like the one above 
and send it to the Children’s Folklore Review. 
108 



 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 

Newell Prize 

The Children's Folklore Section of the American Folklore Society annually 
offers the WW Newell Prize (which includes a cash award) for the best stu-
dent essay on a topic in children's folklore. Students must submit their own 
papers, and published papers are eligible. Instructors are asked to encourage 
students with eligible papers to enter the competition. 

Papers must be typed, double-spaced, and on white paper. On the first 
page, include the author's name, academic address, home address, and tele-
phone numbers. Deadline for each year's competition is September 1st. Sub-
mit papers or write for more information: Dr. C.W Sullivan III, English De-
partment, East Carolina University, Greenville, NC 27858-4353. 

June Factor writes with the good news that all back issues of Play and Folk-
lore (previously the Australian Children s Folklore Newsletter) are now 
available on the web: [http://www.museum.vic.gov.au/playfolklore]. She 
continues, "Our thanks to Museum Victoria for this achievement. Our first 
issue appeared in 1981, so there is a wealth of material about childhood and 
children's folklore for those interested. We would welcome feedback - and 
contributions for later issues." 

Forthcoming Titles 

Childs Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children 

Eminent US children's folklorist Dr Dorothy Howard came to Australia as 
an American Fulbright scholar in 1954 to study Australian children's 
folklore. Her work provides a rare insight into Australian children's folklore 
in this period and is now the subject of a book published by Museum 
Victoria entitled Childs Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of 
Australian Children. 
The book provides a record of Howard's 10 months in Australia when she 
collected and documented children's games and verbal lore in cities and 
country towns across Australia. Her meticulous work laid the foundation for 
research into children's folklore in this country. 

Ten of Howard's original essays are reprinted in this title, along with three 
contemporary essays from other eminent academics. 



 

NOTES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS 

Child's Play: Dorothy Howard and the Folklore of Australian Children 
Essays by Dorothy Howard, June Factor, Kate Darian-Smith and Brian 
Sutton-Smith 
P/b, b/w photographs and line art 
216 x l40mm, 240pp 
RRP $24.95 
Published by Museum Victoria, May 2005 

For inquiries and orders, go to www.museum.vic.gov.au/about/ 
publications.asp 

110 



 
 

CONTRIBUTORS 

John Buckley holds a B. Soc. Sc. Degree from University College Cork, 
Ireland, (1975) and an M.L.A. Degree (1994) from the University of 
Pennsylvania where he studied Irish children's folklore with the late Dr. 
Kenny Goldstein as his advisor. He holds a Ph.D. in Education (2002) from 
the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He 
teaches a graduate course on "Play, Learning and Education" in the 
Education Department at LaSalle University in Philadelphia. 

Jay Mechling is Professor of American Studies at University of California, 
Davis. A Fellow of the American Folklore Society and a former chair of the 
Children's Folklore Section, Mechling publishes widely on children's 
cultures, including his 2001 book, On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the 
Making of American Youth. 

Laureen Tedesco is an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina 
University where she teaches children's literature. She is an active member 
of the Children's Literature Association. She has an article on the 
problematic pedagogy governing Jane Andrews's Seven Little Sisters Who 
Live on the Round Ball That Floats in the Air (1861) forthcoming in 
Children’s Literature in Education, and she is currently writing a book on 
the gender signals of the early Girl Scout manuals (1913 to 1933) and their 
intersection with girls' fiction of the period. 

111