Playground Person

Abstract

lona Opie, the Marie Curie of hopscotch and skip rope, came to New York for the first time in her life last week. She is sixty-five years old and lives in Hampshire, and she will talk to perfect strangers in hotel lobbies about the nature of play, the architectural origins of evil, the absurdity of games instruction, and where in the human body grief resides. Forty years ago, when intellectuals were speculating on the Nature of Play, and the Psychological Origins of Play, and the Dubious Future of Play, she and her husband, the late Peter Opie, decided that one good way to find out about playing was to go to a playground and watch. The result of their years of research, "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren," was published in 1959, and it remains a classic of anthropology and a book rich in the contagious joy of finding things out. The Opies discovered, for instance, that a children's rhyme took only a few months to travel from its starting point in, say, London to the most distant playgrounds in Britain. lona and Peter Opie also edited scholarly collections of Mother Goose rhymes and children's games, among much else. Mrs. Opie is one of the very few experts on anything whom we have ever wanted to interrogate, and when we found out that she was in New York we rushed over to the lobby of her hotel and began to pepper her with questions.