The Boy and His Gang

by Joseph Adams Puffer

First of these comes swimming. Swimming is perhaps the most popular of all sports during the summer season. The adolescent boy has a craving for the water, and, if not checked, will remain in it for half a day at a time. It is probably, on the whole, the safest way for most boys to get their necessary exercise in very hot weather, while at any time of the year it is, by general consent, the best all-round exercise there is. Moreover, except for the chance of drowning, it is the safest of athletic sports. Neither falls nor sprains nor broken bones nor any of the common accidents of ball field and gymnasium are possible to the swimmer. He cannot so much as strain a muscle against the yielding element.

For these reasons and because, of all interesting sports, swimming contributes most to the symmetrical muscular development of growing children, every community ought to provide some sort of convenient swimming place for its boys and girls. If it can manage to give them, in addition, a daily half-hour throughout the year, so much the better. Even an artificial swimming-tank is not especially expensive, when one considers to what large use it may be put. It would certainly be a great improvement if there could be in every public playground a children’s swimming-pool, two or two and one half feet deep, in place of the dirty and useless wading-pool one so often sees.

Natural pool or artificial tank, however, every swimming-place ought to be under the supervision of the right kind of man. He ought to be a teacher, for the modern swimming-strokes are by no means easy to get exactly right, and boys seldom pick them up correctly for themselves. His chief function, however, should be to keep the moral atmosphere of the swimming-place clean and pure, for here if anywhere the tone of the company is likely to drop. Boys in their games keep pretty closely to associates of their own age and station in life, but the swimming-hole takes in all ages, and its society is apt to be somewhat too democratic.

While, however, the careful parent will take all reasonable pains to avoid any moral contamination at the swimming-hole, he ought never to allow his boy to fall into the other extreme of prudery. For healthy-minded men and boys the bathing-suit is at best a necessary evil, and trunks an utter absurdity. The last thing to be desired for a boy is anything resembling the modesty of a girl.

Of skating there is little that need be said. As simple skating or as ice hockey, it is, for three months in the year, the most valuable of winter sports in our Northern States, and one of the least expensive. It is a short-sighted community that does not keep cleaned and ready for daily use a safe, central skating-field. An active boy during the winter is often hard-pressed to find wholesome outlets for his energy, and the ice is often the only efficient rival of poolroom and saloon.

The skating-field is, besides, one of the natural places for the boy toward the end of the gang period to graduate into a new social life. The fresh, wholesome air, the brisk exercise, the sharp cold act together to discourage dalliance. Outside a better equipped home than one half of our boys and girls come from, there is no more wholesome place for them to meet one another than on the ice.

This last advantage, though at a long interval, skating shares with dancing; that is to say, if the dancing is properly conducted. A badly conducted dance comes near to being the worst environment in which a boy is ever likely to find himself. Boys at the gang age, however, except toward the end of the period, seldom care spontaneously for dancing at all. On the whole, probably, the wisest plan is to respect the natural impulses of the average boy and to discourage much departure from the type. The boy’s manners will probably suffer, but the boy who is a perfect gentleman at fourteen usually has something permanently the matter with him.

As for theatres, circuses, and shows, for which boys have commonly a raging passion, it all depends on the show. All penny arcades and peep-shows are pretty certainly bad. Better keep the boy away. All performances attended predominantly by men are also bad, except athletic exhibitions and horse-races. The general run of vaudeville shows, with singing, dancing, and the like, are probably harmless enough in themselves, but they are commonly pretty inane, while the slight demand which they make on the voluntary attention cultivates a distinct trashiness of mind. Ordinary stage dancing, by women who are in no sense artists, is degrading both to performer and spectator, though, fortunately, to this influence the boy at the gang age, unless precociously educated, is nearly immune. At best, however, the vaudeville show, except its athletic turns and its exhibitions of trained animals, is a good deal foreign to the interests of boyhood; so that for various reasons, a taste for this sort of entertainment is something whose cultivation may well be postponed until extreme old age.

Circuses and other performances of like types are in a different category. Their feats of skill and strength and daring are a revelation to the boy, and a stimulus to emulation. The cowboys and Indians appeal strongly to his imagination, and help him to visualize the people whom he reads about in books. In many ways, these exhibitions are educative and valuable; such evil features as they sometimes have slip off the boy’s mind like water from a duck. At the gang age, he is quite impervious to them.

Much the same is true of the moving-picture show, which seems to offer, just now, the pressing moral problem of the city parent. Where these are good,—and it is always the simplest matter in the world to find out whether they are or not,—they are likely to be very good indeed. They give the boy at second-hand all sorts of delightful experiences of travel and adventure. Where the films present scenes of industrial activity, historic settings, important contemporary events, interesting places, customs, or scenery, their educational value is often high. Like the circuses and “Wild West” shows, they help to gratify the migratory instinct, and to satisfy the boy’s native curiosity and his desire to go out into the world and see things. I doubt whether we half realize how much the moving-picture show might be made to do for a boy if some one would show him what to look for, and tell him what it is all about.