But there is a whole field of study of kids' games passed down from kid to kid with no adult supervision.
Oooh, another rabbit hole! As I think about games we used to play, it occurs to me that children of that era may have been the last of the "free range" kids, especially during the summertime. No supervision, just making stuff up as we went along. There were some rules, like don't cross "that" street or go over "there" and don't go hanging out with "that group." But rules are often meant to be broken and once in a while you even got away with it.
Before air conditioning closed all the windows and folks no longer sat on their porches or stoops it never occurred to us kids how loud we were. You could hear kids playing a half a block away, and so could the adults, but we never thought of that. They could keep track of us without even trying, always having a good idea of where we were and what we were doing.
You fellows from the South Side had a much richer environment than us poor north side urchins. Train yards, swamps, and prairies, Oh my! I didn't see any prairies until we ventured out to the suburbs where they were plentiful. But in reality, they were just empty lots, overgrown with weeds or grass but good enough for a kid to play in. There was something rewarding about crawling in the overgrowth but I can't define it. Maybe it's a throwback to our hunter/gatherer heritage.
As the prairies gave way to suburban housing developments there were new avenues of adventure: homes under construction. Big piles of dirt (King of the Hill!), big holes in the ground, and the wooden skeletons of new houses. Climbing in the rafters was great sport, dangerous as hell but we did it anyway despite the many parental warnings. Good way to break an arm or leg, we were told, and one of my pals did just that. Broke his arm when he fell from the rafters but I wasn't there at the time. I never asked him about it but I bet he thought it was worth it. Dangerous activities are a lot of fun for some people.
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