In the San Francisco Bay Area, there is a little community called Castro Valley, where I spent the first nine years of my life.  On Lake Chabot Road, where it stops going north and curves west, there was a place called the Community Center.  According to Google Maps, it’s still there, but it looks different of course.  The Noon Whistle was at the Community Center, a siren on a tall pole that went off every day at noon.  We could hear it from our house, and if you were standing under it at noon, it was loud.  Thinking back on it, it was probably an air raid siren, but I only knew it as the Noon Whistle.

Adults played bridge at the Community Center, four to a table in a large room with hard floors.  Once our mothers yelled at us kids for sliding bottle caps across the floor to each other.  They said we were disturbing the bridge players.  The bottle caps were the real deal, the type you needed a can opener to get off the bottles.  With cork inside.  I doubt today’s aluminum bottle caps would slide across a floor very well, but I’ve never tried it.  Kids today are getting ripped off.

But the best part of the Community Center was the F9 jet airframe in the playground outside.  It lay retired in a large sandy area, and was there so kids could play on it.  I now wonder how they got it there, but they did and it was cool of them to do something like that for kids.  They could have put monkey bars there, but they put a jet there instead.  How cool is that?

There were two intakes you could crawl through, you can see them in the picture.  The tail was too high for me to reach, and I used to look up at it and wish I could sit on it.  The cockpit was stripped bare, no joystick or whatever they used to fly the thing.  No instruments.  Just empty space, but it was still fun to get inside it.  The floor was shiny from all the sand that had been tracked in by the kids.  It was better than playground equipment, any day of the week.

Playgrounds these days have plastic crap to play on, another way kids are being ripped off.  I doubt there are many planes left in them.  Too dangerous, probably, although I survived it okay.  Most kids did, I’m sure.  Magical stuff like that seems to be gone.  What kids are going to remember plastic playground crap when they’re 57 years-old?  None of them, guaranteed.  I’ll bet if there were more planes in playgrounds these days, the kids wouldn’t be as fat as Michelle Obama says they are.  Riding bikes helped with that, too.  Ride a bike everywhere, and you don’t get fat.  Sure, there have always been a couple of little porkers around who couldn’t crawl through the intakes, but that’s just the way it is.