"Play was no longer a means of exercise but an end in itself, a science conforming to the needs of an urban culture. The rural image of informal outdoor exercise gave way to an urban ideal for town and country alike. In the 1920's, the National Recreation Association found rural play patterns woefully inadequate. Country children had nowhere to go but the open fields and nothing but their own inventiveness to guide them. In 1929, the Association published a rural recreation handbook to bring the social games of urban society to those who still lived in the country."
-- Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America, Peter J. Schmitt, 1969, p. 75.
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