The Oakland Recreation Department was an important influence in my childhood. Next to my elementary school, Washington School, was Bushrod Park. There was the Bushrod Recreation Center Building with a gym and many side rooms for arts and crafts classes.

There was the park itself with football and baseball practice fields, swings and climbing structures you would never find in a park today. Yes, I did climb up and slide down those “fire poles” many times.

The ORD sponsored day camps and over-night camps in the summer and a vast series of festivals. Below I am costumed for some sort of International Festival. I think I represented a Scandinavian country. But, you can see that my costume could be re-purposed for the May Day Festival, below.

Every year there was the May Day celebration. Poles were put up on the Bushrod football field and all the elementary children were costumed and taught how to dance and weave a May Pole. Then there was the Queen of the May. She paraded around the poles with her court and ascended her throne through an archway of flowers. I particularly remember the year that Joyce Deere, the oldest of the Deere children, was Queen of the May. Because the Deere’s were neighbors, I got to see the dress being sewn by her mother. Being Queen of the May was certainly something I aspired to, but I heard or realized, even then, that there were some politics involved. Joyce was Queen, other children said, because her mother baked many cookies for the PTA. Kids can figure things out.

Probably one of the ORD’s more ambitious projects was the Annual Children’s Christmas Pageant. It was held at the Oakland Civic Auditorium (now the Kaiser Center).

It involved hundreds of children from all over the city, and the driving force behind it was a dancing teacher named Louise Jorgensen. In addition to the Christmas Pageant, Miss Jorgensen (as she was known) was also in charge of other ORD festivals, like the May Day Celebration at Washington School and Bushrod Park.

The Oakland Auditorium is a large space, and the audience for this event sat in the balconies. Thus they looked down on the dancing and the patterns it created. There was no stage involved.

I can’t imagine the logistics involved in all this: the costuming, the rehearsing, the hundreds of children. The years when I participated I was always a (Christmas) fairy and my costume was white. The older you got, the more complicated your routine(s). The music was always Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, and the most impressive dance was the Russian Dance, done by Miss Jorgensen’s star teen pupils from her dance studio. Of course I aspired to that dance corps, but, early on, my mother made it clear that I could not take dance lessons at Miss Jorgensen’s studio. Why it was okay for me to appear in an enormous, public dance performance but not take dancing lessons was a mystery to me until I finally came to understand that it was because the lessons cost money. Nonetheless, I enjoyed my years of International Pageants, May Day Festivals and Christmas Pageants, and I think this participation established, for me, a belief in the value of community activities and organizations like the Oakland Recreation Department.

December 25, 2021