While researching various subjects in the Dedham Transcript archives for this blog, I frequently come across the Dedham Playground write-ups published every week in the summer. These summaries were written by the high school and college students who worked at the various playgrounds around town and would include the names of all the neighborhood kids who had attended that week and a description of the activities they were involved in. I found many mentions of my own name and that of my sister and all the kids in my Tower Street neighborhood who used to frequent Paul Park in the late 60s-early 70s. Along with volleyball, baseball, pot holder making and plaster of Paris, one regularly mentioned activity was Kalah. I have fond memories of playing this game for hours on end, and when I became an elementary school teacher I introduced it to my students as Mancala, which it is commonly known and sold as today. At first I thought that Kalah was a nickname the Paul Park kids made up, but then I found this Transcript headline from 1958 and I knew I needed to do some more research.
As it turns out, Kalah was a brand name for the mancala-type game invented here in Boston in 1940 by Yale Graduate William Julius Champion, Jr. It is believed that Champion adapted an ancient bean counting game from either Asia or Africa to create a 20th century version. Champion founded the Kalah Game Corporation in 1958 and the wooden boards were manufactured in various places, including Holbrook, Massachusetts, until the 1970s. Beginning in the late 1950s, recreation departments in towns across the country were sponsoring tournaments at playgrounds and community centers, and Kalah had taken its place among such timeless pastimes as checkers, chess and horseshoes.
I’m sure many of you have fond memories of scooping those dried beans from pod to pod while sitting on a splintery bench in a Dedham playground. Here’s to that highly addictive game and here’s to all the college and high school teens who worked at those playgrounds. They kept us safe, entertained, and out of our mother’s hair on those hot summer days.
Jim Parr
