285.HOW DID FOOTBALL BEGIN?
From September to November, every Saturday afternoon is football time in the United States. In thousands of stadiums all over the country, millions of people gather to watch schools and colleges play. In fact, football is the country’s leading college sport.
Yet, the game as we know it, is less than 100 years old. The first game of football in the United States was played on November 6, 1869 at New Brunswick, New Jersey, between teams representing Princeton and Rutgers Universities. The game spread first among the older eastern universities, such as Yale, Harvard, and Columbia, and was later adopted by the whole nation.
284.HOW DID BANDS ORIGINATE?
Everybody loves to hear a band! A parade wouldn’t be a parade wit out one, and can you imagine the circus without a band? Nowadays, a band has even become part of our sports activities, and school bands play at all the big games.
The first brass bands were nothing like our bands of today. A few traveling musicians would appear here and there, play for a while, and then move on. By the end of the thirteenth century, however, these bands had grown in size and had become so popular that they began to form special organizations. They established guilds just as did people who specialized in other kinds of work, and these guilds had rules and regulations and guarded the rights of the musicians who played in bands.
283.DID CHILDREN HAVE TOYS IN ANCIENT TIMES?
What does a toy mean to you? Is it just anything you play with; for example, two pieces of wood, a rock or a piece of cloth? While these may serve as toys sometimes, we really mean something more than that by the word “toy.”
A toy is usually something to amuse children that in some way mimics what grownups do. A gun, a car or wagon, a doll, or a little house are such toys. So are balls and tops. But since children, from the beginning of time, have liked to mimic grownups, we can assume that toys have probably existed since the earliest history of man.
