Origins of Lawn Games...

In case you were curious about the origins of favorite lawn games, I found an article!

Taken from The Surprising Origins of 4 Popular Lawn Games:


Bocce

Sir Flinders Petrie, a well-known British archeologist, reportedly unearthed the tomb of an Egyptian child and discovered various rounded objects, which he assumed had been used in a primitive game of lawn bowling that we commonly know now as bocce.

Lawn bowling was reportedly so popular in the Middle Ages that many kings, from Edward III in 1361 to Henry VIII in 1541, specifically prohibited “artificers, laborers, apprentices, husbandmen, servants or serving-men, and other ‘low-born’ people” from participating in lawn bowling. The peasants, he feared, were wasting too much time playing in the grass.

Croquet

The modern sport of croquet came to America by way of France and England.

Originally called “pall mall,” this target game was eventually called croquet after the French word for crooked stick. A Brit, Walter Jones Whitmore, is credited with standardizing rules. His countrymen embraced the game with such passion they formed the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in 1877. Today, we know the site better as Wimbledon, home of the world’s most prestigious tennis championship.

Frisbees

A baker named William Russell Frisbie, who ran a shop at 363 Kossuth Street in Bridgeport, Ct., embedded his name in the bottom of his pie tins. Students at nearby Yale University took to tossing the metal tins though the air — hollering out “frisbie” as they threw. In the early 1950s, when the Whamo toy company released their “flying saucer,” they borrowed the baker’s name, with only a slight modification in spelling.

Whiffle Ball & Bat

In Shelton, Conn., David N. Mullany, a former semi-professional baseball pitcher, had a problem: his 12-year-old son was constantly in trouble for damaging school property with errant baseballs. David Jr. tried swapping hard balls for tennis balls and small plastic golf balls with no avail. So David Sr. glued plastic half-balls (used by a friend for makeup cases) together and cut slotted holes on one side. The new creation, a ball that easily made batters “whiff,” slang of the day for striking out.



I feel a little bit like Paul Harvey right now...