Childhood Lore

If I said to you: Miss Lucy had a steamboat…

You would answer…

The steamboat had a bell. (Ding ding!)

Kottke had a post about childhood lore — the comments are pure gold — but it raised an interesting question. How did these rhymes or games or traditions spread before the internet?

Everyone around my age who grew up in the US knows what a cootie catcher is and how to use it. I know this because people came from all over the US to our wedding, and we put a cootie catcher at every place setting that people could use to strike up a conversation with their tablemates. So instead of your fortune on the inside flap, you had a question that you could ask the other person to get the conversation started. Everyone in our age group immediately started using it. People much older didn’t know what it was.

Everywhere I’ve gone, kids have made a tugging motion with their arm while passing a truck to see if the truck driver will pull the horn. Or lifted up their feet when going over railroad tracks. Or typing 80085 on the calculator. But how did we know? I know it passed from older kid on the playground to younger kid on the playground, but how did it jump from playground to playground, across the country? Fast enough that people around the same age would know the same thing, but kids a decade older or younger wouldn’t?

It is clearly easier now with the internet, but how did those common childhood beliefs or games spread across the country or world before it?