They didn’t have them then. Got a few skinned elbows and torn pantlegs from catching in the chain but that was all.
Are you for real? It’s one thing to eschew them yourself, but for your kids?
Anyway I grew up in the 90s and pretty much everyone did, even though I didn’t bike that much.
Thanks for reminding me of the time I fell out of my grandpa’s Volvo.
Door popped open on a turn, slipped right out under the seatbelt.
I never really thought that helmet was a bad idea. Caught hell for it, but, then again, I had just about the first mountain bike on the East Coast, too. And I used it hard enough to bend the frame on two of them. (The Vette impact only bent the front fork and ruined both wheels. The bike actually survived that.)
Sitnam: not much of a concidence. Early adopters of helmets tended to be people who, well, went in situations where they’d need them. In my case, this involved going down the sides of hills which didn’t technically have roads, bicycling in the dark in locations with drunk drivers, and showing people with BMXes that you could, in fact, do almost anything they could on their stunt bike, on my big-ass one. Not to mention, of course, that people on ten-speeds tended to have their bikes vibrate apart on rougher terrain, while I managed to keep traction considerably longer. Which made the eventual impact a bit worse.
Nope. And if I had worn one, it would have gone unused. Knee and shoulder pads, on the other hand…
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Freudian Slit** must not live around here; almost nobody wears a helmet. I do live in a no-helmets-required-after-21 state, but still
I guess not. I just don’t see any good reason not to, still less to tell your kids not to wear them. That just seems messed up.
I had a stepfather, when I was a small child, who felt much the same way about seatbelts. Nobody was going to tell HIM to wear a seatbelt, etc. He went so far as to forbid me to wear a seatbelt. Overprotective bullshit, he never wore a seatbelt and he grew up just fine, blah blah blah.
I have a lovely scar and a little bit of nerve damage in my left knee from the injuries I sustained in our rollover car accident, thanks to his awesome no-seatbelt policy. Really I’m lucky just to be around to bitch about him, of course. My kids wear seatbelts. And bike helmets, too. (Not at the same time, though.)
Never wore a bicycle helmet on my bicycle. Should’ve worn a cup, though.
1960s ------- none of us wore one. Like others, I am not even sure that there was such a thing. But after the one kid my age had a bad crash (when I was maybe 10) and joined the ranks of kids around us who were “a little slow” its something I thought about even way back then. By the late 60s when I moved on to motorcycles, I wore a helmet and still do. My brain may not be the best or brightest, but its all I have.