The other day my daughter told me that she fell on the playground at school and hurt her leg. I asked to see her “boo-boo” and she showed me a little red mark. She said she got a sliver from one of the wood chips that cover the ground around the jungle gym in her school playground.
This got us talking about how when we were kids that our playgrounds were either concrete or asphalt and that they weren’t made from plastic but from metal, probably coated with lead paint. We rode around in cars that not only didn’t have airbags but we never wore seatbelts and there was no such thing as a baby seat. On long road trips I would sometimes lay on the floor in the back of the car.
I had Tonka trucks made of metal with sharp edges. If I left them outside they would get rusty and I always had scrapes on my hands from them. We didn’t have helmets for biking or rollerskating. Our roller skates were made of metal, we would strap them to the bottom of our shoes and when those metal wheels hit a pebble we would stop instantly.
Despite all of these hazards we somehow managed to survive. Sure, I’ve got a few scars on my knees from my adventures but I made it through.
As we talked about these things, our kids’ jaws dropped. They couldn’t believe that we lived in such dangerous times and managed to not get killed or maimed.
So what dangerous things do you remember from your youth?
I remember the first “creative playground” I played at, it was in the expanded backyard of a school that still had the old playground closer to the school building…with an asphalt floor. Looked dangerous even then.
And then of course everyone then realized the creative playgrounds were a arsenic hazard from the pressuretreated lumber, and so we reverted to small plastic ones. Just the other day I saw the hugest plastic playground set I’ve ever seen outside of a theme park or restaurant, and it was only slightly larger than a McDonalds playplace. Oh for the days where you could romp around the nooks, mazes, and ladders of a good quarter acre of wood.
I remember a lot of toys being metal, rather than the molded plastic they are now. The little toy kitchen I had, for example. It looked very realistic, but those sharp corners would NEVER be found on such an item these days.
My daughter’s preschool has had a controversy because some of the parents want the kids to wear helmets when they ride the tricycles. Mind you, these are designed to be low to the ground, sort of like a Big Wheel, so they won’t tip over. I really can’t imagine what kind of freak accident there would have to be for a kid to have a head injury from riding one of these things. But, such is the world these days, I guess.
McDonalds had heavy metal Merry-Go-Rounds. The obvious thing to do was to get your friends to run and spin it as fast as possible will kids would jump on and slam against the bars of to push each other off so you hit the concrete at a high rate of speed. Standing up was very questionable after that as well. I lost more than one cheeseburger playing that game.
I grew up in Louisiana. We always begged the adults to let us ride in the back of the backup truck and they were always happy to oblige. The main informal rule was to not sit on the sides while the truck was going fast. Most of the time, the metal bed would be so hot you had to ease up and down and cool a space with your backside before you could settle in. It was great to be riding in the back of my father’s truck with a few of my friends down a quiet road. He would be driving with a beer in one hand and the rest of the twelve-pack on the passenger side floor. He would smke with the other hand and flick the butts out of the window away from the bed. Every once in a while we would pass a police car and he would wave and the police would wave back. There was nothing to worry about as long as no laws were being broken.
I was just talking about this with a friend last night. It’s amazing how many of us survived to adulthood, the way we drank out of hoses, rode bicycles without helmets, didn’t wear seatbelts (I remember riding in the back of the family station wagon with the seats down, luggage piled around me and the dog).
The park a block from my house had a six-foot high chain link fence around the play area, with large gates that we used to swing on. One day I jumped high up onto the gate and wedged my feet into the links; the gate swung open until it hit the fence and bounced back with me still on it. The pipe that made up the top of the gate caught me square on the forehead, breaking the skin. Blood was flowing into my eyes as I ran hope, screaming. I remember there was some discussion about whether or not to take me to the hospital (my parents decided not to bother, although I probably could have used a few stitches).
And I don’t want to think about the number of times we would see how high up we could swing before jumping off, trying for distance, or pushing the swings to try to wrap the chains around the top pole, dodging the wooden seat as it flew around.
We used to stay home ALONE from the age of seven or so. We used to go play with our friends - unsupervised by adults - in the woods out back from early elementary school. We used to visit public restrooms alone and walk up to the corner store. And not a single pedophile ever grabbed me, did illegal and disgusting things to me, and killed me.
I still let my kids do most of these things, but most people are SHOCKED I take such risks.
I went to grade school with Bridget Kramer. She lived around the corner from me, and she had the coolest toys. Well, they weren’t actually her’s – they were her father’s – but still, we were allowed to play with them all we wanted.
“Fast” Bob Kramer was a professional stock car on the local circuit. His house butted up against the garage that they used to work on his cars, and behind that was an open lot where they stored the wrecks.
Or, “the playground”, as we called it.
Nothing dangerous about a bunch of seven-year-olds playing in, out, around, under and on top of a bunch of mangled, wrecked cars, is there? Sure, there may have been some spots where ripped, jagged metal was sticking out, and the occasional pool of hi-octane fuel, but really nothing major to be concerned about…
When cleaning out my mom’s house we found a ‘toy’ that belonged to my older brother Tom.
You made your own army men.
You made them out of lead.
It had an electic hot plate you set a ladle with some hunks of lead in the ladle. When the lead melted you poured it into a mold, that as far as we could tell, that someone held in their hands.
Until I was about ten years old, my grandparents lived in the Pocono mountains, where I spent hours roaming free whenever we visited. I still have a scar from sliding down a cliff while playing mountaineer. Good times.
I also drank from creeks and ate anything growing in the woods that seemed like it might be edible. Somehow I managed not to poison myself. (I think I did have enough sense to avoid the mushrooms, but berries and ferns were fair game.)
Riding my bike to the corner store alone (half a block up, through the alley and across the street).
Definitely the merry go rounds… I can remember a couple times getting it going really fast then sitting and dragging my feet on the ground. Got pulled right off!
The huge truck tires that were screwed together to make jungle gyms, we’d climb into the really big ones and hide inside them, they smelled of pee. Sometimes kids would get stuck in the spaces between the tires where several met, having misjudged the space in relation to their size.
We’d go camping and us kids would run off all over the place. The lake was a bit of a walk away and we’d go run around there with no adult supervision at all, half drowning each other.
Playing frisbee and other games in the field nearest the house at the farm, sometimes with the cows still there.
Talking with adults who said they knew my parents when we were out camping, a four hour drive from our home. (Actually, they did, but I talked with them a bit and even told them which site we were in etc before I confirmed with Dad).
We also had lawn darts, no helmets for sledding (hay bales at the base of the official hill was the safety gear)
We had BB guns, and fireworks. We made ramps for our bikes and skateboards out of stuff we “salvaged” from building sites with unsupervised use of Dad’s power tools. We had rock fights and played tackle football in the middle of the street. We played all winter long on frozen ponds in our neighborhood. Some of us had little 50cc motorbikes to ride at crazy speeds through angry farmers fields.
Oh god or sometimes you fell and scrapped your palms and god forbid you lost the skate key.
Also,
Riding bikes with no helmet and sometimes with no breaks
See Saws
Monkey bars
Metal, hot on the legs and ass on a sunny day, slides
Skate boards with no helmets or leg/elbow pads
I remember this one set of money bars on the school playground. It had three bars. One low, one medium and one high. When I was in fourth grade I learned to do penny flips off of them. You basically hung upside down by your knees and swung back and forth really fast until on the up swing you flipped off the bar and landed on your feet.
One time I did not have enough swing and landed straight down. I scraped up my face pretty good. They took me the clinic and called my mother to come and get me. I was fine really but they wanted to leave that up to my mom.
She took me home and we put some ice on it and I was good as new the next day.
Those bars remained for many years until they did the entire playground over with “safe” play items. In todays world they would have been gone before the weekend.
I lost count the number of times I got scratched climbing trees and bushes (bushes especially made great secret bases). And of course there were all the times I fell from my bike/roller blades and ended up with wicked looking scabs on my legs or elbows.
We used to walk on top of the retention pond in front of the Music building in the winter - the thing froze over nicely and nobody was dumb enough to try stepping on thin ice during spring.
Our elementary school was on the top of the hill and during the winter they’d set hay bales at the bottom and we’d hurl ourselves downward on plastic sheets. One year one enterprising young kid crashed through the bales and knocked a hole in the face.
I used to eat frozen icicles off of cars, and one day in a moment of insane curiosity I tried a bit of road salt (verdict: blah).
When we moved to Florida our subdivision was still under construction, so my brother and I spent ours jumping off of giant sand piles, crawling through piping, etc.
Yeah, the world is a dangerous place, but part of being a kid is all that reckless abandoment that makes you laugh when you look back on it.