Is this site made for the Facebook demographic? I was astounded that there wasn't a poorly-made image macro of a minion with some quip about drinking from a garden hose or rubbing dirt in your wounds to accompany this idyllic gem.
Both of my parents have stories about people getting seriously messed up or killed back in the day by doing dumb stuff on bicycles or otherwise. My father was on a first-name basis with hospital staff when he was a kid because of these types of hijinks and always made my brother and I wear helmets when we rode bikes. If we were skating pads were mandatory too. There's a comfortable middle ground between never setting foot outside and getting your viscera fatally crushed by a 130 lb eighth grader's bicycle tire.
And yes, I've built and jumped kicker ramps, tore my knees open, looped a bike (in both directions), skitched, gone OTB into a ravine in the woods, etc. but the difference is that I never had to go to the hospital or nearly died.
Cool photos regardless but let's not pretend that any of this was smart. Having common sense and wearing protective gear when you have fun is cool, not uptight.
1000% agree and that's exactly the point of my comment. I didn't mean that all of HN is like this, mostly just the linked post, so I'll edit accordingly.
- World War 1
- The Spanish Flu (she caught it and survived despite being only 6)
- A rural Pennsylvania childhood with no antibiotics and where multiple family members were injured by livestock or heavy equipment
- Prohibition
- The Great Depression
- World War 2
I often wonder if this gave that generation a VERY different attitude towards risk. e.g. one of your kids having a broken arm may not seem that big a deal when you might know a family that lost multiple sons in WW2? Or a bad cut compared to someone you know losing a leg in a tractor accident?
My grandparents were born in 1890-1900. What they suffered through I’m sure would kill most people. Definitely would me. Most of them lived to their late 80s and 90s.
We've made everything so regulated, costly, and supervised that it meaningfully contributes to the lowest fertility rate in the nation's history. Many of the children who are fortunate enough to get a chance to exist at all spend their lives hypnotized forever scrolling and will likely suffer a shortened and less worthwhile life due obesity, inactivity, isolation, and depression.
Having a chance to live, either in the metaphorical sense or in a literal sense trumps eliminating the last epsilon of risk that can only be eliminated by living in bubble wrap or not living at all.
Your admonishment of there being a middle ground is fair in one sense, but too often humans are bimodal against risk: we either ignore it completely or obsess over it. If a middle ground can be reached, great, but if it can't ignoring small risks is often superior to the alternative of over emphasizing them.
It's also important for to have risky activities that LOOK risky. No one under those bikes was under an impression that it was safe. I'd rather children climb on some lump of rickety boards they hammered together themselves-- it's clearly dangerous to everyone-- than run face first into some gleaming concrete and steel playground equipment which looks safe but becomes just as dangerous if you are reckless enough.
What's safer? Bike jumps over kids or a snapchat filter that makes things look faster the faster the gps reports you going?
... and some amount of the risky stuff is needed just to keep the overton window open for the sensible middle. There are places in the US where children of the ages in the picture merely playing outside (no bikes!) will result in state child protective intervention. If a few kids getting scraped up or broken bones-- or heaven forbid, even dying!-- is the cost of having perspective, it's well worth it.
It had never yet crossed the minds of adults, helmets certainly were not a mainstream product when it comes to protecting kids.
Parents loved their kids just as much as ever back then and you could feel the full force of their protective nature, even if it doesn't always appear historically so.
Whether hardened by war or anything else, what really started the helmet "craze", whether it's kids wearing them or not, and regardless of increases in dangerous road traffic, helmets really started to fly off the shelf like never before, once the greatest threat of all started escalating risk through the roof.
And it was adults who needed to protect themselves like never before.
From lawsuits.
I think it wasn’t lawsuits, but good ol’ American advertising: helmet manufacturers created a need in the minds of consumers where there had not been one before (cf. deodorant, cigarettes and plenty more).
The road I always wanted to fly down was Harwood Rd (SW end on the Los Gatos side) ever since 1982-3 when I saw Woz's house under construction but didn't realize who that was. Harwood's steepness was an obsessive objective for maximizing bicycle and skateboard speed when I was 5-6 and the local roads and sidewalks in front of my house were somewhat uneven. This was an era when many San Jose and Los Gatos residential streets were smooth blacktop and not yet besmirched with a very rough, gray aggregate bonded topcoat hostile to bicycles and especially skateboards.
(Later, I had a steel frame Miyata that was perpetually too small for me extended by ever-increasing handlebar and seat extension risers. (It was eventually stolen in Davis CA the only time I forgot to lock it. Its wheels had slime tubes and Kevlar linings to defeat California's omnipresent goatheads.))
When I grew older, I would fly down Bernal Rd (down from IBM) on the Miyata and Hicks Rd (on the back side before Alamitos Rd) with my best friend. Hicks Rd has/had a grade so ridiculously steep and pavement so uneven, I had to sit on my bike rack to avoid tumbling over the handlebars. In adult life, I found out he became a Christian metal/rock performer and had an insanely hot SO... that's cool and to each, their own.
In recent years in the midst of my mid-life (crisis?) I found that Kaabo King GT Pro goes 60 mph (96 kmh) while standing. I had to have that. It turned out to be (almost) true (57 mph (92 kmh) on a slight downhill, but I'm probably double the weight it was designed to carry). And it did fly around Austin downtown and surrounding areas 2020-2024.
If I was near the Bonneville Salt Flats as a kit, I would've probably been obsessed with building rocket-powered wagons and bikes. Sadly, all we kids had was gravity and the potential energy of short hills and later, some small mountains. I'm guess that was a blessing because there are sensible risk appetites. There's a bathtub of reasonableness between completely risk-adverse and (un)knowingly Darwin award. The former is result of helicopter parents who turned kids' parks into boring, perfectly-safe, plastic "paradises" no one goes to when there were uneven, redwood telephone pones to jump on, a semi-enclosed vertical steel maze about 15' tall with 3' horizontal sections to crawl up, and a real retired Korean Era jet in a sandbox. None of that cool stuff remains.
These days, my current neighbor won't even let their almost adult son use an electric hedge trimmer because "ooh, too dangerous!" but they gave him an offroad 125cc motorcycle (I would've died for one of those)... which doesn't make any sense at all.
mikestew•3d ago
gibbitz•3d ago