> less restricted, less supervised, less obsessively safety-conscious things were – and it was fine.
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.
alexpotato 3 days ago [-]
My grandmother was born in 1912 and therefore lived through:
- 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?
e40 3 days ago [-]
That generation experienced natural selection. It definitely weeded out the weak.
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.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
It also weeded out the risk takers more. And it weeded out a lot of people randomly.
siva7 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think so. Older generations seem to me much more risk-averse than recent ones. You had many people who were pretty aware how dumb such stunts were back then. Two factors come to my mind - there were much more toxic masculinity vibes and more importantly - much less awareness for safety and incidents than nowadays.
potato3732842 50 minutes ago [-]
There's no incentive to take risk in a world where you can be half literate and go punch the clock at your dead end job riveting spring hangers onto Chevrolets to afford a house and a car and a stay at home wife and not have to worry about retirement because stonks will go up as you sell the country's industry to overseas.
watwut 3 hours ago [-]
My grandmother lived through WWII and stuff ... but she ended up being very "be careful, bad things can happen, do not risk it" kind of person.
She was more aware of "bad things can happen" and "do not risk it" then my parents generation.
gibbitz 4 days ago [-]
This is a bit harsh on the HN community IMO. This was all nostalgia to me and not about overprotective parents. that said, looking at it in that light, my kids had none of the experiences you did. I think the overprotective instinct of this generation's parents has been steadily teaching them to be more risk averse and protecting them from learning about how to deal with undesirable outcomes to a point of irrational fear. My kids are in this generation and despite having this opinion they're surrounded by other adults and media that teaches them, not how to deal with mistakes, but to avoid them at all costs. I'm not advocating death and dismemberment, but there has to be an in-between.
alexjplant 4 days ago [-]
> there has to be an in-between.
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.
getoffyrhihrse 34 minutes ago [-]
> Having common sense and wearing protective gear when you have fun is cool, not uptight.
In the 70s, there was little protective gear available for bikers. Motorcyclists had fat helmets, football players had helmets, and maybe some fast roller skaters had fat knee-guards or elbow guards. 80s kids were pampered.
Fricken 3 hours ago [-]
Locally we recently had a 9 year old girl die while skateboarding in front of her home. Like the vast majority of fatal skateboarding injuries, she was run down by a motor vehicle right in front of her home. The article didn't say whether she had a helmet on, it wasn't relevant.
It's what kills most kids on bicycles as well. I myself witnessed 2 children die on separate occasions because they were run down by cars. Automobiles and firearms are the leading killers of children.
nullc 3 days ago [-]
Everyone dies, everyone suffers injuries, everyone gets sick, it's the price of ever having had the opportunity to exist in the first place.
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.
fnmeustr 1 hours ago [-]
> Cool photos regardless
I think some or all may have been created by AI.
51 minutes ago [-]
LargoLasskhyfv 4 days ago [-]
No risk? No fun! No pain? No gain. Call it evolution in action, or something. The unfits get sieved out by winning darwin awards.
aaron695 53 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
frumiousirc 38 minutes ago [-]
Heh, some things never change with DIY bike mechanics.
Oof, that one kid way out behind his seat, about to come straight down onto the front wheel? That's me, fall 1974, about to scrape most of my face right off.
abibb 2 hours ago [-]
Kids loved jumping things back then, but typically the jumps were sad, not that high, and no one was going to lie down in front of them unless they were idiots.
I can believe some kids potentially could have jumped high in the 70s, but more often a high jump would’ve been off a dirt ramp.
Somehow there were more undeveloped areas (up until maybe the mid-80s) where kids would dig foxholes, have BB gun fights, etc. Shoveling dirt was our version of Minecraft. Kids got hurt regularly. Digging was fine if things held together, but I later heard in some places where it didn’t, some died from cave-ins.
By early/mid 80s, there would be dirt biker racers with helmet and other protective gear on constructed dirt tracks. There was that in the 70s, but less organized in more natural less confined areas and more for motorcycles where you just had jeans and a fat helmet.
Skateboarding became a bigger thing by roughly mid-1980s than biking; the 1970s skateboards were skinny flat banana boards with trucks that couldn’t turn, so they weren’t very maneuverable- the scene from the original BTTF where Marty makes a skateboard out of a scooter was funny, but how he used it seemed unrealistic- it would’ve been a pita to get around on that.
Back to 70s bike ramps...
The ramps were usually just a piece of wood with anything you could find under it, and the Napoleon Dynamite bike ramp scene was close to the normal result.
Jumping as high as in these pictures was not normal. A nice curved plywood ramp would take work, time, tools, and money, kids wouldn’t expect parents to help them out, so you’d more often have shitty ramps and minor jumps.
Some of these pictures look physically impossible given the orientation of the ramp or non-existence of a ramp. I wonder if AI generated those.
reactordev 2 hours ago [-]
80s kid here. We definitely had fathers help build us some ramps. With curve. It’s how skateboarding got so popular - vert ramps and half pipes.
So you’re right on most things but we definitely had some quality wood ramps in the 80s. Sending us up and over fences, fathers, cars, and friends.
fnmeustr 1 hours ago [-]
In the 80s, yes, but not as much in the 70s.
potato3732842 37 minutes ago [-]
>Somehow there were more undeveloped areas
Everyone lived in suburbs that still had all the B/C/D rate lots undeveloped because it wasn't worth it. The country was still sprawling out, had mostly yet to pass zoning and other asinine regulation, etc, etc.
The incentive to cram industrial parks and office parks and housing into every nook and cranny of our towns and cities came later over the course of the 80s because regulation speculatively front-loaded compliance costs into construction and when that happens it makes more sense to develop a bunch of D rate lots already on roads and bulldoze starter homes and mobile homes already on road and utilities than incur all the "you'll need an engineered site plan for that, that'll be $50k" cost to proactively prevent problems that previously would have been addressed on an as needed basis after the fact where pertinent.
It's basically the same incentive structure you see with zoning wherein grandfathered in stuff goes up in value. Unless you've got some monstrously profitable project to justify the expense the numbers work better to buy out something that exists than to blow untold thousands fighting for permission or jumping through hoops to do greenfield development.
MontgomeryPy 3 days ago [-]
It all started with Evel K. in the 70s I think. We'd see him on Wide World of Sports, get his cycle jumping toy as presents, etc. Everyone started building wooden ramps to emulate Evel. It was actually a lot of fun so long as you didn't add too much speed or ramp height.
JKCalhoun 53 minutes ago [-]
"Evel K.", ha ha. Never heard him called that.
In the photos I see the transition from the "high rise" bicycle to the "BMX" bike. While somewhat cool looking, the BMX bikes, for me it was also the end of an era — my era — for biking. Instead of BMX bikes I moved instead on to 10-speed road bikes (later 12 speed ... now 1000 speed or whatever they're up to).
The photos also shows a time when wearing a helmet was not a thing. That did come shortly after (I mean at the time of these photos, I don't think you could even go to a Sears or wherever and buy a "bike helmet". After a rather nasty spill I had riding to work one morning, I became a helmet convert.
Neil44 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and BMX's were quite a hot & recent thing at that point as well.
Convince me that the kid in the first photo clears the entire line of kids before landing.
kcplate 25 minutes ago [-]
I can assure you as being one of the kids doing the jump and as one of the kids being jumped over in moments from around that time frame…that you did not always clear them.
Those always hurt like hell (both being on the bike and off) but I wouldn’t trade that experience away today. Some of the best times I had as a kid involved crashes, pain, ER trips, and stitches.
Good times!
rimeice 1 hours ago [-]
Right, he’s definitely at the apex and not halfway over the line!
gibbitz 4 days ago [-]
I had the same thought. The kid in the end is looking into the camera like he knows he's about to be cut in half.
rambambram 4 hours ago [-]
Haha nice, that first one. Jumping with your bicycle over kids lying on the ground. We did that with inline skates in the nineties. Looking back at it, it was pretty dumb, but we survived.
haritha-j 3 hours ago [-]
Well the ones who didn’t are unable to comment on HN on account of being dead, so there may be a bit of survivor bias there.
fuzzfactor 3 days ago [-]
IIRC, K-Mart sold a lot of bikes, but not helmets.
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.
vertnerd 1 hours ago [-]
The canonical Bell Biker helmet that I remember was an ugly and expensive white bowl-thing for serious road cyclists that started becoming popular in the late 70s as ten-speed bicycles became more popular with adults.
I think I bought my Bell Biker helmet around 1980. The stylish kid-sized helmets that became widely available during the 80s did not exist in the 70s.
JKCalhoun 50 minutes ago [-]
You have the time period correct with regard to helmet availability. Even if it wasn't completely dorky to wear a helmet riding a bicycle — where would you have even bought one in the 70's? Certainly not where you bought your high-rise handlebar, banana-seat bike.
I recall no lawsuits being the cause of the adoption of helmets.
eadmund 3 days ago [-]
I still believe that bicycle helmets are a net negative for cycling safety, due to a combination of them not improving crash survivability as much as folks believe while at the same time increasing the number of crashes due to rider and driver behaviour. But who can argue against the perception of the masses?
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).
condiment 2 hours ago [-]
This belief is completely incorrect. Helmets increase survivability and decrease the degree of injuries in every respect. This is a very well-studied phenomenon with many public and peer reviewed sources. [1]
To respond to the 'nuance' of your remark, that helmets change rider behavior for the worse, resulting in higher aggregate injuries - that is also incorrect. The passage of helmet laws results in significant reductions (20-50%) in head injuries and deaths. These are reductions among the same population, in the same geography, in a short timeframe. It is indisputable.
If the total number of recorded injuries is going up, it's because ridership has increased. Ridership is up for lots of reasons, population growth and health benefits being two of them. Cycling is a terrific way to improve your overall health, even when the risk of injury or death due to cycling is taken into consideration. [2]
And if manufacturers profit from improving the health and safety of a population? Good.
To be fair to the previous poster, there were some studies (from Australia I believe), which showed an increase in bike accidents with helmet laws. IIRC they didn't have a good explanation, but thought it could be due to more risky behaviour, but also cars being less considerate if people wear helmet.
There were also some studies that showed that for population health bike helmet laws might be a net negative, because it prevents more people riding bikes and the positive health benefits of riding outweigh the slightly increased risk of biking even without a helmet.
Depends on how one rides: Back when I was an edgy teen I accidentally rode too fast over a pothole right at the top of a rocky asphalt slope. I felt a whiplash on my shoulder, lost grip, rolled over three times down the slope, and slid head-first into a thick metal railing. I wasn't wearing a helmet and it was pure luck that I bent the head in time before hitting the railing. A bit faster and I would have cracked my head open; I've still got burn scars from that day.
It would probably help teens a lot if affordable helmets didn't look so goofy, it's the main reason we didn't want to wear them.
JKCalhoun 48 minutes ago [-]
Pretty sure I don't ride more recklessly simply because I am wearing a helmet. You're suggesting others do though?
3 hours ago [-]
CalRobert 4 hours ago [-]
Arguably it would make more sense for drivers to be wearing helmets considering how bad head trauma can be in a car crash.
My kids don't wear helmets when cycling, but we live in the Netherlands and they ride pretty slowly. I do wear a helmet when I bike on anything but the stationfiets, but I also like to ride fast (and I think a helmet saved my life as a teenager)
I'll add I was saved from serious head injuries by a bike helmet. Twice. Neither were my fault.
I know someone who wasn't. She had serious concussion. It's not something you want. 2 years off work. Petrochemical engineer - no longer works in the industry because of the injury.
pnutjam 22 minutes ago [-]
I distinctly remember a kid dying by falling off her bike in the late 80's. She was in the class w/ my younger brother but we didn't really know her. It was obviously a big deal at the school.
elevaet 2 hours ago [-]
Best enjoyed with Boards of Canada
comrade1234 4 hours ago [-]
My friends and I but fewer girls...
> seriously our neighborhood was some weird demographic misfit. A dozen boys and not a single girl...
burnt-resistor 3 days ago [-]
I had an all chrome and black pads Diamondback bike with black mags, and the scar tissue on my knees and elbows to prove it.
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.
4 days ago [-]
waynesonfire 3 hours ago [-]
Never mind the no helmet thing... I don't even see kids outside, doing ANYTHING.
JKCalhoun 44 minutes ago [-]
I'm starting to see brigades of boys on electric bikes more and more. Some girls on scooters. Then there are the kids driving kids on electric golf carts around the neighborhood (sigh).
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.
- 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.
She was more aware of "bad things can happen" and "do not risk it" then my parents generation.
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.
In the 70s, there was little protective gear available for bikers. Motorcyclists had fat helmets, football players had helmets, and maybe some fast roller skaters had fat knee-guards or elbow guards. 80s kids were pampered.
It's what kills most kids on bicycles as well. I myself witnessed 2 children die on separate occasions because they were run down by cars. Automobiles and firearms are the leading killers of children.
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.
I think some or all may have been created by AI.
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/kids-jumping...
(fork is installed backwards).
I can believe some kids potentially could have jumped high in the 70s, but more often a high jump would’ve been off a dirt ramp.
Somehow there were more undeveloped areas (up until maybe the mid-80s) where kids would dig foxholes, have BB gun fights, etc. Shoveling dirt was our version of Minecraft. Kids got hurt regularly. Digging was fine if things held together, but I later heard in some places where it didn’t, some died from cave-ins.
By early/mid 80s, there would be dirt biker racers with helmet and other protective gear on constructed dirt tracks. There was that in the 70s, but less organized in more natural less confined areas and more for motorcycles where you just had jeans and a fat helmet.
Skateboarding became a bigger thing by roughly mid-1980s than biking; the 1970s skateboards were skinny flat banana boards with trucks that couldn’t turn, so they weren’t very maneuverable- the scene from the original BTTF where Marty makes a skateboard out of a scooter was funny, but how he used it seemed unrealistic- it would’ve been a pita to get around on that.
Back to 70s bike ramps...
The ramps were usually just a piece of wood with anything you could find under it, and the Napoleon Dynamite bike ramp scene was close to the normal result.
Jumping as high as in these pictures was not normal. A nice curved plywood ramp would take work, time, tools, and money, kids wouldn’t expect parents to help them out, so you’d more often have shitty ramps and minor jumps.
Some of these pictures look physically impossible given the orientation of the ramp or non-existence of a ramp. I wonder if AI generated those.
So you’re right on most things but we definitely had some quality wood ramps in the 80s. Sending us up and over fences, fathers, cars, and friends.
Everyone lived in suburbs that still had all the B/C/D rate lots undeveloped because it wasn't worth it. The country was still sprawling out, had mostly yet to pass zoning and other asinine regulation, etc, etc.
The incentive to cram industrial parks and office parks and housing into every nook and cranny of our towns and cities came later over the course of the 80s because regulation speculatively front-loaded compliance costs into construction and when that happens it makes more sense to develop a bunch of D rate lots already on roads and bulldoze starter homes and mobile homes already on road and utilities than incur all the "you'll need an engineered site plan for that, that'll be $50k" cost to proactively prevent problems that previously would have been addressed on an as needed basis after the fact where pertinent.
It's basically the same incentive structure you see with zoning wherein grandfathered in stuff goes up in value. Unless you've got some monstrously profitable project to justify the expense the numbers work better to buy out something that exists than to blow untold thousands fighting for permission or jumping through hoops to do greenfield development.
In the photos I see the transition from the "high rise" bicycle to the "BMX" bike. While somewhat cool looking, the BMX bikes, for me it was also the end of an era — my era — for biking. Instead of BMX bikes I moved instead on to 10-speed road bikes (later 12 speed ... now 1000 speed or whatever they're up to).
The photos also shows a time when wearing a helmet was not a thing. That did come shortly after (I mean at the time of these photos, I don't think you could even go to a Sears or wherever and buy a "bike helmet". After a rather nasty spill I had riding to work one morning, I became a helmet convert.
https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/...
Those always hurt like hell (both being on the bike and off) but I wouldn’t trade that experience away today. Some of the best times I had as a kid involved crashes, pain, ER trips, and stitches.
Good times!
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.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11831...
I think I bought my Bell Biker helmet around 1980. The stylish kid-sized helmets that became widely available during the 80s did not exist in the 70s.
I recall no lawsuits being the cause of the adoption of helmets.
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).
To respond to the 'nuance' of your remark, that helmets change rider behavior for the worse, resulting in higher aggregate injuries - that is also incorrect. The passage of helmet laws results in significant reductions (20-50%) in head injuries and deaths. These are reductions among the same population, in the same geography, in a short timeframe. It is indisputable.
If the total number of recorded injuries is going up, it's because ridership has increased. Ridership is up for lots of reasons, population growth and health benefits being two of them. Cycling is a terrific way to improve your overall health, even when the risk of injury or death due to cycling is taken into consideration. [2]
And if manufacturers profit from improving the health and safety of a population? Good.
[1] https://newrossgreenway.org/bicycle-helmet-vs-no-helmet-stat... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10546027/
There were also some studies that showed that for population health bike helmet laws might be a net negative, because it prevents more people riding bikes and the positive health benefits of riding outweigh the slightly increased risk of biking even without a helmet.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-5-september-october/g...
It would probably help teens a lot if affordable helmets didn't look so goofy, it's the main reason we didn't want to wear them.
My kids don't wear helmets when cycling, but we live in the Netherlands and they ride pretty slowly. I do wear a helmet when I bike on anything but the stationfiets, but I also like to ride fast (and I think a helmet saved my life as a teenager)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKbYaOiz5U4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JfbTwrtOWU
I know someone who wasn't. She had serious concussion. It's not something you want. 2 years off work. Petrochemical engineer - no longer works in the industry because of the injury.
> seriously our neighborhood was some weird demographic misfit. A dozen boys and not a single girl...
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.