> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
She was more aware of "bad things can happen" and "do not risk it" then my parents generation.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
I think some or all may have been created by AI.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
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!
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.
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/kids-jumping...
(fork is installed backwards).
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.
VERY unlikely to kill someone but could certainly seriously injure... Never got in trouble. Different times.