“You come to a point in your life when you really don’t care what people think about you, you just care what you think about yourself.”
—Evel Knievel
I grew up in the 1970s in the sticks of Washington State, and it was quite a different way of life than my nieces and nephews have today. Even though they are growing up in the same small town, they have a vastly different experience with the passing of 40+ years of technological innovation. Back in the ‘70s we of course had television, and every house had a stereo to spin records or listen to the radio. Our house even had a player piano that you had to pump with foot pedals, and some old musical instruments that provided years of entertainment. However, the vast majority of the time when we were not doing our chores around the house and garden, we were doing outright dangerous things that were considered to be legitimate pastimes.
If you’re close to my age of 52, then you are either a Generation Xer or an older Millennial. I’d like to think that some of the Baby Boomers might be reading this too, because we all have much in common. And that’s because if you were a kid growing up in the 1960s, 1970s, or even the 1980s then you had an entirely different experience of what childhood is all about. We didn’t play with computers or video games (the exception being the advent of the video arcade) but rather, we lived by a code of conduct that was more akin to who was the toughest, most daredevil, and even deliberately reckless kid in the neighborhood. This was largely determined by virtue of our athletic ability, strength, daring, or simply the ability to crash a bicycle at high speeds, only to be skinned alive on the pavement without shedding a tear. Playing with firecrackers and perhaps a soda can of gasoline would put you in an entirely different league of badassery—or in the hospital, as one of our friends found out. He burned all the hair off the side of his head.
This is the part where I sound like my grandfather—but it’s a true generational fact. The chores had to be done first, and that amounted to a whole lot of gardening, weeding, lawn mowing, fence post setting, firewood chopping, animal feeding, and all manner of physical labor. I have to say I quite enjoyed chopping the firewood, as there is something quite rewarding about bringing the axe down on a block of wood, splitting it in half and then quarters, and then stacking it in a neat pile. It’s transformative work I guess you would call it, the sort of thing that makes you feel legitimate, and it’s satisfying at the end of the day to see a nice, clean row of split and stacked firewood. Plus you get about the best workout you can have doing an actual chore. But it wasn’t all work for us, as we had plenty of time for playing and fooling around and doing all those dangerous things I mentioned.
Our afterschool evenings and weekends were filled with sports, played in the fields behind our houses, because all the kids in the neighborhood lived on several acres of pastureland surrounded by forest—we were working-class families with farm animals and gardens. We played football, baseball, basketball, and the almighty Kick The Can. KTC was a more elaborate version of hide and seek, except it was done in the dark shadows of our communal road, with a single empty coffee can placed under a streetlight demarcating home base. After finding your hiding spot, you had to run and kick that can before the Guardian could tag you out.
We also did archery, until we lost our arrows in the dense forest behind the fields, and then we had to wait till Christmas or someone’s birthday when they would hopefully get more arrows. Occasionally we’d find a stray arrow while walking in the woods, and then we’d shoot that single arrow repeatedly, which we’d have to retrieve after every shot. That’s when archery became an aerobic exercise—shoot, run, retrieve arrow; shoot, run, retrieve arrow; shoot, run, retrieve arrow….
We also did target shooting, first with BB guns knocking down soda cans, and then .22 caliber target rifles with a real target set in front of several bales of hay so we wouldn’t hit the horses who occasionally wandered behind it. We also shot flying clay pigeons with our shotguns, and this was something I quite excelled at. We never shot animals for hunting, but we respected our marksmanship, and we were never careless with our guns. Hitting the yellow bull’s-eye in the center of the target was the only thing that mattered to us.
On the 4th of July, we would start the day with the legal fireworks until it eventually turned to the illegal kind purchased at the nearby Nisqually Indian Reservation. When those fireworks started to run out, someone would inevitably light off a can of gasoline with a firecracker, and we already know where that’s going.
However, by far the most fun we ever had was building our enormous bicycle ramps. These ramps were created seasonally, usually in the summer and fall, when there might be some extra building materials lying around from someone’s recent remodeling job. You couldn’t do this kind of thing in the winter anyway, what with all the snow and ice, and that was back when it used to get cold enough to snow, which it rarely does anymore.
We would find a spare sheet of plywood (preferably 2, for an extra long ramp), some lumber for the bracing, and cinder blocks to stabilize the highest end. Then we’d ride our bikes as fast as possible down the street, which had finally been blacktopped after years of being a dusty, pot-holed logging road. This advancement in the road surface provided for much more acceleration, but also more skin on the pavement when we inevitably crashed.
Being an Aries, I was often the first to jump, which frequently resulted in me being the first to crash. It was usually because the plywood was too springy from a lack of bracing (we were not engineers, although we fancied ourselves as such), and halfway across the ramp the weight of the bike and rider, combined with the natural propensity for wood to flex, would launch us straight up in the air, right at the critical moment of take off, which caused a 50% probability in a terrible crash. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Once, the broken end of my brake handle punctured my lower abdomen, which left a stab wound that everyone wanted to look at for a couple weeks. For a short time I was the hero of the Pederson Place bike jumpers—because I had been mortally wounded.
All of this was done, mind you, without helmets, kneepads, gloves, or mouth guards, and most of our bikes were rickety machines that we had bolted together ad hoc with spare parts from other, more dilapidated bikes. We were bicycle scientists/daredevils/engineers/acrobats just itching to see who could jump the highest and the farthest and take whatever pain the God Of Reckless Children could deliver. We loved it, we relished it—it was the ‘70s, man.
Ah yes, the legendary, fashion-challenged, steeped-in-mystery 1970s. It was the decade of Led Zeppelin and The Who, Disco and Punk, Kung Fu and Star Wars, skateboarding and surfing, and bike riding as a form of blood sport. We lived in the suburban neighborhoods across a vast country that was reeling from the Vietnam War, extremely bad fashion (or perhaps the greatest fashion, depending on your perspective), incredible music, constant economic crisis, drugs that family doctors prescribed to depressed mothers, which their teenagers then stole, and parents who alternately attended swinger parties and then divorce proceedings when their marriage went on the rocks. Divorce was so common that it seemed to be an epidemic among many of my friends, when their fathers had ridiculous mid-life crisis, manifesting as bronze Porsches and orange Corvettes, which they revved as they drove down our tiny street. One time we found a box of condoms in the glove box of my friend’s dad’s car and we were utterly perplexed as to what they were.
Our mothers had gigantic hair and blue eye shadow, without exception, because everyone was suffering from the ongoing economic recessions but were still trying to look cool at the same time. This was largely because we were working-class families who got our clothing from thrift shops, Goodwill, or the occasional birthday trip to the Sears Roebuck department store. I wore ratty tennis shoes 2 sizes too big, T-shirts with cartoons and slogans I didn’t really understand, and denim jeans with reinforced kneepads, which seemed to be designed especially for those of us who jumped and crashed bikes.
Our lunches were, quite literally, boloney with yellow mustard on white bread, some potato chips on the side, and if we were lucky, someone’s mom might have a box of Twinkies or Ding Dongs and everyone got a treat that day. If you were given a rare can of soda pop, you nursed it all day long until it was as warm as bathwater and had a couple of yellow jackets floating in the bottom. None of this was taken for granted either, we never complained, and we stayed lean and tough, like the scrappy dogs that followed us home at night.
As the summer nights grew shorter, the halogen streetlights came on sooner announcing that fall was approaching and school would be starting up again. The smoke from fireplaces and wood stoves wafted in the evening air as autumn made its final descent, and by the time winter rolled around, the events of the summer were long forgotten, except for a few of the legendary jumps, crashes, and the impending divorce of someone’s parents.
The beginning of autumn also meant the TV shows would be starting their new season. We were much more interested in what the Fonz was going to say on “Happy Days,” whatever trouble “Laverne & Shirley” might get into, or what Jim Rockford might do as the wily private detective on “The Rockford Files.” And when Cher sang on the “Sonny & Cher Show,” we all decided that our future girlfriends would have to look like her, sing like her, and be funny like her. Cher was the highest standard of feminine cool back then, and I reckon she still is to this day.
Evel Knievel, the greatest daredevil/stuntman of them all, was our universal hero (that’s why we built those bike ramps in the first place) so anything he did on television was a holy event that we watched with intense scrutiny, especially because, like us, he usually crashed. We also loved Muhammad Ali and we all tried to speak in his poetic rhyming slang as we simultaneously tried to emulate the Kung Fu of Bruce Lee. That’s right, 12-year-olds rapping like Ali, Kung Fu fighting like Bruce, and then racing off to jump our bikes like Evel—it was the ‘70s, man.
The Dallas Cowboys were America’s favorite team for that entire decade, as head coach Tom Landry and quarterback Roger Staubach led the team to numerous Super Bowls. And of course every one of us saw Star Wars within the first week of its release and our new heroes became Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, and Princess Leia started giving Cher a serious run for the new standard of girlfriend excellence, even though it would be years before any of us had one.
Young people of every generation have their heroes, and they are certainly as important to them as our heroes were to us. But it is also true to say that the heroes of our grandfathers, the Word War II generation, were real, actual war heroes. By the time it got to my generation it wasn’t so much war heroes as it was athletes, musicians, and actors who stood for something greater than what the American dream had given us. Muhammad Ali in particular rose to being something far above boxing, and even sports for that matter. He became a saintly figure who saw the humanity in everyone, and inspired the entire world. I think the same can be said about Bruce Lee, Cher, the Dallas Cowboys, and certainly the heroes of Star Wars.
Growing up with those kinds of role models, our minds were not on what social media might tell a kid today, which isn’t reality. We just kind of developed a sense of what was cool and legit, which is quite a bit different than the boy who plays video games all day, or the girl who cries over what her friends might be saying on Facebook or Instagram. That just ain’t how a kid should grow up.
If I was starting all over today, I’d still want to be in the ‘70s and I can’t help but think that it might be a bit worse now with kids sitting on their butts, glued to a tiny blue screen, when they could be running, jumping, crashing, high fiving, and earning the occasional split lip.
It seems to me that is a far better way to start your life: Go get a bike, learn to ride it, learn to jump it, and leave a little skin on the pavement in homage to the daredevils who came before you.