An Apple Core, a Toilet: Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood (9 page)

Amazingly, though, I was able to miss the pole, but there wasn’t much point in celebrating. I was headed into a tangle of pine trees. My noggin would bang one of those and I’d be just as dead as if the telephone pole had claimed me.

Lucky for me providence intervened — and his name was Norman Rapp’s dad.

Mr. Rapp was a welder. He had welded a fantastic, giant street-hockey net that Norman kept right there in the thicket of pine trees. It caught me like a giant glove. I landed softly and safely in the center of the net.

I was a kid then, too dumb to realize how close I came to dying that day. I was more interested in the shouts of the other kids.

I jumped my bike 34 feet that day — a long way to fly on a spider bike — and reclaimed my neighborhood record, which, to my knowledge, has never been, and never will be, broken.

A Walk to the Little Store
 

It was a long walk for a 4-year-old.
The walk happened in 1966. My older sister Krissy, eager to get me out of her hair, gave me a coin she'd made from a piece of cardboard.
"You can buy candy with it," she said.
Candy was a rarity in our home, but I knew where to buy some.
I slipped out the back door and made my way through the woods and onto Diane Drive. It was another 200 yards to the "little store," the mom-and-pop shop at the bottom of the hill.
I entered the store and reached my grubby hand above my head and set my fake coin on the counter. Beneath the counter, through the glass, was a spectacular display of penny candy. I stood there mesmerized by the incredible potpourri of sweets.
Unbeknownst to me a great hullabaloo was taking place at my house. Krissy and Kathy, 7 and 9 respectively, had been instructed to keep an eye on me while my mother went downstairs with a load of laundry.
When my mother returned a few minutes later, I was nowhere to be found. Kathy, apparently, had gone upstairs to her bedroom. Krissy and I were left together for only a few minutes — just enough time for her to cut out the coin and give it to me (though I don't think she expected her runt brother to walk all the way to the little store).
Panic overcame my mother as she searched the house — though she’d soon have the situation under control.
This story came to mind as I read a recent article in The New York Times on kids and walking. Today's parents are in such a state of worry, most won't let their children walk anywhere alone.
It's routine for parents to drive their kids to and from school — even if they are 10, 11 or 12 and even if the school is only a few blocks away.
At some schools, there is a rigorous process for picking children up. Parents display their kids' names on their dashboards. A school official radios to the building and the kids are escorted, one at a time, to the cars.
Parents who attempt to buck our worry-prone culture — one lady allowed her 10-year-old son to walk a mile to soccer practice — face the wrath of family, neighbors and local authorities.
When a police officer saw the boy walking alone, he stopped him and drove him to practice. The officer reprimanded his mom and told her she would have faced child endangerment had anything happened to her son.
To be sure, we're an uptight, control-freak culture these days. Our paranoia is stoked by sensationalistic news stories and 24/7 coverage about children who have been abducted, but our fears are not entirely warranted.
The Times offers an interesting statistic: There are roughly 40 million elementary school-age children in America. Each year, 115 children are abducted — but more than 250,000 are in car wrecks.
Which shows how times have changed — and not necessarily for the better.
When I was 10 in 1972, I was permitted to roam all over the place, so long as my mother knew where I was going.
I am certainly sympathetic to the challenge parents face today. A friend of mine is determined that both her children experience some of the freedom she knew as a child.
She allows her kids to go into the woods to play — but she is filled with terror as she attempts to monitor them, unnoticed, from the window.
In any event, on the day I disappeared in 1966, my mother finally got my sister Krissy to fess up. Shortly after I arrived at the store, my mother pulled our station wagon into the store's parking lot and rushed inside to hug me.

And she even bought me some candy!

A Reckoning with Jerry Gray
 

I was so determined to ram my plastic toboggan into Jerry Gray’s shins — as he’d done to me and a dozen other kids on the sled slope earlier that day — I forgot about Mr. Ayres’ pond.

I suppose I better explain.
 

Tracy Drive ran straight up a mountainous hill. It was lined with modest ranch and split-level homes that were built in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Each sat on a rectangular lot.
To provide each homeowner with a level backyard, the builders used giant bulldozers to cut, essentially, a giant set of stairs into the massive hillside — unaware they were creating one of the finest sledding slopes in the history of kid-dom.
No sooner did the clouds open up and the snow begin covering the ground than a gazillion kids, from as far as several blocks away, arrived to whip down the massive roller-coaster slope on sledding contraptions of every kind.
I was always a Red Rider kind of fellow.
Sometime before I was born, my parents had bought one. Though my father can’t recall when or where he got it, it was probably used — my father never bought things new unless he had to.
My first memory of the sled dates back to 1965 or 1966. I vividly remember one snowy day when I was 3 or 4 and my mother, then 26 or 27, took me and my older sisters Kathy and Krissy out to the front yard and sat us on the sled. We were surrounded by giant mounds of snow and bundled tight in our winter coats. We still have that black-and-white photo.
As I got older I fell in love with that sled.

I loved to be off the ground, atop the sled’s rails and body, as I raced down the hill. I liked having the ability to steer, to maneuver over jumps and around obstacles. I polished the rails and kept the hardware tight. I truly loved every moment I enjoyed that sled.
It served me well for many runs until it slipped beneath the wheels of our massive Plymouth Fury III station wagon in our garage — I hadn’t hung it on the wall as my father told me to do — and it was crushed beyond recognition as my father backed the car out.
The Christmas following its untimely demise, my parents replaced it with a plastic toboggan. It was about the same size as my sled. It had grooves cut into its bottom that allowed it to be steered when you held the sides and twisted it left or right.
It could never be as good as the sled had been, but it was infinitely superior to the worst plastic sledding device ever conceived: the Mini-Boggan.
The Mini-Boggan was invented by a woman named Eunice Carlin, who, apparently, was trying to kill her children.
As it went, Carlin was tired of her kids using their book bags to slide down snowy hills — they kept destroying them and she was sick of buying new ones — so she worked with her next-door neighbor, president of a plastics company, to produce the Mini-Boggan.
It was a thin, light, rectangular sheet that you rolled up and carried under your arm. At the top of the hill, you set the flimsy plastic on the snow, sat or lay on it, and proceeded to slide downhill, at several hundred miles an hour, spinning uncontrollably until you collided with whatever you were inevitably going to collide with along the way.
I made the mistake of riding a Mini-Boggan only once.
Unable to guide the thing, I slid off to the far right of our course, where one father had sawed down six pine trees to stumps.
My Mini-Boggan carried me over every one of them — six giant pistons that pounded into my ribs and stomach, knocking the wind out of me. I lay there moaning for several minutes before I was able to get up.
Come to think of it, there were moaning kids and kid gear — mittens, earmuffs, stray boots — all over the hillsides back then.
Boy, have times changed.

***

Sledding bans are popping up in communities across America.
In Massachusetts, says The Week Magazine, a movement is afoot to crack down on the pastime.
Many Massachusetts communities are posting warning signs or issuing outright bans. A state lawmaker introduced a bill requiring children to wear helmets because “there are no brakes on a sled.”
In Omaha, Neb., two popular parks banned sledding after the Nebraska Supreme Court ruled that public parks are not legally protected from being sued.
Monteville, N.J., banned sledding in one of its parks after a girl careened into a bale of hay, hurting her leg; a settlement cost the town $25,000.
That’s if kids even go sledding — many prefer to stay indoors.
Television, video games and the Internet don’t require a kid to strap on thick clothes and bear the elements — and it’s much harder to consume massive quantities of Cheetos while wearing mittens.
Whereas a kid can avoid adults indoors, it’s impossible to do on a sledding slope. Any kid who dares give sledding a try is surrounded by multiple adults who are terrified to let them do anything on their own.
If you see a kid sledding nowadays, you also see an adult running alongside him, shouting, “Good job, Jason! You’re such a good sledder! Watch out for that bump!”
With adults monitoring the hillsides, no kid will ever be permitted to sled down the steepest, most treacherous path — the very path a normal kid is drawn to.
Adult over- involvement squashes all kinds of normal kid activities.
Designing and building a massive snow-packed jump in the middle of the slope — the kind that causes mittens, earmuffs and stray boots to fly — is out.
Eskimo huts, which might cave in and cause some helpless child to suffocate, are out.
Giant snowmen, which might topple over, are out.
Damming the creek with packed snow to build a giant pond: Out!
Snowball fights: Out!
Slipping snow down the back of somebody’s collar: Out, out, out!
And certainly, under no circumstances, would any kid ever be permitted to find the perfect spot atop a railroad trestle for whipping snowballs at unsuspecting cars exiting the tunnel!
That wasn’t permitted when I was a kid, either, but, boy, did we spend hours doing it.
There are few finer feelings than the adrenaline rush that comes after a snowball slams against the rear window of a car, the car fishtails and some angry fellow jumps out, cussing, “You better hope I don’t get my hands on you, you little SOBs!” as he attempts to climb the steep trestle hill and you run like mad into the woods.
In any event, most kids today aren’t spending enough time free to play outside in the elements and it is hurting them more than most parents can imagine.
Such kids are suffering Nature Deficit Disorder.

***

Nature Deficit Disorder is a term coined by journalist Richard Louv in his book "Last Child in the Woods."
Louv spent 10 years traveling around America interviewing parents, kids, teachers, researchers and others to learn about children's experiences with nature.
As it goes, a lack of stimulation on the sledding slopes — a lack of stimulation from exploring nature in general — is very damaging to children.
"We don't yet know why it happens, but when all five of a child's senses come alive, a child is at an optimum state of learning," Louv told me. "Creativity and cognitive functioning go way up."
The consequences of withdrawing from nature are very bad.
“Kids lose their sense of being rooted in the world,” said Louv.
They're more likely to experience stress, hyperactivity, attention-deficit disorder and other modern maladies.
Why are modern kids withdrawing from nature? The primary reason is that their parents are scared.
Technology has brought us lots of cable television channels with lots of airtime to fill. The void has been filled, in part, with sensationalistic stories, such as 24/7 coverage about children who have been abducted.
Louv argues that during the last 30 years, our sensationalist media have "scared children straight out of the woods and fields."
Parents are terrified to let their kids out of their sight.
The truth is, statistically, the world is no more dangerous for kids now than it was in the '50s, '60s and '70s, when 10-year-olds were free to roam all over the place.
Consider: There are roughly 40 million elementary school-age children in America. Each year, roughly 115 children are abducted — but more than 250,000 are in car wrecks.
Where wintertime frolicking is concerned, it is true that kids got hurt sledding during the ‘70s.
I knew of one kid, lying on his belly on his Red Rider, who broke both arms trying to navigate between two pine trees. There were incidents in which some kids, doing reckless things in the woods, suffered some nasty injuries — or worse.
But such incidents happened to a small percentage of kids and there was no bandwidth in the media to make parents scared about potential sledding accidents.
And so it was that millions of us were free to dive headfirst into childhood, nature and winter.
That’s why, every time it snowed, dozens of kids arrived at the top of Tracy Drive — and there was never an adult in sight.
We had to figure things out on our own — had to navigate risk on the slopes and ruffians who liked to take our legs out from under us with their sleds.
Which brings us back to Jerry Gray.

***

One Sunday afternoon, after a particularly fast run down the hill — and a spectacular jump over the ramp in the center of the hill — I decided to head for home.
I’d been sledding all morning, after all, and was getting hungry. It was always a good idea to end on a solid run.
Just as I got to my feet and turned to walk up the hill, Gray rammed into me.
Unlike most kids, who sledded solely for the thrill of whipping down the hill, Gray got his jollies out of knocking other kids off their feet.
He hit me just below the knees, causing me to go posterior over tin cups.
As I lay on my back, writhing in pain, his boisterous laugh echoed over the hillside. Even then, at the age of 11 or so, Gray had a baritone voice like a grown man.
“Sucker!” he shouted as he walked past me back up the hill in search of his next victim.
“Sucker!”
Nowadays, in the highly unlikely event that a kid would ever experience such a thing, his response would surely be different than mine was.
He’d whip out his cell phone and call his mom.
In short order, the cops, Child and Youth Services and the family lawyer would arrive and Gray would be whisked off to a holding cell, where psychiatrists would inject him with sedatives.
No such luck in the ‘70s.
As I lay there in the snow, I had to suffer pain and humiliation all by myself.
But rather than make me sad, it made me angry.
I vowed to give Gray a taste of his own medicine.
I forced myself to my feet and climbed to the top of the hill, just behind him.
Just after he jumped on his sled and took a run, I jumped onto my plastic toboggan just behind him.
Hitting him in the shins as he ended his run and got to his feet would require perfect timing, however.
I didn’t have perfect timing on that run.
As the day wore on, I tried to blend into the background. I shadowed Gray — trying not to reveal my fury as he mowed down one kid after another — looking for the perfect opportunity to strike.
Finally, as the sun began to fall and the dinner hour was upon us, I had my chance.
Just as he finished a run and got on his feet, I hit him square in the shins, causing him to go posterior over tin cups.
I could hear the air exit his lungs as his back hit the icy ground. I turned to watch him writhe in pain as my ride on my plastic bobsled continued down the slope.
I laughed the deepest baritone laugh that a normal kid — one who hadn’t yet gone through puberty, anyhow — could muster.
I was so delighted with the turn of events, I completely forgot about the pond!