Crabgrass by Tauhid Bondia for February 23, 2025

I remember when I was growing up in the 90s I took a turn in a go-kart WAY too fast and was thrown out of it on the asphalt. I had road rash all over my arms legs and one side of my cheek and limped home. My mom almost had a heart attack.

I think Gen X would be the last ones that didn’t have a big embrace of having helmets and pads and stuff.

Rode our bikes till they wore out. Down main street to the prairie path and back, 10 hour days in the summer. Axes, we used to build additions to the tree fort my dad made. Swung off the porches. Found some shingle samples dumped in the vacant lot two doors down, and climbed on the roof and shingled it. My brother suffered the only injury, a broken arm falling off the swing in the tree across from the tree fort.

Back in the 1980’s I asked my sister if I should give her daughters bicycle helmets for Christmas, she told me not to because the other children would make fun of them.

in the 50’s they were not available at least not to us

Scabs. Boyhood’s badges of honor.

Hey! Have you notice most kids don’t ride their bikes off of cliffs?

Geroff my lawn, you goldang ruffians!

Some places have laws, now… not back in the 70s or 80s!!

Okay: List all dates when Kevin and bike go flying…

Finally, someone addressed it.

This generation seems to have more working brains.

I was older than these guys in the ‘80s, and I remember safety equipment coming in during that decade. My contemporaries and I rode everywhere, all the time, without a helmet or any padding in sight. Sometimes we even rode barefoot, although that stopped when we moved from bikes with rubber pedal pads to bikes with metal pedals.We weren’t unaware of the potential for injury. I once wiped out on some loose gravel and scraped up my ankle, and I remember one day a kid went over the handlebars right in front of our house when an extra pair of shoes he was carrying got tangled in his front wheel. HUGE goose egg on his forehead. Still, I rode enough to literally wear out every moving part on my bike from 1975-79 (ran up over 2500 miles according to the odometer) and never even thought about a helmet or pads.(I also remember seeing a Family Circus panel showing one of the melonheads sitting on a swing while wearing a helmet, knee pads AND elbow pads and thinking, “Parents don’t REALLY make their kids wear all that, do they?”)

In the 70’s, the only “safety” equipment I had was a clip that I put on my pants leg to keep them from being snagged in the bike chain. You remember bell-bottoms?

Their flights:

2025/02/23

2025/01/05

2024/09/29

2024/08/11

2024/06/02

2024/03/24

2024/02/11

2023/10/15

2023/08/27

2023/06/25

2023/03/19

Kids were tough in those days. If you broke a leg, you were expected to “walk it off.”

Now we “know better.”

As everyone is saying, no safety stuff in the 60s or 70s, so my overprotective mother just didn’t allow me to ride a bike, other than on one small section of the driveway. I was able to drive a CAR (after an extra year of practice) but still no bike at 17… No climbing trees, no going barefoot, no running too hard, no playing in the snow except twice in my entire childhood.

This comment is a repeat, but still applicable. When I got my first bicycle at age 8 or 9, my dad helped me learn to balance and start the bike moving, etc. Then on my first ride on a very gentle downslope, I ran into a tree. There was no damage to me or the bike, but my dad gave me words to live by. “If you can’t stop, steer. If you can’t steer, stop!”

Anyone notice their bike had 3 peddles? Maybe that’s why they’re having so much trouble.

My generation was getting replacement joints in their 30s. I managed to avoid school sports and am still running with OEM parts.

This strip takes place in the 1980’s, right? So this explains a lot. No computers, no Internet, no helmets, no cell phones, Kevin and Miles pretty much free to explore unchecked by parents. I don’t think today’s kids would ever understand this time.

Free Range Childhood. Now that’s Living!

Gah. No, Kevin, this is STILL your day as a kid, and your generation that generally gets sheltered, perhaps a little too much. I don’t know if your mom is being understanding or negligent, but count yourself lucky — as long as you don’t kill yourself or end up a paraplegic or something like that.

Oh man the things we did! Played on bikes and ran in the streets barefoot (I had numerous stubbed toes), hammered caps to make them explode, started little fires with magnifying glasses on pavement (our permissive mom at least warned us about that one), caught crawdads on the creek, had to be dragged in to dinner. So much fun. And I made sure my kids had free play with better safety measures. Finally bave into video games when they were older. Now they are hooked on their phones. Sigh….