I received an email with the picture above recently and it got me thinking about the 1970’s. That was my time...aged 4-14. It was a great era to grow up in and this picture perfectly captures that time. We had long hair, parted in the middle, and carefully feathered back with large blue or black 'Goody' combs. We wore cut-off tee-shirts, short jean-shorts, and yes we jumped everything. We did a lot of stupid crazy stuff, but jumping stuff was huge because Evel Knievel was doing his thing back then jumping over fountains, cars, buses, and of course his rocket-cycle attempt over the Snake River Canyon in 1974.
I still remember where I was on that weird day...in my friend Greg Felson’s living-room watching on TV with his disgusted dad when Evel’s jump failed miserably. But whenever Evel would do one of his jumps on ABC’s 'Wide World Of Sports' it was all we could talk about at school. We also had Fonzi from 'Happy Days' who cashed in on the Evel craze in that 2-part episode in 1975 when he jumped over 14 trashcans on his motorcycle. All of us kids were glued to the TV for those Happy Day’s episodes. I don't know if the whole jumping thing was a nation-wide craze or not but it was huge where I lived. Well, KISS, jumping bikes...and Wacky-Packages. Remember those? Huge.
My younger friend Jimmy used to jump his Big-Wheel like in the picture above, but all of us bigger kids jumped our pedal dirt-bikes. We would put jumps anywhere and everywhere. Just grab a shovel and make a dirt jump in the field, or a log and a piece of scrap wood and we were in business jumping on the road. Or we would put the jump in the ditch and get a good fast start on the road before gliding down into the ditch jump.
And of course we were jumping over things...boxes, rocks, logs, garbage cans or anything we could get our hands on. One time my mom came down from the house to the road to check on my little brother Nate only to find him obediently laying in the ditch with us taking turns jumping our bikes over him. She made us stop that. We would jump in the winter too. We had a corn field across the street from my long, steep driveway so we would put a ramp on the road, tear down the driveway as fast as we could on our bikes, hit the jump and fly 25-30 feet in the air landing in the deep snow. We didn't care if we stuck the landing because it was just as much fun to land and flip over the handlebars into the soft snow.
We were into doing some stupid sh*t, and yes we would get hurt. I remember one trick we would do was to see how many people we could get onto one bike...like a guy on the handlebars, a guy standing up peddling, another two guys on the seat and maybe a guy standing on the back wheel peg. Then we would go as fast as we could down a large hill by my house. Lots of scraped and bloody knees over the years. Jimmy's older brother Scott got a dislocated shoulder from a jump, and I still have a scar on my right knee from skeeching.
This cool trick we called 'skeeching' would take place in the winter when there was freshly fallen snow on the road. We would get off the school bus one stop early, run around to the back of the bus and then hold on to the bumper. The bus would then pull you down the road while you held on for dear life, gliding on your boots with snow spraying up into your face. It was exhilarating and you felt cool with the kids on the back of the bus cheering you on, but one time I hit an unseen pot-hole and went head over heels rolling down the road at 30 mph. My jeans were ripped to shreds and my knee was a bloody mess. I had to tell my mom that I slipped and fell on some ice.
That was painful, but nothing other than our shattered nerves got hurt the time we were at the top of a large grain tower. We used to climb up the ladder on the outside of this tall concrete container and sit on the sheet-metal dome on top and check out the view. We could see for miles around and it was a good place to hang out and feel cool. One afternoon me and Aaron Vermillion were sitting up there and the metal top collapsed from our weight! That was not cool. It did not collapse all the way, but the top turned from a dome into a bowl and the sudden 6-foot drop scared the living crap out of us.
A neat game we would play was 'Rock-Tag'. Before my dad had it paved, our driveway was made up of golf-ball sized rocks. Towards the end of summer when the corn was grown over our heads my friends and I would break up into two teams. One team would stand at the end of my driveway and the other team would disperse into the corn field across the street. The team in the driveway armed with rocks would yell "Marco!" and each player in the corn field would have to yell "Polo!" while tossing an ear of corn into the air. That would signal your position so that the 'Driveway' team could then throw rocks into your general vicinity hoping to hit you. The trick of course if you were in the field was to toss up your corn and then break into a sprint to avoid the rocks. Your adrenaline would just skyrocket when the rocks were raining down around you. Fortunately only a few of us ever got hit, but we quit playing after Scott took a shot to the head and was bleeding.
So many fun, stupid things. One afternoon me, Gary Paulson, Aaron and a couple others were hanging out in the loft of an old abandoned barn down the street. There was a long thick rope hanging down from the ceiling that we used to swing on into the hay below. Suddenly Aaron reached out with his lighter and lit the bottom of the rope on fire, to be funny I guess. Of course the flame started climbing up the rope. "Holy sh*t!!" Aaron grabbed a two-by-four and wacked the fiery end of the rope hoping to knock out the flames. He stopped the rope-fire but in the process sent sparks flying everywhere starting at least a half dozen smaller fires in the hay. We were all running around like crazy stomping out the fires. A couple of them got fairly big and I remember thinking that the whole place was going to go up and it was going be one huge fire and oh-my-god we were going to get into so much trouble...but eventually we managed to get all the fires out and then we got the hell out of there.
I guess the stupid stuff we did as kids in the 70’s paved the way for the even stupider stuff we did as teenagers in the 80’s (as outlined a few weeks ago in my blog entry ‘Down By The River’). The 70's were a fun time to grow up in though. Bike helmets had not been invented yet, we collected baseball cards religiously and never put them in the spokes of our tires, we listened to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 every week, other than PBS we only had 3 channels on TV, and we did not have video games until ‘Pong’ came along in the late 70’s...but we sure had a lot of fun. Thanks Mom for letting us be stupid kids.
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