Editor’s note: This column is an except from Tom Purcell’s book, “Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood.”
The MSNBC.com article said that kids raised in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s are survivors. We survived chain-smoking adults, meat-and-potato diets and rough-and-tumble fearlessness of every kind — such as the bike jump that nearly killed me in 1972. It was the Evel Knievel era, after all. Knievel became famous doing wheelies and jumping his motorcycle over cars and buses. Every kid with a bicycle tried to emulate him.
We jumped our bikes from ramps built from warped plywood that we set on rickety blocks. It was a grand feeling to soar through the air, though our landings often weren’t pretty. This was the early ’70s, after all. We didn’t wear helmets or pads. When our rear wheels hit the pavement, we wiped out plenty. When a landing went really wrong, a mom was alerted, a moaning kid would be loaded into a wood-paneled station wagon and off he’d go to St. Clair Hospital for stitches or a cast.
Which brings us to the day I almost died. I was riding a five-speed Murray Spyder bike. Its fifth gear allowed me superior speed and, thus, superior distance off the ramp. I held the neighborhood record for the longest jump— until some outsider allegedly broke it. I wasted no time reclaiming my record. I rode to the tippy-top of Marilynn Drive and began pedaling like mad. I was moving faster than I ever had when I cut a hard left onto Janet Drive and hit the ramp.
The jolt was spectacular. It caused my sweaty fingers to lose hold of the handlebars. Everything went into slow motion. I remember floating through the air like a directionless missile — my body flailing as it sought to regain its balance. I remember the tremendous impact that shot through my spine as the rear wheel hit the pavement, how my bike began wobbling wildly. I was heading for a big, splintery telephone pole. I leaned left, then right, and, miraculously, avoided the large pole.
The worst was yet ahead. I was roaring toward a thicket of pine trees. Their trunks and branches would surely turn me into kid stew. Then providence intervened. One of our neighborhood dads was a welder. He had built a giant steel-framed street hockey net, and it was stored in the pine brush directly where I was headed. The net caught me like a glove. I didn’t hit a single trunk. I didn’t suffer a scratch.
One doctor told MSNBC.com that most kids of my era survived their childhood just fine, but some did get badly hurt, and a helmet and some padding could have saved them. But it’s also true that whereas kids were once free to roam and explore, too many of today’s kids aren’t free to do much of anything.
In any event, I regained my bike jump record that day, and I’m confident it will stand forever.
Even if a 2024 kid was daring enough to jump his bike off of a ramp, he’d be covered in more protective padding than a hockey goalie. There’s no way a kid carrying that much weight could ever fly as far as I did the day a bike jump nearly killed me.
Copyright 2024 Tom Purcell, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Purcell’s syndicated column, humor books and funny videos at TomPurcell.com. Email him at Tom@TomPurcell.com.
