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May 24, 2022 - Lionel Nation
29:56
My Glorious Childhood of Danger: Jarts, M80s and the Excitement of Certain Injury
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First, I hate syrupy nostalgia.
I detest it.
I hate when people tell me that, you know...
Their generation was better than my generation and that I don't understand.
Whether it's the Depression or World War II, God bless these people.
But I wasn't born then, so why are you always telling me, well, you don't understand.
Well, guess what?
I'm doing it too.
Not about the Depression, but about being born when I was born.
The greatest Generation.
I love that everybody says that.
But in my, I guess in my 64th year, I guess, I look back to growing up in the 60s.
Being a kid in the 60s.
And the 70s, we'll talk about one day, because that's really the 60s people talk about.
But I digress.
But I was blessed with something that at the time we didn't really understand.
We didn't understand.
It was dangerous toys.
Living dangerously.
So perilously.
I get choked up just thinking about it.
Where parents thought nothing of not BB guns, pellet guns.
Jarts.
Remember that?
Lawn darts.
Huge propelled arrows that could impale and kill.
Not to mention irreparable brain damage, irreversible trauma.
That's wonderful.
Wood-burning sets.
Wood-burning pyrography.
Giving a kid a wand, an electric soldering iron that's glowing at 15,000 centigrade.
No helmets.
No knee pads.
No safety.
Even the strollers.
Have you seen strollers?
When we were kids, those metal things, you stop fast and, I mean, it's brain trauma.
Now there are these prams.
And it made us better.
And it made us tougher.
And that is the subject matter of today's disquisition.
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I was born in 1958.
At the tail end of the Eisenhower administration, I love to say that.
See, I'm sorry.
Maybe I'm getting this wrong.
But I like my age.
And I like...
To me, aging is learning and maturing.
I love it.
And I'm an ageist.
I don't think a lot of kids today understand the...
Frankly, the...
Benefits of our knowledge.
I don't think they understand it.
I don't think they recognize it.
I don't think they even have the slightest comprehension of such.
But what I think was so critical in retrospect, and I didn't understand it then, I did not understand it, was that it was the norm to be dangerous.
And reckless.
And we didn't even know we were being reckless.
Now, with society comes some certain things.
I think cars are better designed.
Better designed, right?
Some, if you recall, remember those big steering wheels?
Remember when power steering wasn't there?
I mean, all that.
I don't want to just wax too nostalgic, though I love it.
But they would have these pointed...
Chrome arrows in the middle of the steering wheel so if you impale before airbags, you're dead.
Your steering wheel killed you, not the accident.
I remember we didn't have seatbelts.
We had to add them.
We had a car, we added them.
We went to Western Auto and we added them.
These bolted down things.
They had campaigns on TV to convince you, please wear a seatbelt.
There was one, I remember this, one woman said, I don't know about my seatbelt.
It'll wrinkle my dress.
Next scene, she's in traction.
Remember that?
Oh, they always had traction in movies.
That body cast with the leg up and the weights.
I don't know if anybody's ever done that before, but you saw that.
So there's been some, you know, some benefits.
But I remember our breaks was my father putting his arm out.
That's it.
That was the breaks.
And the toys?
We had no idea of anybody being hurt.
And if they were hurt, it was like, well, what are you going to do?
I had a firecracker one time.
A firecracker.
It wasn't a, you know, it wasn't like an M80 or anything, but I was holding it.
My friend was lighting it.
The fuse was, I don't know, too short, too fast.
And as they lit it, it went and back.
Bang!
In my hand.
My hand was like numb.
Not numb.
Yeah, numb kind of.
Numb.
My fingers were black.
We went to the doctor.
Why am I losing now?
I don't know.
And you go like that.
It doesn't seem to be any nerve damage.
Let me know.
Could be.
Could be.
Alright.
And that was it.
Now can we sue anybody?
Nerve damage?
It was just a matter of fact.
Well, you had a firecracker in your hand, yeah?
Well, you might get some nerve damage.
Okay.
Our biggest worries were being losing your eye.
You're going to poke your eye out.
You're going to lose an eye.
Or, break your neck.
It was one of the two.
One of the others.
I tell this story and I think it's the most emblematic.
Of my generation, how we just don't understand what's going on right now.
People are with the masks and this.
Not so much the masks are bad, but the fear, the dread fear.
Nothing scared us.
Remember, mothers would smoke cigarettes.
Most, not most, a lot of us, their mothers smoked during pregnancy.
There was no low birth weight.
These people are, I don't advocate that, but it was a different time.
It was just a different time.
But the story that I will never forget, that to me is the moment.
The moment.
I've said this before, I'll say it again.
We would meet with kids from the neighborhood, and we don't know who they were.
We kind of knew, but it didn't matter.
We were kids.
We were on our bikes.
We would go to somebody's home.
And we were just, the parents kind of knew that.
You just...
Hello.
Parents ever say, what are these kids doing there?
Who are these?
You just understood.
You went to this backyard and that backyard.
And one day we ended up in my house and for some reason we had a ladder.
And I or somebody else came up with the idea.
Let's play Jump Off the Roof.
It wasn't that high, but it's a roof.
So we put the ladder up.
Aluminum ladder.
Climbing up.
I don't know how old we were.
30?
40?
Just kidding.
And we had a towel around our neck because we were Superman.
And we would go to the edge and jump.
Now the compression, nobody broke a leg that I know of.
We just did it.
We went up.
And yay!
Boom!
My father was in his chair and he's reading his proverbial paper and he looks up and he sees it.
Didn't even react to that one.
These kids.
Then he saw a second one.
It was mostly out of curiosity.
Goes to the back door.
Sliding glass door.
Big Florida thing.
What are you kids doing?
What are you kids doing?
We're jumping off the roof.
Okay.
Not a...
It was a great father.
Loved us.
Caring.
It didn't register.
These are kids.
They do this.
I want you to ask yourself, and I want your kids to know this.
I swear to God, I want you to do this.
You know, every now and then somebody will come up with these things like some West Point or Annapolis featured speaker will do something about, you know, make your bed.
The benefits of making your bed.
Okay.
And there's something to be said for that, I think.
Okay.
Make your bed.
Fine.
Here's one for you.
Take your kids out.
Go to a park.
Find an appropriate tree and say, climb it.
What?
Climb that tree.
Get up there.
And then figure out how to get down, because that's the hard part.
I never realized how important it was to climb.
A tree.
Plotting, which branch do I go to?
Can that one hold me?
And if it doesn't hold me, I fall and I die.
But it was accepted.
Because these are the 60s.
We die.
But we're playing.
What a good way to go.
And then somebody, he wouldn't cry, get me down.
There's no getting you down.
I can't come up and get you.
You're going to come down.
Figure this thing out.
And if you don't come down soon enough, we're leaving.
We'll stay here for a while.
And that's another thing, too.
Negotiating.
We negotiated with each other.
We talked.
There was this thing about talking.
What do you want to do?
I don't know.
Should we help him?
I don't know.
He's a pain in the ass.
Wait five more minutes.
Okay.
All right.
Go ahead.
We're just talking.
Not like this.
And by the way, I'm not...
I love social media.
I love...
The internet.
How do you think I'm talking to you now?
What am I, crazy?
Of course I love that.
But there was something else.
I grew up in Florida.
Not Florida.
Florida.
That's redneck.
Hot.
West Coast.
Tampa.
Not Tampa Bay.
Tampa.
Hillsborough County.
And every summer...
Invariably, some of us would go, their families would go on a trip.
One time my family and I went, in like a 66 Impala, we drove to Canada and back.
The back part is important.
And my sister and I would sit in the back and just not say anything.
We might have a magazine.
We might have something.
We didn't complain.
We just sat there for hours and hours on the ribbon of America, the highways.
Never thought about it.
Just amused ourselves somehow.
Anyway.
We're funny about that.
We just did these things.
But there was this idea that is so gone now.
This whole idea where you have to amuse people.
Where kids have to be...
Anyway.
I almost got off track.
I do that sometimes, because sometimes I think, I like this idea better.
But invariably, during the summer, somebody would go on vacation and come back.
And when you went to the Carolinas, south or north, or both, I don't know, this is where you got fireworks.
In the 60s, there'd be a gas station, and they had fireworks.
Not firecrackers.
You didn't hear what I'm saying.
I'm talking Grucci family quality fireworks.
Unregulated.
Straight from China.
With the most wonderful art on these.
I love...
If you tell me right now, want to go blow some fireworks?
Right now.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I also like to play catch in fireworks.
Anytime.
Anyplace.
I don't care if I'm a hundred.
Yes!
Let's go do that.
The fireworks themselves.
Black Cat.
The artwork was beautiful.
Those were boring.
Because you get a fire...
You get the firecracker.
What do you do?
You string them together.
You tape them together.
You multiply the lethality of it, which is what little boys did.
What boys did.
And then you'd cut them open.
Maybe combine the powder.
Anyway, you would tape.
You would figure, how do we make this more powerful?
Well, that was easy.
We had M-80s and M-1000s.
Ash cans, they called them.
Smoke bombs.
Cherry bombs that had water-resistant wicks.
You could flush them down toilets.
You could do so much.
Fireworks that were just beautiful with a report.
Let me tell you this one story.
Never forget this.
Just when it got to be dark I went in the backyard and I had a I had a bottle rocket with a nose cone on it.
You couldn't believe this thing.
I mean, this thing, it just looked like.
Stand back.
It wasn't even a bottle rocket.
It was almost like a missile with a nose cone.
And this had a report.
Colors.
Boom!
The report was the...
And not just a...
I mean a boom!
And, you know, glitter and colors and...
Okay.
So it was in the backyard.
I had a Folgers coffee can.
I'm going to just...
You know, that sound it makes.
And then...
You see the beautiful array of colors, right?
Okay.
Here's the coffee can.
I lined it up perfectly.
When I lit it, for some reason, I don't know, it slid...
Here's the bottle rocket.
When I lit it, it did this.
And it went to the...
Corner of the can.
Now the trajectory is like 45 degrees versus 90. Oh my God!
And it's in the flash.
I'm not going to grab this thing.
Oh my, that's terrible.
Where's it going?
It's going that way, but I don't know.
And I'm doing Euclidean geometry.
This is what happened.
It went over the back.
Like a hedge or something.
Over the backyard.
I ran to see where I was.
I'm in horror.
And it's one of these slow motion.
We had a woman named Mrs. Jones across the street.
Mrs. Jones used to wear stockings and never shaved her legs.
Don't ask me why.
It was the most horrible thing.
We would see this matted and these stockings.
She was from Spanish Barbados, her husband was a tugboat captain.
Mrs. Jones, she had a weird accent.
It was like Caribbean meets something.
Apparently Mrs. Jones was right there by the front door because it did this.
Hit her door.
There was an overhang, a little porch, kind of like these wooden, these cheap, you know, those wooden slatted Lawn chair things.
Anyway, she had that, a planter, and her front door, okay?
Hit the front door.
She must have been right there.
And I'm watching this in horror.
She must have been, like, right at the door.
She opened the door.
And right there.
Right there.
Boom!
Lights!
Glitter!
Red, blue, green.
Pow!
The overhang of her porch added this reverberation, this Phil Spector wall of sound.
It was glorious.
Boom!
Smoke!
You know that acrid, cordite, silvery gunpowder smell?
I remember And, you know, you think people react.
She just stood there.
I thought, she's going to die.
She's going to die.
She didn't, of course.
But she didn't jump back or close the door.
She just stood there.
But just remember this.
Oh, what's that?
Open the door.
as a wall of flame, fire, sound, color.
This report...
And immediately I said, I'm going to get arrested.
So I took my can.
I hit it.
I told my parents, I'm going to call it a night.
I'm tired.
It's 7.30.
Yeah, well, you know.
I figure if I'm in bed somehow, the police won't come.
They won't come.
They won't find me.
I don't know how old I was at the time.
But I loved that.
We had demented kids.
Kids that later on, I guess, grew up to be either politicians or serial killers.
The M80 and M1000 ash cans.
These, of course, this was terrible.
I'm not saying I ever did this.
I don't know what the statute of limitations is, but sometimes people would place these into mailboxes.
And they would take a mailbox right off the hinges.
They were really powerful.
Canister, red, with a green wick in the middle.
So, we're throwing them in.
So there's always that one kid in your group.
The killer.
Stand By Me had that one kid.
We had one.
His mother had a glue gun.
Mama's got a glue gun she wears on her chest.
And he took the M80 and he coated it in glue and rolled them in BBs from the milk carton, Daisy BB, rolled them in, let them hard, so it's now shrapnel.
Now, let me just explain something to you.
In the pantheon of dangerousness, it doesn't get any more eyes.
I mean just I can't believe we did this.
But we did.
Nobody got hurt.
I remember taking a Crossman pellet gun, chasing a friend.
It was kind of cool, for Florida standards.
And as I was firing, this is terrible.
I'm not proud of it.
It's my life.
The back of his jacket would go up as each...
He didn't pierce anything.
But I thought nothing of it.
I'm chasing him around.
And people are saying, I don't know if dodgeball is...
If that gives a wrong...
I'm trying to kill this guy.
I'm trying to kill him.
But the last one...
And I'm really lucky.
Nothing happened.
I'm not proud of this.
And please, in no way I'm endorsing this.
Roman candles were these wonderful things that you...
These tubes, and you light them, and you know, the phosphorus or whatever ball.
Willie Pete, you know.
Different colors.
That was okay.
But you know when it was really fun?
To chase people with them.
One of each hand.
Look, I'm Thor.
I'm Vulcan.
As you're chasing people, and you're...
Chasing them and she's and it's missing them and hitting the ground and it's this fireball which could, God knows what it could do to you.
We drank from hoses.
One time we drank from a hose.
The hose that would be outside in the hot Florida sun, the water was like boiling.
But one time there was a mouse.
They got into the hose and died and this guy puts his mouth up to it and there's a bit of a something caught and he wiggled it or bent it and all of a sudden this dead mouse hits him.
He spat and spit and contorted.
Did he get a tetanus shot?
No.
Did he go to the doctor?
No.
We laughed.
It was a sense of we're indestructible.
Nobody ever got hurt.
Nobody...
It was different.
I told you, I had a wood-burning set.
And I'm sitting like this.
You know, I could kill myself.
So?
And because we didn't fear this, Because nobody applauded our timorousness.
Because nobody applauded and encouraged this, oh my God, this snowflake, oh my God, I don't know what to do.
You know, you got my pronoun wrong or whatever the heck it is.
Nothing, nothing bothered us.
Nothing.
Nothing.
It was just...
And we couldn't come home until it got dark.
Play!
Get out of here!
Go talk!
Figure things out!
Get on a bike!
Ride!
Go into woods!
Do dangerous things!
Go!
Go!
Get out!
This is, of course, before serial killers and Charles Manson and everything else.
Granted, it was a different time.
So I'm going to leave you with this.
If you have kids, or if you're looking for a great summer program for kids, I want you to go to a park, find a good tree, and tell your kids to climb it.
Without helmets, and without knee pads, and wrist pads, and elbow pads, and armor.
Climb it.
And get scared.
And overcome your fear.
And get down.
And then, you tell your kid, that was great.
I saw it.
I saw you.
I'm proud of you.
I'm proud of you.
You climbed a tree and you got down.
And you did it on your own.
And it was scary.
And you did it.
And you withstood it.
Sounds silly, doesn't it?
It does.
Sounds silly.
It's not.
We did things.
I'm going to say one more thing.
When you hand a baby a toy like this, more mental operations are going on than you can imagine.
What is this?
Texture.
Shape.
Spheroid.
Versus square.
Metal.
Soft.
This.
Round.
I'm touching it.
I'm seeing it.
I'm holding it.
Parietal lobe.
Positioning.
I'm here.
It's here.
Maybe I can throw it.
Oh, it rolls.
It rolls.
And the baby's figuring out this rolls, but this doesn't roll.
What's going on?
It sounds crazy.
Blocks.
Blocks are the greatest thing in the world.
Lincoln Logs.
Stuff that we thought was stupid.
Stuff that we said, well, we had that because it was the 60s and we didn't have computers.
No.
No.
This is the worst thing.
This is two-dimensional.
This just throws information at your child.
Your child's not interacting.
Pushing a button and staring in this quaalude fog is not interacting.
This is it.
Do you know that there's a difference between boys and girls?
I know nobody wants to say this, but boys, they've found that when you take blocks and give a kid blocks...
He will stack them up to see how far he can stack them.
But little girls will spread them out.
Like making a home.
Isn't that interesting?
I'm not being nostalgic for this.
Not everything was great then.
Not everything was great.
But the stuff that was great was great because we didn't realize it.
And we need to reacquaint ourselves with it.
Now.
Because we are losing generations of kids lost in a world of remote learning and fear and dread and scaredy-cat, everything, where being scared is applauded and courage is dissuaded, so to speak.
In any event, think about this carefully.
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