Hand Me My Stair Helmet
November 2014
© Adam Granger
The following passage should be read on an empty stomach: In 1958, when I was nine years old, my dad bought our first television, a big RCA black and white. The timing of his purchase was synced to the US Open Men's Tennis Finals. He switched on the set, sat down on the couch with a cold Pabst, and—in ran Adam, blood spurting from his hand.
Friends and I had been playing war, and I was a sentry, sitting atop a clothesline pole in our back yard. The line was fastened to large hooks on the pole. I lost my balance and, while falling, impaled myself on one of the hooks by my wrist, my feet dangling off of the ground. A neighbor who was mowing his lawn ran over and unhooked me. The bones in my hand were visible. And so, instead of an afternoon of beer and tennis, my dad spent three hours at the hospital, his head between his knees (all the blood had made him woozy), while I was knocked out and sewn up. Eighteen stitches later, we came home, the tennis match, in that time before videotape, gone forever.
This type of injury was not uncommon in the 50s and 60s. Bicyclists didn't wear helmets and, for that matter, neither did motorcyclists. Kids had bike wrecks all the time, and banged their heads and denuded large tracts of their epidermises.
Much is made of the nostalgic 50s image of kids protected by a cohort of village moms, but the fact is, in my home town at least, no one was watching us kids, and we pretty much did what we wanted, as long as we didn't disturb the grownups. My brother and I used to run the garden hose all afternoon, literally flooding our back yard. We would make torches out of lit rolled-up newspaper and run about the neighborhood brandishing them and howling. And when we played guns—which was sometimes cowboys and sometimes war—one neighborhood kid shouldered a real machine gun (supposedly disabled) that his dad had brought home from the Korean War. The thing I remember most about that gun was how heavy it was, and how much more fun my plastic machine gun was to carry and shoot. (In the 21st century, an eleven-year-old running through yards waving a submachine gun and screaming like a stuck hog would certainly elicit a different response, but back then, we were just kids playing guns.)
Fireworks were completely unsupervised, and injuries were epidemic. My brother blew off part of his toe when he was twelve, and my mother was so mad at him that she didn't take him to the doctor until it became infected. And I've already written about following the DDT sprayer on our bikes and riding in the cloud he produced.
Everyone just assumed that there would be a certain number of injuries. Everyone knew a lot of accident victims, and once in a while, someone died. I knew two kids who were blind in one eye, and several with missing fingers, teeth and toes, all the results of misadventure. I chopped off the tip of my left thumb in a bicycle sprocket when I was eight. The tip couldn't be found, so the doctor just folded the skin over the top and bandaged it and sent me home. When I broke a toe, the same doctor just taped it to the one next to it.
And in the 60s, when I did construction gruntwork, no one wore respirators or safety glasses; I shudder to think of the hours I spent breathing who knows what while demolishing old construction and insulating crawl spaces. And in 1973, when I was running a large drill while doing winter maintenance on a refrigeration chiller in Oklahoma, I ripped out half of my hair when I caught it on the drill shaft. This stuff just happened: kids lost body parts and grownups poisoned their respiratory systems and people got decapitated in car accidents and we all figured it was our own stupid faults, somehow, and we just sort of accepted it.
OSHA was formed in 1971, but it wasn't until around 1980 that it seemed to really kick in. About the same time, parents started deciding to reduce the casualty rate of their offspring. Kids started wearing bike helmets, and then their parents did too, and everyone started wearing seat belts. Playground equipment lost its sharp edges and square metal corners; the inherently lethal teeter-totter was vanquished. Kiddie car seats were improved, and then improved again. Ditto for strollers and cribs.
If we were to inch farther along this continuum, we might well come to concepts like wearing helmets in cars. And why not? I'm pretty sure automobile head injuries outflank bike head injuries. And how about helmets for going up and down stairs? It sounds like I'm ridiculing the wearing of bike helmets, but my talk of stair helmets only sounds ridiculous because we don't currently use them. As a 65-year-old, I can well remember thinking it was ridiculous to make a four-year old on a scooter wear a helmet.
Admittedly, this discussion puts us in range of Woody Allen's story of his mother making him wear a helmet to play chess, but I daresay someone somewhere has suffered a head injury while playing chess. And, seriously, I lost a good old friend a few years back to a fall down his basement stairs. A stair helmet might have saved his life, but we're not there yet.
Today, we feel naked without helmets while riding bikes and scooters. And if, in the future, we do move on to stair helmets, we will, after an inevitable period of scoff and scorn, adapt to these also. Who knows, we might end up finding it easier just to wear helmets all of the time.
Friends and I had been playing war, and I was a sentry, sitting atop a clothesline pole in our back yard. The line was fastened to large hooks on the pole. I lost my balance and, while falling, impaled myself on one of the hooks by my wrist, my feet dangling off of the ground. A neighbor who was mowing his lawn ran over and unhooked me. The bones in my hand were visible. And so, instead of an afternoon of beer and tennis, my dad spent three hours at the hospital, his head between his knees (all the blood had made him woozy), while I was knocked out and sewn up. Eighteen stitches later, we came home, the tennis match, in that time before videotape, gone forever.
This type of injury was not uncommon in the 50s and 60s. Bicyclists didn't wear helmets and, for that matter, neither did motorcyclists. Kids had bike wrecks all the time, and banged their heads and denuded large tracts of their epidermises.
Much is made of the nostalgic 50s image of kids protected by a cohort of village moms, but the fact is, in my home town at least, no one was watching us kids, and we pretty much did what we wanted, as long as we didn't disturb the grownups. My brother and I used to run the garden hose all afternoon, literally flooding our back yard. We would make torches out of lit rolled-up newspaper and run about the neighborhood brandishing them and howling. And when we played guns—which was sometimes cowboys and sometimes war—one neighborhood kid shouldered a real machine gun (supposedly disabled) that his dad had brought home from the Korean War. The thing I remember most about that gun was how heavy it was, and how much more fun my plastic machine gun was to carry and shoot. (In the 21st century, an eleven-year-old running through yards waving a submachine gun and screaming like a stuck hog would certainly elicit a different response, but back then, we were just kids playing guns.)
Fireworks were completely unsupervised, and injuries were epidemic. My brother blew off part of his toe when he was twelve, and my mother was so mad at him that she didn't take him to the doctor until it became infected. And I've already written about following the DDT sprayer on our bikes and riding in the cloud he produced.
Everyone just assumed that there would be a certain number of injuries. Everyone knew a lot of accident victims, and once in a while, someone died. I knew two kids who were blind in one eye, and several with missing fingers, teeth and toes, all the results of misadventure. I chopped off the tip of my left thumb in a bicycle sprocket when I was eight. The tip couldn't be found, so the doctor just folded the skin over the top and bandaged it and sent me home. When I broke a toe, the same doctor just taped it to the one next to it.
And in the 60s, when I did construction gruntwork, no one wore respirators or safety glasses; I shudder to think of the hours I spent breathing who knows what while demolishing old construction and insulating crawl spaces. And in 1973, when I was running a large drill while doing winter maintenance on a refrigeration chiller in Oklahoma, I ripped out half of my hair when I caught it on the drill shaft. This stuff just happened: kids lost body parts and grownups poisoned their respiratory systems and people got decapitated in car accidents and we all figured it was our own stupid faults, somehow, and we just sort of accepted it.
OSHA was formed in 1971, but it wasn't until around 1980 that it seemed to really kick in. About the same time, parents started deciding to reduce the casualty rate of their offspring. Kids started wearing bike helmets, and then their parents did too, and everyone started wearing seat belts. Playground equipment lost its sharp edges and square metal corners; the inherently lethal teeter-totter was vanquished. Kiddie car seats were improved, and then improved again. Ditto for strollers and cribs.
If we were to inch farther along this continuum, we might well come to concepts like wearing helmets in cars. And why not? I'm pretty sure automobile head injuries outflank bike head injuries. And how about helmets for going up and down stairs? It sounds like I'm ridiculing the wearing of bike helmets, but my talk of stair helmets only sounds ridiculous because we don't currently use them. As a 65-year-old, I can well remember thinking it was ridiculous to make a four-year old on a scooter wear a helmet.
Admittedly, this discussion puts us in range of Woody Allen's story of his mother making him wear a helmet to play chess, but I daresay someone somewhere has suffered a head injury while playing chess. And, seriously, I lost a good old friend a few years back to a fall down his basement stairs. A stair helmet might have saved his life, but we're not there yet.
Today, we feel naked without helmets while riding bikes and scooters. And if, in the future, we do move on to stair helmets, we will, after an inevitable period of scoff and scorn, adapt to these also. Who knows, we might end up finding it easier just to wear helmets all of the time.
