Slides 12, 56 and 57

The Slide: A family on a highway

The Date:  Around 1970

The Photographer:  Unknown

 The picture was taken from our car’s passenger side window.  The subject of the photo is a young American family—father, mother and toddler—off for a motorcycle ride on a summer day.   The father wears a white t-shirt and long cotton trousers—the mother, shorts and a sleeveless blouse.  The toddler, a little boy, wears a one-piece sun suit and is sitting in a child’s travel seat behind his mom.  The seat is strapped onto the bike’s luggage rack above the back fender. A small sneakered foot dangles close to the rear tire.  The father is driving fast and the woman’s hair flies in the wind.  None of them are wearing helmets.  I’m guessing they didn’t bother with the sunscreen either. They’re off for the afternoon and having fun.

Today the parents would be prosecuted for child endangerment. It’s hard to look at the photo without shuttering. It’s hard to imagine that in 1970 we thought this photo was cute but that’s because… well… things were different then. 

Safety was not a cultural priority.   I suppose the farm kids learned about the importance of being careful.  They were probably taught to keep their heads out of the hay bailer—maybe told to stop pullin’ on the bull’s nose ring—but we didn’t get many of those warnings in town.  I do remember it was important to wait an hour after lunch before swimming.  Observing this summertime discipline was important in preventing death.  Sure, we missed the best pool hour of the day but we all survived.

I also remember a catchy safety jingle that filled our airwaves for nearly a decade. 

 Buckle up for safety

Buckle up

Buckle up for safety

Always buckle up.

 It was a nice little ditty—a wonderful safety campaign—which would have been far more effective had they, in those days, sold cars with seat belts.   In the late sixties my father bought a new Ford Tempest and that car had belts in the front but one of the buckles fell off and got stuck beneath the seat.  We tried for a few days to get it out and then gave up.  It wasn’t much good with only one side to the buckle so we tucked the belts under the seat too.  It wasn’t a great loss.  It’s not like we would have ever worn them.   They seemed unnecessary.  After all, these were the days when, if I fought in the car with my sister, my father sent me to the back window for a time out.  I liked it up there lying in the solar heat. It was especially nice in the late autumn.  Sometimes on short rides around town my father let me sit on his lap and steer—and more than a few times, just for fun, he’d let my sister and me ride in the trunk. These were the same years my wife’s family vacationed with all five kids laid out playing games on the back deck of the station wagon.  They probably didn’t even lock the doors.  Safety wasn’t a big deal back then.  

It was a different world in which we could not have imagined the culture of today.  For example, restaurants were places you ate next to tables full of chain smokers. The smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the menu.  Nor could you taste the food.  Oddly, I don’t ever recall anyone complaining. It was part of the culinary experience.  And of course it was worse on airplanes. Back then, as now, I flew nearly every week. On many flights I was the only one who didn’t smoke.  I swear, in the bigger planes, from the front you could not see the back rows.  You found your seat by following the tract lighting on the floor.  This is nearly unimaginable now in a day when the entire country of Ireland has gone smokeless. 

It’s as if safety consciousness had not yet evolved.  Coffee cups did not display warnings that the coffee might be hot.  Everyone figured it probably was.  The manufacturer of Super Glue did not warn us to keep the drops out of our eyes.  Most of us never felt the urge.  Frankly other warnings from Super Glue might have been more helpful. I could have used one that said, “Not for use in practical jokes involving toilet seats.”  Though even in this case my classmate survived and is nearly scar free which proves again that time heals all wounds.

Still, when I look at the picture of the motorcycle family I cringe.  The parents are smiling as if they can’t imagine that anything could go wrong.  I ask myself, "What’s the matter with these people?  Are they that stupid?" Of course the answer is… Yes!  But so are we all.  Honest parents with even a few short years of experience know how foolish they can be.  And most of us looking back recognize how foolish, at times, our own parents were.  That being said, is it not a great a marvelous wonder that any of us are still alive? 

I first understood this truth about my own father when I was fourteen.  Until then, I’d always seen him as the intelligent, loving dad that he was.  But that changed during Christmas vacation. My cousins from California were coming with their parents for the holiday.  This family was, as we used to say, pretty well off.  They lived in the hills above Oakland in a big home with lush beautiful landscaping.  Our whole house would have fit in their living room.   I’d spent the entire previous summer with them and now nervously anticipated their visit.  They planned to stay for nearly a week and I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough to do.   This is the family that took me to the beach in Santa Cruz where we killed entire days at the amusement park on the boardwalk.  We visited Yosemite, Monterey, Carmel, and Disneyland.   We drove over to San Francisco one night where we ate in China Town and then saw Yul Brynner  in The King and I.  Several times we watched the Giants play through the fog at Candlestick Park.  These people had given me the biggest adventures of my life. Now they were coming to my home in rural Pennsylvania and I was concerned that they’d be bored. 

At first it seemed my worries were unfounded.  I’d not considered that they’d spent almost no time in snow—and snow was something we had lots of to enjoy.  For a couple days we played snow football in the front yard, did some sledding on the hill behind our house and had a few good snowball fights.  Then we began looking for something more exciting. Fortunately, I had an idea.

A couple summers earlier one of my buddies, who lived by the river, found a big rectangular piece of floating Styrofoam caught in the branches of fallen tree.  We hauled it to his house and sawed angles in the front creating a boat shape. Then we hollowed it out and hauled it back down to the river where we spent many summer days just floating around.   At the end of August we talked our parents into allowing us to take an entire day just to see how far we could float down river.  As it turned out the river was very low that summer. We had to get out and let the boat float by itself most of the way but that evening the odometer in the car said we traveled about five miles.  Of course, we’d floated much further because the river always takes the long way around.

Now a year and a half later I worked in the backyard with my cousins shoveling two feet of snow off the frozen Styrofoam.  Peter, who was a year younger than me and a little over weight looked concerned, “So you’re telling me this will float. Right?” he said.

“Sure it’ll float,” I said.  “That’s not the problem. The problem is getting our folks to let us do this.”

My older cousin Tom looked inside the boat. “ You know,” he said, “I don’t think I can fit in there.” At nearly 6’5’’ Tom had reason to wonder.

“You’ll fit,” I said.  “You can sit on the back ledge if you have to.  Pete can sit in the middle and I’ll paddle on my knees up front. What do say?  Shall we ask them?” They agreed and we headed inside.

I knew it wasn’t a good idea.  That’s the reason I’d brought it up—it sounded adventuresome.  It sounded perilous which put me in a good light with my cousins but I’d only suggested it knowing we wouldn’t be allowed. The river is dangerous in the winter.  It is not only deeper and flowing more swiftly but ice encroaches from both banks—the water is swirling in places and, needless to say, it’s cold. I knew we weren’t going anywhere.

Our folks were all in the kitchen putting Christmas leftovers on the table. “Hey Dad,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, “we just shoveled off my Styrofoam boat and I was thinking we could take it up the river and then we could float back toward town and you could pick us up at the Mill Street bridge. Would that be okay?”

“Sure,” he said.  “Let’s have some lunch first.”

Pete and Tom let out a, "Woo hoo!"

“Okay you guys,” my mother said, “who would like the last spoon of the corn pudding?”

  I couldn’t believe what I’d heard.  But he said it.  He said, “Sure. Let’s have some lunch first.”  So we did.  Then we went out and hauled the hunk onto the top of our car and twined it down.  We drove a couple miles up Route 6 to a place where the river almost joins the highway and pulled over.  It was two in the afternoon and getting very cold. We cut the boat off the car, slid it down the bank and crawled in.  Tom was right.  He didn’t fit.  But the boat floated and we started down stream. 

“We’ll see you at the bridge in an hour,” my dad shouted.  Then he snapped a couple pictures, hopped in the car and drove off. We sang the theme song from Gilligan’s Island. 

That was the highlight of our trip.

The photographic evidence is clear.  We could have been killed.  We didn’t even have life preservers.  We couldn’t move in the tiny space—didn’t dare move for fear of tipping and our bodies were freezing.  The river is particularly circuitous in that stretch meaning it didn’t take us an hour.  It took us three hours and by the end it was starting to get dark. Before we could see them, from far off, we heard our fathers. They were shouting our names.  There was a sound of desperation in their voices.  When we shouted back they responded joyously as if they knew they had done something foolish. A few minutes later we floated around a bend and saw them where they'd been waiting for a long time.  My father snapped a picture. 

We crawled onto the bank beneath the bridge, miserable, unable to feel our hands and feet. We scrabbled awkwardly up the steep grade to the warmth of the car.  I was not happy with my father but didn’t want my cousins to think any of the experience was other than normal. My father opened the car door and said, “Do you want me to try to pull the boat up the bank?”  I didn’t hesitate.

“Leave it,” I said. 

Later that spring the high waters washed it away.

My father’s actions were the winter equivalent of putting the toddler on the motorcycle.  Every parent is guilty of the same.  Some parents are more cautious than others but the very nature of parenting—twenty-four hours a day, day after day, year after year—insures that mom and dad will make some terrible mistakes. The old adage, “Accidents will happen”  is closer to a law of nature than we would like to think. Serious accidents will be carefully avoided for years and then someone will say, “Hey Honey, do you suppose that car seat would fit on the back of my Honda?”  Or, “Hey Dad, we just shoveled off the Styrofoam boat and I was thinking….” At those times one can only pray to God as my father did standing on that cold bridge. At those times one can only pray that everyone will be okay. Of course some people don’t believe in God so even that option is off the table.   I’m guessing most of them are not yet parents.