Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s
flashbak.com
flashbak.com
Is this site made for the Facebook demographic? I was astounded that there wasn't a poorly-made image macro of a minion with some quip about drinking from a garden hose or rubbing dirt in your wounds to accompany this idyllic gem.
Both of my parents have stories about people getting seriously messed up or killed back in the day by doing dumb stuff on bicycles or otherwise. My father was on a first-name basis with hospital staff when he was a kid because of these types of hijinks and always made my brother and I wear helmets when we rode bikes. If we were skating pads were mandatory too. There's a comfortable middle ground between never setting foot outside and getting your viscera fatally crushed by a 130 lb eighth grader's bicycle tire.
And yes, I've built and jumped kicker ramps, tore my knees open, looped a bike (in both directions), skitched, gone OTB into a ravine in the woods, etc. but the difference is that I never had to go to the hospital or nearly died.
Cool photos regardless but let's not pretend that any of this was smart. Having common sense and wearing protective gear when you have fun is cool, not uptight.
1000% agree and that's exactly the point of my comment. I didn't mean that all of HN is like this, mostly just the linked post, so I'll edit accordingly.
- World War 1
- The Spanish Flu (she caught it and survived despite being only 6)
- A rural Pennsylvania childhood with no antibiotics and where multiple family members were injured by livestock or heavy equipment
- Prohibition
- The Great Depression
- World War 2
I often wonder if this gave that generation a VERY different attitude towards risk. e.g. one of your kids having a broken arm may not seem that big a deal when you might know a family that lost multiple sons in WW2? Or a bad cut compared to someone you know losing a leg in a tractor accident?
My grandparents were born in 1890-1900. What they suffered through I’m sure would kill most people. Definitely would me. Most of them lived to their late 80s and 90s.
She was more aware of "bad things can happen" and "do not risk it" then my parents generation.
I am very sorry to say toxic masculinity is returning. We girls really need to be getting out there and keeping down men, it's for their own good, lest they literally be flinging themselves off cliffs.
I wholeheartedly agree. What western society needs is a matriarchy that will take care of its own and suppress any subversive elements.
I can't wait for scientists to demonstrate that testosterone is actually a poison and the main cause of toxic masculinity. In a more civilized era, children assigned to any sex at birth will be dosed with exogenous estrogen starting from age 5 in order to optimize and civilize their development.
We've made everything so regulated, costly, and supervised that it meaningfully contributes to the lowest fertility rate in the nation's history. Many of the children who are fortunate enough to get a chance to exist at all spend their lives hypnotized forever scrolling and will likely suffer a shortened and less worthwhile life due obesity, inactivity, isolation, and depression.
Having a chance to live, either in the metaphorical sense or in a literal sense trumps eliminating the last epsilon of risk that can only be eliminated by living in bubble wrap or not living at all.
Your admonishment of there being a middle ground is fair in one sense, but too often humans are bimodal against risk: we either ignore it completely or obsess over it. If a middle ground can be reached, great, but if it can't ignoring small risks is often superior to the alternative of over emphasizing them.
It's also important for to have risky activities that LOOK risky. No one under those bikes was under an impression that it was safe. I'd rather children climb on some lump of rickety boards they hammered together themselves-- it's clearly dangerous to everyone-- than run face first into some gleaming concrete and steel playground equipment which looks safe but becomes just as dangerous if you are reckless enough.
What's safer? Bike jumps over kids or a snapchat filter that makes things look faster the faster the gps reports you going?
... and some amount of the risky stuff is needed just to keep the overton window open for the sensible middle. There are places in the US where children of the ages in the picture merely playing outside (no bikes!) will result in state child protective intervention. If a few kids getting scraped up or broken bones-- or heaven forbid, even dying!-- is the cost of having perspective, it's well worth it.
It's what kills most kids on bicycles as well. I myself witnessed 2 children die on separate occasions because they were run down by cars. Automobiles and firearms are the leading killers of children.
I think some or all may have been created by AI.
In the 70s, there was little protective gear available for bikers. Motorcyclists had fat helmets, football players had helmets, and maybe some fast roller skaters had fat knee-guards or elbow guards. 80s kids were pampered.
Those always hurt like hell (both being on the bike and off) but I wouldn’t trade that experience away today. Some of the best times I had as a kid involved crashes, pain, ER trips, and stitches.
Good times!
I can believe some kids potentially could have jumped high in the 70s, but more often a high jump would’ve been off a dirt ramp.
Somehow there were more undeveloped areas (up until maybe the mid-80s) where kids would dig foxholes, have BB gun fights, etc. Shoveling dirt was our version of Minecraft. Kids got hurt regularly. Digging was fine if things held together, but I later heard in some places where it didn’t, some died from cave-ins.
By early/mid 80s, there would be dirt biker racers with helmet and other protective gear on constructed dirt tracks. There was that in the 70s, but less organized in more natural less confined areas and more for motorcycles where you just had jeans and a fat helmet.
Skateboarding became a bigger thing by roughly mid-1980s than biking; the 1970s skateboards were skinny flat banana boards with trucks that couldn’t turn, so they weren’t very maneuverable- the scene from the original BTTF where Marty makes a skateboard out of a scooter was funny, but how he used it seemed unrealistic- it would’ve been a pita to get around on that.
Back to 70s bike ramps...
The ramps were usually just a piece of wood with anything you could find under it, and the Napoleon Dynamite bike ramp scene was close to the normal result.
Jumping as high as in these pictures was not normal. A nice curved plywood ramp would take work, time, tools, and money, kids wouldn’t expect parents to help them out, so you’d more often have shitty ramps and minor jumps.
Some of these pictures look physically impossible given the orientation of the ramp or non-existence of a ramp. I wonder if AI generated those.
So you’re right on most things but we definitely had some quality wood ramps in the 80s. Sending us up and over fences, fathers, cars, and friends.
Everyone lived in suburbs that still had all the B/C/D rate lots undeveloped because it wasn't worth it. The country was still sprawling out, had mostly yet to pass zoning and other asinine regulation, etc, etc.
The incentive to cram industrial parks and office parks and housing into every nook and cranny of our towns and cities came later over the course of the 80s because regulation speculatively front-loaded compliance costs into construction and when that happens it makes more sense to develop a bunch of D rate lots already on roads and bulldoze starter homes and mobile homes already on road and utilities than incur all the "you'll need an engineered site plan for that, that'll be $50k" cost to proactively prevent problems that previously would have been addressed on an as needed basis after the fact where pertinent.
It's basically the same incentive structure you see with zoning wherein grandfathered in stuff goes up in value. Unless you've got some monstrously profitable project to justify the expense the numbers work better to buy out something that exists than to blow untold thousands fighting for permission or jumping through hoops to do greenfield development.
https://flashbak.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/kids-jumping...
(fork is installed backwards).
In the photos I see the transition from the "high rise" bicycle to the "BMX" bike. While somewhat cool looking, the BMX bikes, for me it was also the end of an era — my era — for biking. Instead of BMX bikes I moved instead on to 10-speed road bikes (later 12 speed ... now 1000 speed or whatever they're up to).
The photos also shows a time when wearing a helmet was not a thing. That did come shortly after (I mean at the time of these photos, I don't think you could even go to a Sears or wherever and buy a "bike helmet". After a rather nasty spill I had riding to work one morning, I became a helmet convert.
VERY unlikely to kill someone but could certainly seriously injure... Never got in trouble. Different times.
It had never yet crossed the minds of adults, helmets certainly were not a mainstream product when it comes to protecting kids.
Parents loved their kids just as much as ever back then and you could feel the full force of their protective nature, even if it doesn't always appear historically so.
Whether hardened by war or anything else, what really started the helmet "craze", whether it's kids wearing them or not, and regardless of increases in dangerous road traffic, helmets really started to fly off the shelf like never before, once the greatest threat of all started escalating risk through the roof.
And it was adults who needed to protect themselves like never before.
From lawsuits.
I think it wasn’t lawsuits, but good ol’ American advertising: helmet manufacturers created a need in the minds of consumers where there had not been one before (cf. deodorant, cigarettes and plenty more).
My kids don't wear helmets when cycling, but we live in the Netherlands and they ride pretty slowly. I do wear a helmet when I bike on anything but the stationfiets, but I also like to ride fast (and I think a helmet saved my life as a teenager)
I know someone who wasn't. She had serious concussion. It's not something you want. 2 years off work. Petrochemical engineer - no longer works in the industry because of the injury.
To respond to the 'nuance' of your remark, that helmets change rider behavior for the worse, resulting in higher aggregate injuries - that is also incorrect. The passage of helmet laws results in significant reductions (20-50%) in head injuries and deaths. These are reductions among the same population, in the same geography, in a short timeframe. It is indisputable.
If the total number of recorded injuries is going up, it's because ridership has increased. Ridership is up for lots of reasons, population growth and health benefits being two of them. Cycling is a terrific way to improve your overall health, even when the risk of injury or death due to cycling is taken into consideration. [2]
And if manufacturers profit from improving the health and safety of a population? Good.
[1] https://newrossgreenway.org/bicycle-helmet-vs-no-helmet-stat... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10546027/
There were also some studies that showed that for population health bike helmet laws might be a net negative, because it prevents more people riding bikes and the positive health benefits of riding outweigh the slightly increased risk of biking even without a helmet.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2014-5-september-october/g...
Of course a helmet increases survivability of a head injury in a crash, that’s indisputable. But of course there is a window: some crashes are so minor that they are already survivable without a helmet; and some crashes are so bad that a helmet cannot help. And of course many injuries are not to the head at all.
The first-order effect of cycling helmets is definitely positive! But what are the second-order effects?
> To respond to the 'nuance' of your remark, that helmets change rider behavior for the worse, resulting in higher aggregate injuries - that is also incorrect.
There is evidence that they decrease the number of cyclists; and there is evidence that they change the behaviour of drivers.
When Western Australia imposed cycling helmet laws safety got worse: http://www.cycle-helmets.com/
It would probably help teens a lot if affordable helmets didn't look so goofy, it's the main reason we didn't want to wear them.
But even for cyclists, are they as likely to ride at all if they only ride helmeted? Do you treat cycling as a form of transportation, or as exercise?
My belief is that the more cyclists are on the road, the better drivers drive, and that helmets increase the friction of cycling as transportation, and thus that they may decrease actual cycling safety.
https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_11831...
I think I bought my Bell Biker helmet around 1980. The stylish kid-sized helmets that became widely available during the 80s did not exist in the 70s.
I recall no lawsuits being the cause of the adoption of helmets.
> seriously our neighborhood was some weird demographic misfit. A dozen boys and not a single girl...
https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/...
The road I always wanted to fly down was Harwood Rd (SW end on the Los Gatos side) ever since 1982-3 when I saw Woz's house under construction but didn't realize who that was. Harwood's steepness was an obsessive objective for maximizing bicycle and skateboard speed when I was 5-6 and the local roads and sidewalks in front of my house were somewhat uneven. This was an era when many San Jose and Los Gatos residential streets were smooth blacktop and not yet besmirched with a very rough, gray aggregate bonded topcoat hostile to bicycles and especially skateboards.
(Later, I had a steel frame Miyata that was perpetually too small for me extended by ever-increasing handlebar and seat extension risers. (It was eventually stolen in Davis CA the only time I forgot to lock it. Its wheels had slime tubes and Kevlar linings to defeat California's omnipresent goatheads.))
When I grew older, I would fly down Bernal Rd (down from IBM) on the Miyata and Hicks Rd (on the back side before Alamitos Rd) with my best friend. Hicks Rd has/had a grade so ridiculously steep and pavement so uneven, I had to sit on my bike rack to avoid tumbling over the handlebars. In adult life, I found out he became a Christian metal/rock performer and had an insanely hot SO... that's cool and to each, their own.
In recent years in the midst of my mid-life (crisis?) I found that Kaabo King GT Pro goes 60 mph (96 kmh) while standing. I had to have that. It turned out to be (almost) true (57 mph (92 kmh) on a slight downhill, but I'm probably double the weight it was designed to carry). And it did fly around Austin downtown and surrounding areas 2020-2024.
If I was near the Bonneville Salt Flats as a kit, I would've probably been obsessed with building rocket-powered wagons and bikes. Sadly, all we kids had was gravity and the potential energy of short hills and later, some small mountains. I'm guess that was a blessing because there are sensible risk appetites. There's a bathtub of reasonableness between completely risk-adverse and (un)knowingly Darwin award. The former is result of helicopter parents who turned kids' parks into boring, perfectly-safe, plastic "paradises" no one goes to when there were uneven, redwood telephone pones to jump on, a semi-enclosed vertical steel maze about 15' tall with 3' horizontal sections to crawl up, and a real retired Korean Era jet in a sandbox. None of that cool stuff remains.
These days, my current neighbor won't even let their almost adult son use an electric hedge trimmer because "ooh, too dangerous!" but they gave him an offroad 125cc motorcycle (I would've died for one of those)... which doesn't make any sense at all.