Snapshots of Kids Bike Jumping in the 1970s

Back in the 1970s (and before), parents didn’t stress about our health and safety as much as they do today. It’s not that they cared less – they just didn’t worry obsessively about it. It’s a far guess to say that some of the kids seen bike jumping and being bike jumped (which is the more dangerous?) are parents now – which means that they survived and can recall how less restricted, less supervised, less obsessively safety-conscious things were – and it was fine.

 

 

Bike jumping and jumping over things in general was big TV in the 1970s. By the late 1960s, Evel Knievel was the world’s greatest motorcycle daredevil, a man who had jumped over 13 double-decker buses in London, a canyon in Idaho… and sometimes he missed. As he said : “My failures had a lot to do with my fame … You know, I had a couple hundred jumps in my career, and I made most of them, but the ones they show over and over are the ones when I crashed….

“I wanted to fly through the air. I was a dare­devil, a performer… Sure, I was scared. You gotta be an ass not to be scared. But I beat the hell out of death. It would all go by so fast, in a blur. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi, four Mississippi. You’re in the air for four seconds, you’re part of the machine, and then if you make a mistake midair, you say to yourself, ‘Oh, boy. I’m gonna crash,’ and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

“He’s a legend to all of us,” said skateboarder Danny Way, who jumped the Great Wall of China in 2005. “We probably wouldn’t have the opportunities we do without him. There wasn’t a lot of history of people doing 100-foot jumps before him. The motorcycles weren’t made for it. The ramps weren’t made for it. And he went out and just did it.”

 

 

Via: Reddit, Vintage Everyday