David Carroll Column: How did we survive?

Published 8:40 am Saturday, July 19, 2025

I attended the grand opening of a new “safety first” community playground, and it looked nothing like the playgrounds of my youth. I vividly remember sharp edges, swings that took me way too high and lots of hard concrete surfaces, gravel and bark chips that gave us scabbed knees.

Who can forget the splinters from those wooden see-saw planks? In the heat of summer, we got burned on long metal slides that turned to fire on a hot day.

I’m reminded of other reckless products and activities from my childhood. Basically, we lived a daredevil lifestyle. How did we survive?

Whenever I bring this up to a fellow baby boomer, two words come up: “Lawn darts.” Followed by “Who thought it was a good idea to toss metal-tipped darts fitted with plastic fins into a plastic hoop on the ground?” Especially when the label clearly stated, “May cause serious or fatal injury.”

Yet this product was on the market until 1988.

We’ve all had our close calls, yet somehow we are still here. We learned many lessons the hard way.

Working at my parents’ general store and gas station had its own dangers. At age 12, I was illegally delivering groceries stashed in a saddlebag on my motorcycle on narrow country roads. With about two weeks of driving experience, I spun out into some loose gravel. I still have the scars to show for it decades later. But I did wear a helmet, a lesson some still have yet to learn.

(And before you condemn my parents for letting me ride that motorcycle, I will concede they were not perfect. But at least no one had to tell them not to leave me in a hot car.)

Also by 12 I had worked under the hood of many vehicles, refilling dangerously hot radiators, which could be a literal blast. But that was nothing compared to the experience of attempting to pour an aluminum can of Quaker State motor oil into an engine. Somehow, the can made contact with a battery cable. Boom! An explosion of oil went everywhere, staining and ruining my cleanest dirty shirt. Nobody had warned me about that either. A few decades later, oil companies switched to plastic containers. I figured they had heard about my explosion debacle, but no. Plastic was simply cheaper. I wish they had discovered that earlier. I still miss that shirt.

My kids and others who grew up in the era of safety belts and car seats still can’t believe it when I share stories of life on the road in the days of station wagons and pickup trucks.

In the rural South, we often went from Point A to Point B in the back of a pickup truck. Many kids grew up in large families, so Pa and Ma were in the cab, and their eight young ‘uns were carrying on in the rear, sometimes on a flatbed with no tailgate.

One friend told me that when he was a baby, his car seat was a box. He said his teenage mom drove him thousands of miles in that box. There was no restraint of any kind. But at least he couldn’t crawl out of the box.

I don’t remember being boxed in, but I do remember many long rides without a seat belt, even after they became commonplace. Sure, I saw the public service commercials urging me to buckle up, but my parents had lived 50 years without them, so I figured I could, too. When I was about 30, singer Barbara Mandrell was seriously injured in a car crash and would have died had she not been wearing a seat belt. She soon became a vocal seat belt advocate. I finally began taking it seriously. Thank you, Barbara, you saved many lives.

The list goes on. Bunk beds with no railings. Houses with lead-based paint and asbestos floor tiles. Kids like me wore zero sunscreen day after day, year after year. We simply didn’t know any better.

In the coming weeks, I will be writing about products that we miss from our youth. They were in stores, in our medicine cabinets and in our homes. Drop me a line, and I’ll tell your story.

David Carroll is a Chattanooga news anchor, and his latest book is “I Won’t Be Your Escape Goat,” available from his website, ChattanoogaRadioTV.com. You may contact him at 900 Whitehall Road, Chattanooga, TN 37405 or RadioTV2020@yahoo.com.