[soft music]
- Remember when cooling off meant taking the long way down?
- Whoever can jump from the highest spot
was definitely like the toughest person you knew.
- You run, you hold your nose, and you hope you don't die.
- Or when the neighborhood playground
came with exposed nails and live wires?
- I think the forbidden, naughty nature of doing it
increased its appeal.
- Or when childhood pranks came with a short fuse?
- It contains 80 grains of powder,
and that's 100 times more explosive
than any firework available today.
- Parents don't care.
They're in on it.
Hey, we grew up with blowing things up.
You should too.
- These are the things we used to do for fun, for money,
or maybe out of boredom, that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly.
Deadly?
Occasionally.
But boy, wasn't it exciting?
- [Henry] Remember your first bicycle?
It wasn't just transportation, it was independence.
And if you grew up in the seventies,
it was how you proved yourself,
and the danger ramped up pretty quickly.
- By the time the bicycles became big,
at the turn of the 19th century,
all the way to just about the 1960s,
it was just about transportation
to get you from point A to point B,
maybe use them on your paper route.
But then in 1965, a dude comes along and changes everything.
[motorcycle revs]
- Evel Knievel is the greatest daredevil to ever live.
- [Announcer] The one and only Evel Knievel.
- I mean, in the sixties and seventies,
he was like a God walking amongst us.
- Evel Knievel.
- He's on magazines and lunchboxes,
and even has a toy version of himself
that can jump over things.
- [Henry] But playing with an action figure isn't enough.
Kids want in on the action themselves.
- [Adam] Suddenly kids want bikes that look more badass
with chopper handle bars and really sick forks and frames.
Bicycle, motorcycle, who cares?
I'm Evel Knievel, baby.
- This 1968 model, the Stingray, this thing was amazing.
It had a smaller front wheel for maneuverability,
a five speed gear shift right on the frame,
and front and rear suspension,
which just made it perfect for jumping things.
- [Adam] Kids wanted to jump something that would
draw a crowd.
Okay, they don't have a line of school buses
like Evel Knievel, but you might have a friend or two
that might be willing to lay down.
- Kids being kids, they're bringing stuff
out of the garage.
they're getting boards, they're getting ramps.
- [Jason] You didn't have a helmet, you know,
knee pads or shoulder pads.
You're jumping on your little stunt bike
without anything at all.
It's just kids versus the pavement.
- [Nicole] Parents are fully behind their children
copying Evel Knievel, who broke bones and fractured himself
and you know, just all of these various injuries,
and they're like, "Yeah, that sounds like something
we want our kids to be doing.
What do you need out of the garage to help you do that?"
- [Henry] Just how supportive our parents?
Enough to call the local news.
In 1976, one Indiana station
makes a kid's death defying leap their featured programming.
- [News Reporter] 13-year-old Terry Evel Knievel Bollinger,
who set aside today to prove to all
he could jump over 10 trash cans.
- [Henry] The report builds up every detail,
a rickety plywood ramp and 10 very beat up trash cans.
- He's nervous but confident, right?
This is gonna be the coolest moment of his life.
- The big moment comes, he is huffing, he's puffing.
He takes off.
Once Terry falls, there's not like an adult
who rushes in and is like, "Hey, are you okay, buddy?"
They're all just kinda like,
"Oh, well I guess he didn't make it, hmm.
What's for dinner?"
- [Jason] Terry has no helmet, no protection.
If someone did something like this today,
there would be a lot of people being sued.
- [News Reporter] Didn't hurt yourself, did you?
- No.
- [News Reporter] What happened?
- Maybe my arm.
- [News Reporter] What happened?
- Couldn't get going fast enough.
- What I love is the reporter seems more concerned
about Terry's safety than Terry's parents,
and she's already planning a follow up story.
- When you gonna try it again?
- Next Monday.
- That's good journalism.
- Throughout the 1970s,
it was something like 60,000 kids a year
would end up in the ER
due to injuries from failed bike stunts,
concussions, broken bones, lacerated livers.
- [Henry] But by the end of the seventies,
the inspiration for so many young daredevils
is losing his mojo.
- [Kavitha] You start to see the decline of Evel Knievel's
popularity, for one the novelty of it has kind of worn off,
but also he's older, and throughout his career,
Evel Knievel has sustained over 400 bone injuries.
- [Jason] And then in 1980,
Evel Knievel, the all time great, retires.
- [Rutledge] The whole extreme jumping fad fades pretty
quickly, and partly because suddenly,
safety was more important to parents,
and then they started actually parenting
and paying attention to their kids.
- Now, parents may have given their kids
more freedom to roam the streets back in the day,
but there was still one ironclad rule:
don't play in traffic.
But mom and dad never said anything
about playing with traffic.
- Most of the 20th century,
children are playing in the street.
Very few communities have the money or the wherewithal
to provide a recreational space.
- We played stickball in the streets.
We played kickball in the streets.
You just relied on one other kid to be like,
"Car, car coming," and then everybody would go to the side.
- [Henry] But for some young danger junkies,
the fun isn't dodging cars, it's catching them.
- [Adam] It's called skitching,
and the words a portmanteau of skate hitching.
So you would be on a skateboard,
grab onto a bumper or a fender,
and you would let the car pull you wherever you were going.
- And then "Back to the Future" comes, okay,
and, oh my God, I was nine years old
when Marty McFly got on the back of that Wrangler
with a skateboard and took the ride in, right?
And you're like, "This is instantly something
I wanna do.
This is the coolest thing."
- Kids are into it.
There's even like a skitching video game on Sega.
It's all over the place.
- [Henry] It's all in the spirit of eighties adventure,
but hang on tight.
- [Martin] Well, the big danger of skitching
is that the driver doesn't know that you're back there.
And so a driver, even in a low speed environment,
like in a built urban area, might have to slam on his brakes
because a car pulls out in front of him,
or because the yellow light suddenly turns red.
- [Adam] The drivers would see you in the rear view
and some of them would even slam on the brakes.
So if you're holding on,
you'd go into the back of the truck,
or you'd whip around and hit the side of the truck.
Oh my God, how did we make it?
How am I actually sitting here?
- [Martin] In 1988, a 17-year-old
in Orange County, California is skitching.
He's hanging on for dear life.
He is struck by another vehicle.
He's knocked to the ground,
and then a third vehicle rolls over his legs.
- That kid actually survives,
but another kid two years later is not so lucky.
Also in Orange County, he has an accident,
falls down, he dies from head injuries.
- [Henry] In the end, it's not fear that ends skitching,
but technological advancement.
- [Nicole] With the technology that new cars have,
you've got backup cameras,
rear bumpers that are flushed to the car,
nothing to really hold onto.
So it's kind of impossible in today's standards.
- [Henry] But kids in the eighties and the nineties
find a way to top skitching anyway,
ditching the bumper for the roof,
and you can trace it back to the same movie star.
- [Brian] Michael J. Fox was in "Teen Wolf."
He was the one on top of the van doing the dance.
He is the reason I got top of a car too.
- [Lance] Of course, he doesn't invent the stunt
of riding outside a car.
People have been riding outside of cars for a long time.
There's actually a running board on a Model T.
You might stand on the running board,
hold onto the side of the car.
You might do that 'cause the car's just too small
to fit a lot of people.
It's a matter of convenience.
- [Nicole] By the nineties,
kids are actually jumping on to moving cars
and riding cars that way.
- [Lance] Teens are doing all sorts of things.
They're in the bed of a truck.
They're on the roof of the car.
They're on the hood of the car.
Sometimes the car starts out,
you know, stop, and you get on.
Other times, you're jumping on to a moving car,
and that's just all sorts of crazy risk.
- [Negin] I cannot believe
that this was just like casually happening.
- [Brian] If you leave me to my own devices and I'm 12 years
old, I'm gonna do these things
because it doesn't seem dangerous to me.
Of course, I can get on top of a car and hold on.
Physics, physics don't matter to me.
I'm young and immortal.
- [Henry] It's the kind of thrill you don't see anymore
because it can be a short ride.
- Between 1990 and 2008,
there are 58 deaths and 41 injuries
as a result of car surfing.
More people are dying than being injured by it.
Law enforcement ultimately gets involved in this.
- [Lance] The fad kind of fades out in the 2000s.
Virtually every state has some sort of law
that makes this action illegal.
- Eventually, law enforcement decided it had gone too far,
but for the kids hitching the rides,
the whole point was to get carried away.
- If jumping off a high dive can win you an Olympic medal,
what does it get you at a public pool in town?
If you were a kid back in the old days,
it could make you a local legend or land you in hot water.
- [Don] During the Great Depression of the 1930s,
President Roosevelt put many people to work
building public swimming pools across the US,
as part of the New Deal.
This ushers in this golden age of public pools.
- These pools are often big and elaborate,
and in a lot of towns,
they almost become like the central recreational spot.
- [Henry] Most of the massive pools
come equipped with a typical diving board,
but a real showstopper that you might not expect:
the high dive.
- These are towers that start at 10 feet, a basketball hoop,
and go to over 30 feet,
which is like jumping out of a third story window.
- These are Olympic height diving boards.
In fact, some of these pools
are even used for Olympic trials, but when they're not,
they are open to pretty much everybody.
- Hands down, the most impressive of these era pools
is that of Astoria Park Queens.
It can accommodate up to 6,000 swimmers at once,
and its centerpiece is a spine like high dive complex
with three platforms,
the tallest of which is 32 feet from the water surface.
- [Henry] In the golden days of the Astoria Park pool,
it's just come one, come all.
- There were lifeguards, but basically no rules.
So if you had the guts to jump off that 32 foot tower,
nobody was gonna stop you.
- You climb up this 30 foot high ladder
and this enormous crowd of your neighbors and friends
are watching you.
Now you see how high you are,
but the only thing worse than jumping
is crawling back down that ladder in shame.
So you're jumping in the water,
and you're a kid, so you're crazy.
- [Don] If you've ever jumped off a 32 foot diving platform,
you fall at roughly 30 miles per hour.
You have about a second and a half before you hit the water.
- At that speed, if you don't hit
at a pretty near perfect angle,
where you kind of slice through the water,
it's like slamming into a concrete wall.
- So you land the wrong way, you're gonna have a broken leg,
a ruptured eardrum, bruised internal organs.
It's like getting hit by a pro football player,
except you're in your swimsuit.
- [Henry] And slamming into the water
is the best case scenario,
next to crashing into the concrete deck below
or the diving board itself.
The possibilities are endless and so is the freedom.
- [Bryant] These pools are notoriously understaffed.
As late as the 1970s, they might only have five lifeguards
for as many as 5,000 people.
- [Austin] Kids are gonna be kids and nothing's stopping them
from sneaking into the park after hours
and climbing that high dive to be the coolest kid there.
The New York City Parks Department
is reporting multiple injuries and deaths and drownings
at city park pools at night.
- I grew up not too far from this location,
and I used to kind of wonder,
"Mom, why don't we go to this pool?
It seems like," and yeah, that was a hard no.
My mother was a very smart woman.
- [Henry] By the 1980s, the high dive begins its downfall.
- [Natalia] These high dives start disappearing from pools,
and that is due not to children's lacking
of desire for thrills,
but rather because of insurance premiums and lawsuits.
- [Don] Today, many municipalities don't allow
diving boards to be more than three feet from the pool,
even in your backyard.
Astoria Park closes up its dive platform
citing liability and risks.
Today, a few publicly funded pools still have them,
but they're usually associated
with universities or swim clubs.
The average person trying to use one of these things
is like somebody walking onto a D1 basketball arena
and trying to shoot.
You're gonna get kicked off really fast.
- Remember when your parents would say,
"Hey, if your friends jumped off a bridge,
would you do it too?"
Well, there was a time
when the most common answer was, "Yeah."
- [Rutledge] Although public pools were popular by the 20th
century, a lot of smaller cities didn't have them.
So if you live away from a big city,
you probably don't have a public pool, so a quarry is it.
A quarry is a place where they have mined some sort of rock
and they dig out, and over time,
it makes this gigantic hole in the earth.
- After a mining activity stops at the site,
they flood with rainwater.
And so what you end up with is a pool.
- [Rutledge] In a limestone quarry,
the water that gets washed down into this hole
and starts to fill it up,
ends up being this bright, brilliant blue color,
almost a turquoise.
They're so inviting,
but it's like a playground for teenagers.
- [Martin] When I was in my twenties in Alabama,
jumping into quarries was a thing that we did.
We would have a competition
to carry out the more spectacular dive
in front of the girls.
That was the most fun ever.
- [Adam] Anybody could just jump into a swimming pool,
but to swim a quarry,
you had to prove yourself worthy of it.
You had to earn it.
- The distance from the top of the cliff
down to the water surface, in some cases,
can be as much as 80 feet.
That's a pretty treacherous dive.
- [Lance] I was terrified.
That's what I would say.
I didn't like heights,
but everybody's standing there looking at me
and I wasn't gonna be the one that said no.
And so you just, you run, you hold your nose,
and you hope you don't die.
- [Henry] An 80 foot jump
puts a local pool's high dive to shame.
It's more like jumping off an eight story building.
- [Rutledge] The dive at a quarry, especially from a high
place, I mean it's like a badge of honor.
Whoever can jump from the highest spot
was definitely like the toughest person you knew.
- [Lance] The thing about quarries, you know, you're
there, you're wearing your cutoff jeans,
all your friends are there.
Maybe the girl you have a crush on is there.
You don't want to be the one who chickens out.
- [Rutledge] Quarries are really perfect spots
for teenagers looking for something to do in the summer
because they're in remote spots.
They're a lot of times abandoned.
That's really cool.
But it also means if you needed help
from some sort of safety team, you're also really far away,
which is not a good thing if you were injured.
- [Lance] It was just forbidden, which means for a teenager,
that's exactly what you wanted,
someplace where you're not supervised,
where you can make your own choices,
and yet, you know you're doing something wrong.
- [Rutledge] What's crazy about quarries
is the water can look so inviting,
but it's what is underneath
that's actually the most dangerous
because there could be old mining equipment,
there could be jagged rocks.
- [Martin] That water is discolored and murky enough
to where something that's even five feet below the surface
is invisible to you.
- [Rebecca] From these heights, when you jump off,
you could actually hit 45 miles an hour
before you hit the water.
- [Martin] It's like being thrown off of a motorcycle
and hitting the pavement at highway speeds.
- [Lance] There's a cluster of quarries
around Quincy, Massachusetts.
Between 1960 and 1998,
at least a dozen people die quarry diving,
in addition to the untold numbers
who might have been injured.
- [Henry] But how do you get kids
to stop jumping into enormous holes in the ground?
Well, in Boston, the solution is a $15 billion project.
- [Martin] For the quarries in Quincy,
they eventually fill them back in,
and they use soil that was excavated in Boston's big dig.
It's something like 800,000 tons of soil,
and then use it to backfill these abandoned quarries.
- [Lance] Now if you find a quarry,
it's going to have a very good fence around it
that's gonna say no trespassing.
There's something to be said for growing up in a life
where there were risks,
and most of us came out with all our fingers and toes.
- Taking a plunge off a steep rocky cliff with your friends
was a classic rite of passage,
back when a good story was worth the risk.
- When you were a kid,
did you ever pretend that you were the sheriff
of a frontier town full of bad guys?
Well, there was a time when those imaginary shootouts
were a little less imaginary.
- Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, westerns are everywhere.
They're in film and radio serials, comic strips,
and, of course, television.
- [Henry] Of course, every hero and every bad guy has a gun.
- [Jason] The toy aisles, they are full of cap guns.
When you shoot them, they make loud cracks.
They even emit smoke.
They are very fun, but at a certain point,
pretend firepower just isn't enough.
- [Kavitha] Kids want something bigger and cooler.
They really wanna up the ante
and that next step is the BB gun.
- [Henry] The BB gun uses compressed air
to fire tiny round projectiles.
It gets its start in Michigan in 1886
for adults to practice shooting,
but soon the BB gun finds a new target audience.
- [Kavitha] Ads are marketing BB guns directly to kids,
and you've got pictures in magazines
of little boys happily hoisting their little BB gun rifles.
- [Brian] I had a BB gun.
It was the pump rifle type.
It was given to me with no rules other than,
you know, don't shoot your brothers.
- As a kid, it feels like so much power and responsibility.
It's also tricky,
like if you have an older sister like I did,
you have to prove
you're not gonna shoot your older sister with a BB gun
every chance you get, even though as a kid you're thinking,
"I'm gonna shoot my older sister with this BB gun
the first chance I get."
- [Brian] These BB guns weren't expensive.
They were mass produced.
In fact, they were sold on the back of comic books
like cut out this coupon, send it in with a check,
and you get your BB gun.
- Today, there is zero tolerance
for any students having a gun at school.
It was made federally illegal in 1990.
But back then, it was perfectly normal for a kid
to have a BB gun in their locker at school.
- [Kavitha] Before 1990, anything kind of goes,
and during recess or after school,
they're gonna play cops and robbers.
- They're firing these BBs in each other's vicinity
and their parents wouldn't think a thing of it
'cause that's how they grew up as well.
- [Bryant] You might think about the movie, "A Christmas Story,"
where the kid wants the BB gun,
but you could shoot somebody's eye out.
Well, that happened.
- [Hakeem] By 1981, 8 million pump action BB guns have been
sold, and in that same year,
emergency rooms report receiving 22,800 people
injured by BB guns.
- [Adam] When kids started getting hurt with BB guns,
the solution proposed was not to stop selling them,
or to modify them, or don't sell 'em to kids.
The solution was just to put a sticker on 'em that said,
"Not a toy."
My guess is that was not effective.
- [Kavitha] By the late 1990s, 13 states have limited BB gun
sales to people 18 and over.
- [Hakeem] In recent decades, a safer alternative has emerged
and that is the paintball gun.
- [Kavitha] The advent of paintball has supplanted the BB
gun fervor.
Paintballing is super fun
and it does mimic the act of shooting somebody.
- [Jason] Manufacturers and marketers in stores
are now treating a BB gun, not like a toy.
They're treating it like what it really is: a kind of gun.
Maybe not one that uses gunpowder,
but one that's still a gun.
- Back in the day,
the line between toy and weapon was always kind of blurry.
Take the slingshot.
With one small tweak, that Y shaped piece of wood
could go from a harmless placing to a mini missile launcher.
- [Martin] In the late 1940s,
one of the most popular genre of dime novels
was the survival story,
and World War II is nothing but a wellspring
of survival stories.
- So in 1946, there's an article in "Popular Science"
about a guy named Jim Gask
who uses a slingshot to hunt small game.
- After that article comes out
and kids see that around the country,
every kid wants a slingshot.
- [Henry] Slingshots, before the invention of rubber,
were called slings, and go back thousands of years.
By the 1940s, they're still do it yourself
and haven't changed much.
- I actually recently found a black and white photo
of my dad holding one.
You get a forked branch that looked like the letter Y.
You would cut notches
or you would tie the ends of that rubber around it.
Pick up a rock and fire.
- They're powerful enough to break a window
or maybe leave a bruise,
but they're not that accurate or strong.
- [Henry] So the toy industry says,
"Let's give kids a slingshot that really hits the bullseye."
- In 1948, Wham-O,
the company that would later eventually bring us
the hula hoop and the Frisbee,
their very first product is a slingshot.
They actually name their company
after the sound a slingshot makes when it hits its target,
which is "Wham."
- [Natalia] The Wham-O slingshot just looks really
cool and sleek.
It's this high quality, vulcanized rubber.
It's this really uniform, thick, polished wood.
- And when it shows up on store shelves,
kids go crazy for it.
- [Jason] Soon, other manufacturers flood the market
with their own versions, some as cheap as like 10 cents,
which is like just a couple of bucks in today's money.
- [Henry] And before parents even notice,
supercharged slingshots are on the scene.
- The rubber bands get much better,
and the construction of the slingshots themselves
get a little more advanced.
Some have a wrist brace
so that you could pull back with greater force,
generating even more highly dangerous velocity.
- [Jason] Some of these slingshots now
can fire a projectile like 170 miles per hour.
That's more than double
of what a previously old school slingshot could do.
Parents, they're not aware.
They're buying these kids slingshots,
and they're sending 'em out the door,
and saying, "Listen, go have fun.
Don't kill the dog."
- [Hakeem] Kids do what kids do.
They were shooting at birds.
They were shooting at squirrels.
They were shooting at each other.
- [Martin] It turns the suburban environment
into artillery testing ranges,
where kids are running renegade with no supervision,
armed with slingshots.
We would take firecrackers, light it,
and then slingshot it at our friends.
And that's how we treated friends.
- [Henry] It's the glory days of slingshots,
until one unlucky launch changes everything.
- In 1977, a 12-year-old boy and his friend
are going down to the ponds to, you know,
shoot some frogs with their slingshot,
and the pellet ricochets off and hits this boy in the eye
and causes permanent vision loss.
- [Adam] The family naturally goes crazy.
They sued the friend, they sued the manufacturer.
The case eventually escalates
all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court.
- [Jason] The manufacturers decide they wanna lower their
liability, so the easiest way for them to do that
is they lower the tension on the bands themselves
for any slingshots sold to kids.
After that, toy slingshots lose a lot of their punch.
When it's less dangerous, it's a lot less fun.
- You don't usually see slingshots
in the toy stores anymore.
Picking up a high powered weapon at the five and dime
is just another experience kids are missing out on today.
- Way back when, there was no such thing as age limits.
We let our kids have access
to all sorts of dangerous things,
from automobiles to cigarettes.
So why would explosives be any different?
- [Don] The tradition of fireworks at July 4th,
Independence Day, doesn't start in 1776.
It starts a year later, July 4th, 1777.
Every celebration features them since.
- [Martin] Initially fireworks are something
that the aristocratic class, they have access to it.
They can afford to purchase these things.
- [Don] But in the late 1800s,
factories start mass producing them.
- [Martin] It's all the old Civil War ordinance plants
that in the aftermath of the Civil War,
they got nothing to do.
We then hit hard economic times,
and they go back into some of these old ammunition plants
and begin making fireworks in them.
- [Don] Suddenly, the average Joe
can afford to plunk down a few pennies
and get some real firepower.
Fireworks aren't just for the 4th of July.
They're a way of life.
At every backyard barbecue,
bored teenagers are lighting these things up.
They're easy to get, they're cheap to buy,
and back then, nobody's really checking IDs.
- [Austin] They're ubiquitous.
Roadside stands, the local five and dimes,
they're selling all kinds of pyrotechnics.
Little kids are running around with sparklers.
Black Cats are lit on tables,
bottle rockets held in soda bottles.
- [Henry] As fireworks become more and more popular,
people start looking for even more bang for their buck.
- Cherry bombs are created in the late 1920s.
These are little red spheres with the green stem,
and they were used mostly for noise in firework shows.
- [Martin] Kids get interested in cherry bombs real quick
because it's catnip, it's bigger, it's more powerful.
Of course, children are going to be attracted to that.
- [Don] Then World War II comes along.
To help train the troops, defense contractors
make these small, cylindrical, explosive devices
that will simulate the sound and flash of grenades.
The M-80 is born.
- M is for a military explosive,
80 because it contains 80 grains of powder,
and that's 100 times more explosive
than any firework available today.
- [Martin] At the end of the conflict,
the American military surpluses the item,
sells them off to dealers and distributors,
and they begin selling them to the American public
and everyone loves them.
The bigger the explosive, the bigger the bang.
They love it.
- [Henry] By the fifties,
M-80s are available to any kid who wants them.
- [Brian] These fireworks are like the grandsons
of military grade explosives.
The military had all this extra stuff lying around.
They were like, "Let's just sell it to people."
And the public doesn't realize
that they're dealing with military grade explosives
and stuff like that, and that can be dangerous.
That can cause one or two problems.
- [Henry] With access to military grade explosives,
the pastime of childish pranks suddenly blows up.
- [Austin] Mailboxes, obliterated.
Watermelons, emulsified.
Your Ken or Barbie doll, no longer.
It's just a smoking head.
Parents don't care.
They're in on it.
Hey, "We grew up with blowing things up.
You should too."
- [Brian] There's a buddy of mine named Mike
who brought an M-80 to school
and lit it and put it in the toilet.
- [Rutledge] If you wanted to blow up a mailbox or a toy car,
allegedly, all it would take is an M-80.
I don't know that firsthand, but that's what I've heard.
- Even the smaller fireworks turn dangerous
in teenage hands.
- Fuses burn too fast, paper tubes rupture,
sending fireballs out sideways.
- [Brian] Oh man, look, I've had explosives blown up in my hands.
We used to take bottle rockets, break the stick off,
which loses the stability,
and it just flies off in a direction.
We'd stand in a circle and break it off and light it
and just wait to see who it'd hit.
Oh man, I wanna do this right now.
- It's a miracle that these are all here and still work
because there was a whole lot of tinkering with fireworks
in my childhood,
and it was often under the supervision of an adult,
although, that adult was intoxicated at the time.
- I remember the first time I was in a Roman candle fight
and I thought to myself, "This is really dangerous."
So you're running around screaming the whole time.
[makes explosive sounds]
It is real fun, wildly dangerous.
That's how this happened.
I'm fine, I'm fine, it was right there the whole time.
- [Hakeem] Boys will be boys, adults say,
but the injuries pile up,
burns, missing fingers, ruptured eardrums,
even permanent blindness.
In the mid-seventies,
you're still seeing about 5,000 injuries a year
in kids under 15.
- [Don] In 1976, just in time for the bicentennial
celebrations, the federal government steps in
to limit the amount of explosive powder
that can be used in all consumer fireworks.
- Too many children were losing fingers
because of these supercharged fireworks
that they could get their hands on so easily.
- The golden age of kids using fireworks is passed.
I mean, today the explosives are so much less explosive,
so much less dangerous.
They're saving a lot of kids' fingers.
That's probably a good thing.
- Turns out back then, supervision was
more of a suggestion.
- Did you know that there was a time
when kids could walk into somebody else's house uninvited,
literally bounce off the walls, and no one would stop them?
How?
Well, we actually made it pretty easy.
- Today, construction sites big and small are locked down.
They're protected by chain link fences, warning signs,
24 hour video surveillance, so it's hard to imagine a time
when half built houses are open invitations for kids.
- [Lance] There was a time when construction zones
were actually open, just free for kids to play in.
- Starting with the suburban sprawl of the 1950s,
all the way through the 1980s,
for kids, a new house construction
is nowhere near off limits.
- [Rutledge] From the fifties to the eighties,
suburban neighborhoods were popping up all over the place,
which basically meant these woods
that so many of us kids had played in,
suddenly had to go,
and now they're gonna build houses there.
So construction sites sort of become a big playground.
- [Brian] I grew up in an era of great expansion of housing
on Staten Island, so there was always houses being built,
and as a kid, when you see that, you gotta go in.
- [Henry] The front door is wide open
because there is no front door.
- [Lance] After the workers go home,
then the kids can go in and play.
It's a fort, it's a playhouse.
You can have little battles and wars in there.
- The most mundane things
that a construction worker might throw away,
you're like, "Oh, that's so cool."
You found a spark plug.
It was like you found the treasure of Sierra Madre.
I found a pair of safety goggles once,
and I was Cyclops and the X-Men.
- [Brian] And there are treasures to be found.
There are treasures to be found.
Oh man, I built at least two clubhouses
by going into construction zones at night
after everybody went home, and taking the cast off wood,
building yourself a clubhouse.
It was pretty great.
- [Adam] You could write your name in a concrete slab
or leave thumbprints or hand prints or footprints.
My initials are on Homecrest Avenue
in Brooklyn, New York to this day.
May not have made it to the Chinese Theater,
but Homecrest Avenue is locked down.
- We didn't have laser tag, we had half built buildings.
- Parents know that they all go there,
but they figure it's just part of being a kid.
It's curiosity.
Hey, maybe our son or daughter's gonna grow up
to be the next architect or engineer.
It's educational.
It's a learning opportunity.
Hey, that's how a house is built.
- [Brian] Adults are not hanging out in construction sites,
unless they're getting paid to be there.
So when the clock strikes five and they went home,
it was you and your friends
and you were alone in your own house-sized clubhouse.
- [Austin] For the young neighborhood kids,
it's a daytime playground.
For the older ones, it's a nighttime playground.
- [Adam] I think the forbidden, naughty nature of doing it
increased its appeal, I'm sad to say.
Sorry, mom.
- [Brian] Now the teenagers come in.
Now, it's a different level of fun.
Now, it's like Caligula in there.
Now, you got a date in there, you're having fun,
you got a six back in there, you're having a blast.
Everybody's having parties in there.
- [Henry] It's part clubhouse, part funhouse,
but maybe a little rougher around the edges.
- [Austin] These aren't playgrounds.
Sharp corners, unfinished stairwells, basements, rebar,
concrete, falling objects, floors with holes in them.
- [Don] Exposed nails, open wiring.
You could fall through an unfinished floor
or step off a half built staircase and break a leg.
These aren't playgrounds.
They're accidents waiting to happen.
- And there are court cases to prove it.
Like in 1961 in Connecticut,
a 9-year-old boy attempts to cross a plank
across an unfinished basement and falls to his death.
- There's another case where this kid is injured
by this caustic construction material, hydrated lime,
that's been left around.
- Finally by the 1980s,
insurance companies start taking notice.
These sites have to be monitored and protected.
We've gotta keep the kids out.
- [Brian] Guards, security cameras,
and it's not for the safety of the kids.
It's so I don't get sued.
That's not gonna happen on my watch.
- Sure, kids are safer now,
fewer splinters, fewer scars, and a little less fun.
- Childhood friendships are some of the strongest bonds
we will ever forge,
and back in the day, kids would make that official
in a way that was bloody intense.
- [Adam] The concept of having a best friend
is part of everyone's childhood.
The idea of having a fellow adventurer
on this thing called life, that's a special thing.
- [Rutledge] Anyone can say they're best friends,
but some kids came up with a ritual
to really elevate that status.
- [Henry] Popular books from Mark Twain's,
"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" to Stephen King's, "It,"
show kids eagerly taking part
in a once common childhood ritual called a blood oath.
- A blood oath is when you cut your own skin
and then your friend does the same thing,
and then you combine your blood
and you become blood brothers.
- Just the idea of blood brothers is so weird to me.
I think I saw it in a movie once when I was a kid
and I just thought, "Gross."
- [Hakeem] In today's world, it looks crazy.
If your knife is dirty, you could get tetanus,
and let's not even talk about bloodborne pathogens
that you can transfer from one to another.
But back then, you weren't aware.
- [Henry] And it's not happening in secret.
Adults encourage it.
- [Don] In the 1930s and 40s,
a special honor society within the Boy Scouts of America
called the Order of the Arrow
regularly conducts this brotherhood ceremony.
- [Rutledge] They take an arrow and they slice the palm of their
hands and then put 'em together,
and that's their blood brother oath.
- [Henry] This sanctioned blood ritual goes on for decades.
- [Adam] Back when the Scouts started,
the whole bloodletting thing,
the idea of bloodborne pathogens
really didn't cross people's mind.
- [Kavitha] There was a lot of issues
with having kids cut themselves to draw blood.
By the mid-20th century,
people understand that disease is passed on
through the blood.
- [Rutledge] In 1956, the Boy Scouts actually rewrite
this whole thing and banned bloodletting,
so instead they would just draw a little blood on their hand
with a marker and then they would bond that way.
- [Hakeem] By the seventies and eighties,
there's more and more fear of bloodborne diseases,
and now parents and scout leaders and coaches
are warning kids against doing this.
- [Rutledge] Nowadays, if you wanna be best friends with
someone, you just kind of say, "Hey, we're best friends."
You don't really have to do
this gross sharing of blood pathogens
to seal that friendship.
Oh, it's so gross.
- A lot of risky behavior that we engaged in as kids
was due to peer pressure.
Take smoking, it was hard to resist taking a puff
when all your friends were doing it,
but sometimes that temptation
didn't come from the other kids.
It came from a machine.
- Smoking is a deeply normalized thing
in mid-century America.
If a teen wants a cigarette back then,
they don't have to try that hard.
All you have to do is look between the jukebox
and the soda machine
to this memorial to American commercialism
in the form of the cigarette vending machine.
- For the price of a milkshake,
you can buy a pack of cigarettes from one of these machines.
By the 1950s, they're at bowling alleys,
they're at movie theaters, they're even in hospitals.
Like anywhere where you need quick access to a cigarette
and where there might be children,
there's a cigarette vending machine.
- At restaurants, I was given the money
and sent, "Go over there and get me a pack of cigarettes,"
and I go, pull the thing, chink, chink,
and let the pack fall to the bottom and get out,
and then proudly walk back and present it to my father.
- [Henry] The machines are designed with sleek chrome,
glowing lights, and glass knobs.
To kids, it's almost a game.
- [Negin] It's estimated that 50% of teen boys were smokers
and some of those estimates are even higher.
And then a minority of girls were also smoking.
- [Martin] The vending machine provides this huge loophole
to the age restrictions because it can't tell.
There's no mechanism for it to ascertain
whether or not you are above 18 years of age.
And so if you have the correct number of quarters,
you can get a pack of cigarettes out of the machine,
even though you may be 15 years old.
- [Adam] Of course, we find out that it is way more dangerous
than the tobacco companies let anybody know.
- [Martin] Smoking is particularly damaging for
adolescents because it interferes
with brain development and lung development.
- [Negin] It's wild to think that cigarette vending machines,
which saw their peak in the 1950s,
puttered along, until literally the 90s.
- [Lance] By 2010, these things are basically extinct,
and the only place where they might still exist
by federal law is places that are restricted to adults.
- Thinking back on the things we did when we were young,
from jumping our bikes to playing chicken in traffic,
to blowing things up for fun, ignorance was bliss.
And what we didn't know could kill us,
but somehow we made it through our hazardous history,
and we've got the scars to prove it.