Any Gen X'ers out there who remembers riding around the back seat of their parent's car without seat belts on?
Mom or dad would take a curve and you'd either slide into your siblings or they'd slide into you?
I was talking to a friend about this memory and they shared that once the back door flew open on the curve and they literally fell out of the moving vehicle. And their mom pulled over to pick them up and yelled at THEM for falling out!
I thought that story pretty much summed up being a kid in the late 60s/early 70s. And of course, every adult smoked cigarettes in the car.
I’m not old enough to remember cars not having seat belts, but we did all used to pile into the back of the family station wagon without seat belts all the same when we had too many passengers.
Hell, yeah!! Well, we had seatbelts, but they were jammed down in between the cushions, so as to be unusable.
My dad had a Corvette two-seater, and my brother and I would hide behind the seats in the "boot". We had a family truckster (Ford station wagon with the wood siding) that we would used the back as our own personal play ground. Later, we had a '73 Buick Centurian convertible, you could fit five people across the bench seats in the front and the back.
And until he got sick with arthritis, both parents smoked like chimneys. We played with metal Tonka trucks as well (when the crane boom would close, it was like a paper cutter).