This 1958 (or ’59) pogo stick is the same kind I had at the time, with the red sponge rubber ball on top for a handle. And if my mother had ever seen the tricks I was doing with my pogo stick, she would’ve had a kazoo.
The kid in this video is good–but I was bouncing up and down our cellar stairs and even up and down the high school football bleachers. You do things when you’re ten years old that you wouldn’t dream of attempting after you’ve grown up.
My friends across the street had a pair of stilts just like those in the video, but none of us ever mastered that art.
One day, alas, a kid in the neighborhood who was much too big for my pogo stick tried it out and bent it beyond repair. And so my pogo days were over.
But if I can ever get my hands on another one…
P.S.–Dig the cool cars in the background!
Scary to watch, at this point in life. 🙂
Just gimme a pogo stick!
Isn’t it wonderful how we all managed to take spills like the ones at the end of the video and come up laughing? No helmets, pads, cushioned playgrounds, and other swaddling clothes in those days. We all had filthy and/or scabby knees and elbows, and occasionally a sprain or even a minor break (casts were great for show-and-tell!), and we had FUN!
I grew up in the Bronx, with concrete and asphalt to play on, except for a park about five blocks away, but even the playground there was asphalt or something. Actually, for city kids, that green stuff (what was it called again? ah, yes, “grass”) was more hazardous than concrete, because you couldn’t see where the lumps and holes were, so you could more easily sprain an ankle than on good, solid, visible concrete. Know something? I still feel that way! 🙂
I love these Memory Lane posts, Lee, even though my memories go back just a wee bit further than yours; my childhood years were the 1940s.
Phoebe, my friends and I lived on our bikes all summer–racing, charging up slopes to try to take off into the air, and I’ll bet we could’ve dressed and eaten breakfast on those bikes, if we had to. And in all that time, I never, never saw or heard of a kid falling off and landing on his head.
It was all a lot more fun!
Likewise. Our bikes were our ultimate possession back in our childhood days.
You sound just like my brother, Lee. He used to pull similar antics lol. While watching this young-un bounce around, the background was very interesting – all those 50’s cars! Those were the days when we could identify cars by their looks rather than having to look for a brand.