I’m lucky to be alive. My survival’s nothing short of a miracle. Perhaps if I’d had a bicycle helmet or knee pads But that’s just it. I grew up in an epoch before safety was invented.

One of my earliest memories was of sleeping in the car on long trips. Back then, your standard automobile was about the size of a small yacht. There was plenty of room for a 4-year-old boy to crawl up on the massive ledge in the back window for a nap.

Had Dad ever needed to stomp on the brake, he’d have been wearing me around his neck like a drooling boa. He never did.

There were no child seats, nor belts in the back. Kids bounded all over the seats, floorboards, windows, roof – anywhere we could yell and wriggle. I think it’s why so many adults smoked back then. Sometimes, they puffed on cigarettes, too.

And get this – we rode bicycles without helmets. Why? Because safety hadn’t been invented yet.

We pedaled bicycles everywhere – around driveways, along roads, through the woods, across creeks, flew over dirt ramps and clunked down stairs – all without helmets or knee pads.

If we fell – which wasn’t so much ”if” as it was ”when” for our Evel Knievel-inspired stunts – Dad watched us untangle limbs from bicycle parts, scanned our skinned knees and goose-egged heads, and offered, ”That’ll feel better when it stops hurting.”

Then we’d straighten the twisted wheels, get on our bikes and do it again.

Somewhere about the late 1960s or early 1970s, a feature to lessen the risks on bicycles was created – the safety flag. Soon, we pedaled around driveways, along roads, through the woods, across creeks, flew over dirt ramps and cluncked down stairs with a triangle of bright orange snapping above us on a 5-foot-tall springy pole.

Most of us owned BB guns by our sixth birthdays. “Don’t shoot anybody’s eye out,” our moms would say as we ran outside to play. So we didn’t. But sometimes a buddy’s rear pocket was too hard to resist.

Before that, we had cap guns, loaded with red rolls of powdered explosives. If the gun jammed, we simply took the rolls and pounded the explosives with rocks. Sometimes we burned our fingers. Sometimes we mashed our fingers with the rock. This was considered fun.

We had robot spacemen spark guns which, if you tried real hard, could set things on fire. Oh sure, not if they were used properly, but we were boys.

Lawn Jarts were awesome. You threw these missile-like things that had seriously lethal spear tips. Grandma hardly ever let us boys play this lawn game without her supervision. I guess she figured out that we were boys.

If it rained, we went inside to play with our woodburning kits or to bake new Creepy Crawlers with our hot metal Thingmakers. Our parents did not hover over us. They figured if we didn’t have enough sense not to burn ourselves, we soon would.

I am not condoning any of this. I don’t even want to think about my grandson getting a hold of a string of firecrackers like a lot of my friends brought over for us to play with. Thanks to the invention of safety, he will have fingerprints.

But it’s only by freak accident that he has a grandpa. Because I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s without a helmet or knee pads.

—- Cole’s latest novel, ”Bash and the Chicken Coop Caper” (B&H Kids), is available in bookstores. Write him at burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or on the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.