Apparently, I was at the tail end of the crash dummy generation.

We grew up riding bicycles without a helmet.

My dad would drive myself, my brothers and cousins in the bed of his 1956 Chevy Apache pickup to an uncle’s house in the country.

When my dad sold his share in a hardware store to his brother Pershing and went to work as superintendent of the Lincoln Public Cemetery District, I’d sometimes accompany him on his weekend rounds riding in the cab of a 1963 Chevy C60 dump truck sans seatbelts.

I got to travel in the cargo space of our 1957 Chevy with ice chests and other items on the way to and from the family cabin at Donner Lake and occasional excursions to Shasta Lake.

I remember my mom letting my sister, who was 4 at time, stand on the front seat of our 1965 Chevy station wagon going to the grocery store.

I’d be remiss not to mention that mom would always extend her right arm out to make sure Mary didn’t tumble into the dashboard when she came to a stop sign.

And we even rode horses without a helmet.

As for walking to school yourself, that was OK to do in the first grade but it was just over 1.5 miles away in Roseville, a lot shorter distance than my mom had to go to reach a one-room school in the Nevada County foothills.

I still walked when we moved to Lincoln in the second grade and the distance not only increased to just over 2 miles but also included crossing two state highways with heavy truck traffic without benefit of crossing guards or stop signs plus crossing the major north-south Southern Pacific train route.

My brothers both learned to shoot after they turned 10 and had their own guns and went hunting with dad. I may have ended up doing the same thing but dad passed away when I was 8.

While living in Roseville, I was allowed to go a block and a half to play in and along Dry Creek when I was 4 with my brothers who were four and six years older.

We even built the lamest of rafts at one time using tools from the garage— unsupervised as well — using scrap lumber.

My brothers, as soon as they turned 12, were allowed to have newspaper delivery routes.

Ronald actually had two — one in the morning for the Sacramento Bee and one in the afternoon for The Press-Tribune.

All of the routes were done on a bicycle, sans helmet, with 40 to 50 papers they folded and lugged in a carrier bag over their shoulder on routes that did not include our immediate neighborhood.

I was allowed, in the summer, starting in the second grade to, walk eight blocks by myself to access the McBean Park public swimming pool as long as I adhered to the promise my mom had me make to stay in the shallow part of the pool.

What brings this up is Hawaii has just raised the minimum age for riding in the bed of a pickup truck to 16.

If that shocks your sensibilities, there are still states such as Alabama and Alaska that have no age restrictions riding in a pickup truck bed untethered.

Most states do prohibit minors from doing so.

And for a bit of worthless information, California allowed minors to ride in pickup truck beds until the 1980s while adults weren’t banned from doing so until 1994, three full years after the Legislature required dogs and other animals in the back of pickups to be tethered or caged.

No, I am not pining for the good old days.

You won’t catch me bicycling without a helmet or riding without a seatbelt.

As for a horse, if I ever got back in the saddle, I likely wouldn’t wear a helmet.

But a lot of the things kids did back then they weren’t allowed to do until parents were comfortable that precautions they drilled into our heads such as how to properly and safely cross a street were understood plus how you were supposed to behave in public.

Things are safer today in terms of design and reasonable precautions.

But not allowing kids to bruise either their knee, their ego, or even their hearts at an early age has a tendency not to make them stronger and less likely to judge, let alone comprehend, risk.

Again, they weren’t universally good old days but kids for the most part learned how to cope with the world long before they reached high school.

There’s a lot to be said for being able to do so at an earlier age.

And to be clear, riding in the bed of a pickup truck long ago stopped being semi-safe given how many people now approach driving as being the distraction.