STUPID: Bumper Sledding.

If summers seemed to drag on and on when you were young, winters seemed to be endless. In spite of this, and maybe because I was a little bigger than other kids my age, I sometimes got into more than my share of "activities" with the older, local kids. One such questionable activity was a more or less accepted practice back in the 1950's I called Bumper Sledding. Looking back now I can see that being towed on a toboggan or sleigh behind a 3000 pound automobile, on city streets, through a snowstorm, with no way to communicate with the driver, is probably not a great idea. This was however, popular at the time and one of the most fun of all the questionable activities in which I partook.

Click on my Rockwellian artsy picture to enlarge it.

Bumper sledding (not to be confused with bumper jumping)
Our dear next door neighbour, Helen Clarkson was one of the few suburban housewives of the time to have her own car. I think it was an old 1938 or so Chevrolet "bustleback" sedan. The car was large but not big enough to carry everybody so she devised a simple, yet effective plan. Aunty Helen as I called her, was big on good times, if not a little short on good sense. Who couldn't love a woman who would tow all the neighbour kids a mile or two from the park at Colville Boulevard all the way over to the London Ski Club, now called Boler Mountain. She patiently waited while gabbing with her sister or another neighbourhood housewife while everybody tobogganed and sledded to their heart's content. Then after, she would tie us all back on and tow the whole collection back home where she would feed us fresh, hot popcorn and hot chocolate. At least I always made it home, but there was no checklist of names so it's possible someone could have gotten left behind if they were tardy.

Did Helen Clarkson actually invent Bumper Sledding?
In spite of the obvious risks like being run into by a vehicle from behind, or someone falling off and freezing to death, or being gassed by the adjacent tail pipe or... Hey! We never thought of these! Bad endings were only things you read about in the newspaper, and as for Bumper Sledding, there was no law against it that any of us knew about. It was really a different world back then. Even drinking and driving was more or less the norm, no one would ever think of suing another person and insurance was for house fires. As I've said before, parental supervision also seemed to me to be a relatively new concept for the 50's.
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