The Boston Phoenix
September 9 - 16, 1999

[Out There]

Playing dead

Slip 'N Slide, the Pitch Back, and other horrors of my youth

by Kris Frieswick

The other day on the news they announced the recall of a children's toy -- a stuffed bear with a little button nose that, said the incredulous newscaster in breathless tones, could be pulled off and possibly swallowed by a small child. The news clip demonstrated one of these cute noses actually being removed from the cuddly toy. A large adult-male arm wielding a pair of pliers wrestled with it for a good 20 seconds before the nose showed any sign of coming off.

These people obviously don't know a thing about dangerous toys. I, however, spent my childhood in the devil-may-care '70s. Anyone who grew up during those years knows, as I do, the true meaning of danger.

Remember Slip 'N Slides? They were huge when I was 10. They were 30-foot-long, three-foot-wide pieces of yellow plastic with little spray nozzles attached along the sides. Mom or Dad would hook one end of the Slip 'N Slide to the garden hose, unroll the thing down the back hill, and turn on the water. A complex system of tubing in the slide would bring the water down to the nozzles, which would spray the slide and create a slick surface. The trick was to run at full tilt toward the yellow slide, fling yourself onto it, and glide along the wet plastic to the bottom. Hours of wet fun in the sun!

The first time my brother, sister, and I used our Slip 'N Slide, we discovered several design flaws. The first one wasn't really the product's fault. In our excitement, we forgot that underneath all that inviting bright plastic was still the cold, hard back yard. We flew through the air and landed with a crunch that sent our heads snapping back as if we were crash-test dummies. (I was diagnosed last year with a herniated disc in my neck, and I'm pretty sure I know how it happened.) Second, the nozzles didn't work very well, so only sections of the slide got wet. My brother left a large patch of skin on the Slip 'N Slide one afternoon when he hit a dry section. Despite the obvious hazards, our Slip 'N Slide was never recalled. It was, however, torn to shreds by Onion, our cat, who we thought would enjoy the slide as much as we did.

And who can forget the Pitch Back? This devious creation was custom-made for kids like us -- children imprisoned in a semi-rural neighborhood where the nearest playmates were more than a mile away. The Pitch Back was a little three-foot-square trampoline-like device that you could stand up on its edge to face you. You tossed a baseball at it, and if you hit the "strike zone" in the center, the ball would bounce directly back to you, thus eliminating the need for playmates. Aside from the obvious antisocial ramifications of this toy, if you actually did hit the strike zone, the ball would come whizzing back at you at about three times the speed at which it was thrown -- usually right at your face (which was a particularly bad thing the year both my brother and sister got braces). If you missed the strike zone, you would be spared, but anyone within 40 feet of the Pitch Back was a potential concussion victim. The toy didn't do much for our pitching or catching abilities, but we had finely honed flinching and ducking skills by the end of that summer. In spite of our frequent Pitch Back-related injuries, it was the property damage that led to the Pitch Back's eventual demise in our home. The toy was officially "retired" after the third time it rocketed our baseball through the cellar window.

The dangerous, unchecked toys of my youth didn't cause merely physical damage. Sometimes they left wounds that only time and years of intensive therapy can heal. A friend of mine remembers one of her childhood toys, a doll called Baby Alive. The gimmick of Baby Alive was that you could feed her real food using her workable mouth, most of which would then pass through into her workable diaper. You could feed that doll all day long. Problem was, there was no way to get all the food back out again. My friend recalls playing with Baby Alive one day when maggots started crawling out of its mouth. For my money, that tops a loose bear nose any damn day.

Then, of course, there's the most dangerous toy of my youth (or that of anyone I know) -- lawn darts. If memory serves, this product actually carried the slogan "It's all fun and games until somebody puts out an eye." Even before we used them, the lawn darts scared us. My sister, demonstrating wisdom far beyond her six short years, wouldn't go into the back yard when the lawn darts were present. After the incident with Clyde, our overly curious German shepherd (the vet said things would have been much worse if the dart had landed just one inch farther to the left), the darts became part of Frieswick family lore.

I'm pretty sure that lawn darts have gone the way of the dinosaurs, but I recently learned that Pitch Back and Slip 'N Slide are still out there, breaking the teeth of a new generation. I also hear that Baby Alive remains in the retail marketplace, but now with her own specially designed "food" (which I assume "passes" more easily than whatever my friend was feeding her and doesn't attract bugs).

I can't believe that these toys haven't been yanked from the market, especially in an era when public-toy-enemy number one is a teddy bear with a nose that it would take a jackhammer to remove. I like to think that, just maybe, the supreme toy-yanking authority had the clarity of mind to realize that truly dangerous toys represent a unique and indispensable educational opportunity for the youth of every generation. Looking back, I see that some of my most valued life knowledge came from exposure to these toys. For the sake of any kids out there who haven't slipped-'n-slid their way through childhood, I would like to share a few of these lessons:

Animals are not actually made of fur. That's just the top coating. There's skin underneath.

Believe in the conservation-of-matter theory. Covering a hillside with yellow plastic does not mean that the hillside goes away.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction -- unless you're using a Pitch Back, in which case the reaction will be triple the original action.

Gravity kills.

Any toy can be dangerous if used properly.

Kris Frieswick is a finance-magazine editor and writer living in Newton. She can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

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