Memories of Car Travel #2...safety

When I was a child my family traveled by car about 10 hours to our annual vacation spot.  We usually broke it into two days since my grandparents lived 4 hours along the way.  My parents used the suitcases for our one month stay to fill the well between front and back seats. They were carefully wedged up to the level of the back seat with pillows to soften the hump between the two sides.  [Yes, there was really spacious leg room between seats in those days of long, tank-like cars.] Covering the whole thing with blankets created a bed across the whole seat and space.  As children we stretched out and could sleep away some of the long hours.  When there were three of us, two could sit [either cross legged, or facing each other with our backs to the windows] while one got to "sleep" or at least stretch out. We were completely untethered in those days before seat belts, much less should belts and safety seats! The only "air bags" we had were inflatable pillows to cradle our heads from bouncing against the window. One truly lucky young child might get permission to stretch out on the back windowledge... a space far wider than in today's cars.  It was like sleeping and resting in the viewing bubble-top of touring trains...the ultimate window seat.  I loved it!

We traveled along the spanking new New York State Thruway perched precariously on wooden toy boxes with painted-on names.... the safety polar opposite of today's car seats!  No one had yet figured out that a child sleeping on the back windowledge [the prized spot] risked becoming a flying projectile.  No one noticed that the toy steering wheel [mounted on the front of the baby seat] could impale, and the baby seat [which hooked over the top of the back of the front seat so the child could see out the windshield] could propel forward at windshield height. Not that my parents were not safety minded. We were never allowed to play with pointed objects in the car...crayons, no pencils [through crayons left on said rear windowledge invariably melted into colored pools of wax.]. We had accident "drills."  If Dad hollered "Down!" we all immediately threw ourselves onto the floor sheltered between the front and back seats. 

When I think about it, I wonder that we all survived.  The danger seems so obvious now.  Actually, it's kind of funny that the same people who were so worried about atomic war that many scrambled to build basement fallout shelters [totally inadequate against nuclear war] were oblivious to the easily prevented dangers of daily car travel! And yet, I admit to a bit of melancholy that none of my children got to experience that freedom of movement, the privileged views, ..... the innocence  and lack of fear.