Before there was a summer camp or after-school program to match every child’s interests and favorite hobbies, kids were largely left to fend for themselves, while summer camps were a relative rarity.
“Fending for themselves” entailed activities that in this day and age would be unheard of: baseball in the city streets, experimenting with toxic chemicals, and melting lead to make toys from molds.
These days children’s safety is high on parents’ priority lists, and summer programs accredited by the American Camp Association undergo a rigorous inspection process to ensure they meet safety standards in areas including fire, transportation, healthcare, crisis management, and staff training.
But in the 1930s and ’40s, when longtime West Windsor resident and Looking Back columnist Dick Snedeker was growing up in Brooklyn, there was little consideration and often little knowledge of the hazards posed by everyday childhood activities.
Snedeker — who attended several summer camps that he notes were “a terrific change” for a city kid — reflects below on the hazards he grew up with.
#b#Lead — Just One of The Hazards We Used to Live With#/b#
There is no question that the presence of metallic lead and its compounds in the environment is hazardous and that the efforts in recent years to minimize that presence make very good sense. But looking back at how pervasive lead once was, I must consider myself fortunate to have escaped for so long with no apparent harm. There are so many ways in which lead and its compounds were a part of my everyday life — along with other things that are now considered hazardous for children — that it’s worth recounting some of them just to appreciate the contrast between then and now.
Despite the obvious free use of lead during those years and before, I and most of my childhood friends were well aware that lead was poisonous and that you should not ingest it or, say, get it into a cut. In fact we used to joke about poisoning someone by stabbing them with a lead pencil — and, yes, we also knew there was no lead in the “lead” of a graphite pencil, but we thought it was a funny play on words.
But we never gave a thought to the possible dangers of lead manifested in more subtle ways such as in the inhaling of dried flakes of interior paint that contained lead oxide. Few people knew that paint contained lead, anyway, so no one worried about it. Even if people knew there was lead in paint, there was a belief that if the lead was part of a chemical compound, it was not dangerous, since it would take a chemical reaction to free the lead and make it harmful.
Here are some examples of one boy’s experiences with lead — plus a few other “dangerous” things he encountered routinely — between roughly the years 1927 and 1951.
1. Plumbing in our house in Brooklyn: All the water supply pipes in our house were made of lead. So for the first 24 years of my life, I drank and bathed in water that reached the faucets through lead pipes. The house was built in the late 19th century when lead was the common water pipe material, as it was until well into the 20th century when galvanized steel and then copper became the materials of choice. More recently, even the lead-alloy solder used for joining copper pipes has been phased out in favor of lead-free solder. Of course, much of the copper has now been replaced with plastic.
2. Casting set: Like many of my male friends, I owned a casting set. In fact, I believe I received two as birthday or Christmas presents at different times. A set consisted of a small electric smelting pot in which you melted lead ingots. You then poured the molten lead with a ladle into molds to cast various objects. The most popular were soldiers (World War I version) and animals.
I received my first casting set at about age 9 or 10. I spent much time watching with fascination as the lead melted in the pot and I know I breathed in whatever fumes were given off. Just seeing the metal in liquid form was amazing, I thought. Such sets would be taboo today, not just because of the lead, but because of the burning hazard of handling the hot ladle and molds. Neither I nor any of my friends who had these sets were ever burned that I know of. We had sense enough not to touch anything so hot.
3. Rocks and minerals set: These sets contained an assortment of sample pieces of many kinds of minerals and types of rock, including galena, or lead sulfide, the principal ore for lead. The sets also contained samples of elemental sulfur and raw asbestos. The latter could be shredded easily and was fascinating to handle. I never had such a set myself, but some of my friends did, and I know I handled asbestos samples several times. It’s a unique material in its natural form. There were also samples of many of these hazardous materials at school. Of course, they weren’t considered hazardous at the time.
4. Chemistry set: This is an item that in the form we had them would be taboo today, I guess because people are afraid their kids will eat the materials. The sets I had did contain a number of chemicals that could make you very sick or even kill you if you ingested them. But the idea of eating the contents of a chemistry set was so ridiculous to me and my friends, we never even considered such sets to be hazardous.
During my years from about third through eighth grade I had a succession of chemistry sets, each one larger and more impressive than the preceding one. They were manufactured by A.C. Gilbert, the same company that made Erector sets (of which I had several). There is no question that my chemistry and Erector sets were major factors in my eventually becoming an engineer. With the chemistry sets, it was the whole idea of creating new compounds from certain chemicals and watching the reactions as they proceeded that really turned me on. Like several of my friends, I always wanted new and better apparatus and new chemicals to experiment with.
There were several chemical supply stores where high school chemistry students could buy almost any piece of apparatus and chemical compound they wanted to. I set up a kind of laboratory on an old desk in the small room next to mine.
My best discovery for the laboratory was that the gas valve on the wall, which had once supplied the gas for illumination in that room of the house (before it was electrified) was still connected to the main, and that I now had gas to run a Bunsen burner. Goodbye alcohol lamp! That made a big difference, and I spent many hours with my friends in that room making all kinds of interesting chemical compounds, including hydrochloric acid and gunpowder, the latter — a mixture, not a compound — being something that many kids knew how to make. (I once had a near miss with a homemade firecracker when the fuse burned a lot faster than I thought it would. But I was only surprised, not hurt.)
We also experimented with the reaction of metals such as lead with acids such as sulfuric, nitric, and hydrochloric. Some of these reactions gave off noxious fumes, but we knew enough not to breath them and to open the window if something smelled really strong or corrosive. We even experimented with elemental sodium metal and phosphorous, both highly reactive materials.
The idea of kids doing this sort of thing today is pretty far fetched — it may even be illegal for parents to allow it. Beyond giving me the chemistry set, my parents rarely if ever paid attention to what I did with it. In my personal experience, no one ever got hurt, and we learned a great deal.
5. Decorations: At Christmas, the tinsel we used on our Christmas tree was made of lead. Unlike tinsel that was later made of aluminized plastic, lead tinsel actually hung on the tree under its own weight so it looked like icicles, which was the idea of tinsel. No other tinsel ever looked the way it was supposed to because it didn’t hang straight down. Only lead did that because of its high density. We used lead tinsel until it was no longer available as a result of World War II, when a very large amount of lead was used for bullets.
I remember being fascinated when a piece of tinsel fell on the tracks of my Lionel electric train under the tree. If it fell across the central power rail and one of the outer rails, the lead would cause a momentary short circuit that would trip the circuit breaker in the transformer power supply and melt in the process. The train, of course, would stop. No harm was done, but I liked to see the thin strip of lead melt. I melted many pieces of lead tinsel that way just for fun.
6. Lollipop molds: My mother’s sister, my aunt Mary B. Jenkins would come to our house in Brooklyn every year around Christmas. While she was with us, she always made barley sugar lollipops that we hung on the Christmas tree. The lollipops were in the shape of animals. There was a turkey, a lamb, a hen, an elephant, a rabbit, a horse, and maybe some others. The lollipops were made about four at a time in molds made of solid lead. (They must have weighed at least five pounds each.)
These were two-part molds into which you poured the hot liquid barley sugar from the bottom and then inserted a lollipop stick made of wood, the latter being my job when I was old enough. After the barley sugar hardened you pried the two parts of the mold apart and removed the lollipops. I probably consumed dozens every Christmas season. Who knows how much lead, if any, each lollipop contained? We never thought about it. Of course, all that sugar didn’t do my teeth any good.
7. Sinkers: Most of the males in my family — my father, one of my two brothers and I — enjoyed surf fishing on the beach at Bay Head, NJ. (We spent most of the summer there through the 1930s and up until 1943.) Lead sinkers were a routine part of our tackle, and we handled them almost every day throughout the summer. We never got into casting our own sinkers from molten lead, but some of the other fishermen did. Lead was the only material out of which sinkers were made, and many ended up on the ocean bottom with lost tackle.
8. Bullets: Like many families of those days we had a .22-caliber rifle at home. (No permit or registration was required.) The bullets were solid lead, of course. I rarely shot it, and I probably wasn’t supposed to know where it was hidden. But I discovered it one day by accident—along with a few bullets—and didn’t let on that I knew about it. Many high schools, including mine, had competitive rifle teams, so quite a few boys knew how to handle such guns and the lead bullets safely.
Neither of my brothers was into target practice, but I did fire one of the guns in the cellar of our house, just for fun. I had to be careful to shoot at something that would not cause the bullet to ricochet. If it’s still there, someone can find a lead bullet in one of the wooden posts that holds up the first floor near where the furnace used to be — or still is after 65 years — I know the house is still there.
9. Type: In the elementary school I attended, one of the most popular after-school activities for fifth-grade boys was the printing club. One of the teachers had a real print shop set up in one of the classrooms where you could actually set type into pages or other formats and print from it with ink on paper in a printing press just the way newspapers, magazines, and books were printed. If it was printed, it had to be printed from type, and the principal metal in the type was lead. Type metal also contained tin and antimony, although the type itself was often collectively referred to simply as “lead.”
Setting the type involved picking the pieces of type metal containing the individual letter forms out of a type case with your bare fingers and placing them in a “stick,” a small metal tray that allowed you to set (or “compose”) one page-worth of type at a time, line by line. When you wanted to add extra space between the lines of type, you inserted a thin flat strip of type metal — or lead — of a specified thickness measured in “points” (approximately 1/72 of an inch). This was called “adding lead” or simply “leading” (rhymes with sledding).
Some professional compositors spent their entire careers handling lead type with their bare hands every day. After automated composition systems were developed such as Monotype and Linotype machines, their operators had to work in close proximity to the molten type metal that was cast by the machine and breathe the vapors at the same time.
10. Solder: The use of lead-based solder for joining wires in electronic circuitry was common, and I and some of my friends were very active in using solder for this purpose. Solder was also essential for some operations in the course of building model airplanes such as holding landing gear wire parts together. (From the age of six until about 16, my main pastime at home was building model airplanes.) My father taught me how to solder wires together when I was quite young — maybe around five or six — when he was building a crystal radio set, one of his favorite hobbies.
When they became available in the 1950s, kits for building your own HiFi audio equipment (Heath Kits, etc.) were very popular, and I built several. All the assembly was with lead-based solder, and it was very easy to spend hours bent over the workbench breathing in the fumes from the solder and the resin flux that helped it adhere to the wires.
11. Glue: The type of glue I refer to is the lightweight, fast-drying kind used on balsa wood in the construction of things like model airplanes and ships. While it does not involve the use of lead, some users found a new way to make it extra hazardous: that is by sniffing it. In the 1960s someone discovered that you could get “high” by intentionally breathing in the vaporized, highly volatile solvent from such glue, and it acquired a bad reputation as a result.
However, in the days when model airplanes were a real novelty and you could build ones that actually flew, intentionally sniffing the glue was unheard of. Why would anyone do that, anyway? Building the model gave many kids great satisfaction and taught them how to be creative — without the expense of taking lessons or going to a class, I might add. Oh yes, I was aware that the glue had a pleasant smell, but sitting there and just smelling it never occurred to me or anyone else I knew.
There are a number of other activities we engaged in as city children in those days that would be considered too dangerous today. For example:
Playing baseball without a helmet or a face mask.
Riding a bicycle without a helmet.
Using roller skates without knee or elbow pads — or a helmet.
Playing tackle football without a full set of the latest protective gear.
Hitching rides on the back of electric trolley cars.
Sledding in the snow-covered city street.
Playing stick ball, touch football, or a variety of other games we made up in the city street.
I did most of those things and more, and I guess I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to survive. This is not to disparage the use of modern protective gear. If it had been available at the time, and if its use was shown to be beneficial without hindering the activity, I expect most would have used it — if they could afford to buy it.
