games
Backyard
from 1970’s WORDS BY DORIAN MODE
With NSW in lock down, for this travel column, I’ve been reflecting on how we used to entertain ourselves in the backyard the 1970s. YELLOW BRAKE ROAD If you weren’t rich enough to own a swimming pool in the 1970s, the next best thing was the Slip ‘N Slide. This was invented accidentally when its inventor saw his son sliding on wet painted concrete at his home in California and thought: ‘This kid’s gonna break his neck’. So he took a strip of plastic and sewed a tube into the side, forming an “irrigating duct” to which his garden hose could attach. It’s still available for purchase today but was taken off the market for a while in the early 90s. While kids are fairly mailable, your beer-gutted dad, sliding down the ‘yellow brake road’ holding a can of KB and a damp cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth, and sliding faster than a Qantas share portfolio, might indeed break his neck. This is what happened, resulting in numerous lawsuits in the US. My chum Pete says he cracked two ribs on the slide some years ago while playing with his
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kids. (It now says “not recommended for adults” and is back on the market.) There were Slip ‘N Slide secrets of course. You needed a big run-up. And you never placed it at the end of a footpath as the slides inertia was unpredictable. Particularly, if you used the secret ingredient: a bottle of mum’s jade green Palmolive detergent. Indeed, there was an ad on telly with Madge, a bottle-blonde manicurist, telling a customer she was soaking her hands in said dishwashing liquid. ‘It’s mild on hands while you do dishes,’ says Madge. ‘It’s green,’ replies the shocked client. ‘Yes. You’re soaking in it,’ she adds. The customer looks perplexed before peering down at her feet. ‘And my pedicure? It’s blue.’ ‘Yep. Harpic Toilet Cleaner. Works wonders on your bunions.’ At this stage, Madge’s long-suffering boss flags her into his office. ‘Madge, we are going to have to let you go.’ ‘What on earth for?’ ‘Well, first there was the Palmolive incident. Now this new “Harpic Pedicure” of yours. And last week a customer complained that you died her hair with Kiwi Boot Polish.’ ‘But these are all products we simply have lying around the house!’
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There were Slip ‘N Slide secrets of course. You needed a big run-up. Anyway, I digress. The Palmolive turbocharged your sliding experience. But my wife Lydia says she remembers the detergent stinging her eyes as a kid on the slide. Nonetheless, no summer was complete without that grass kill on your front lawn, where the yellow strip was left for a month where it subsequently killed off dad’s lawn. A summer garden tattoo. TOKEN TENNIS I’m putting it out there that McEnroe never made a Wimbledon final by playing totem tennis – which like Slip ‘N Slide, you can still purchase today. It was kinda lame. It was simply a tennis ball attached to a cord connected to a vertical pole with a coil on top. Inevitably, the ball would become tangled, and you would be left wildly swinging your racquet in an ever-shrinking arc till you bashed each other. Overseas it was also known by other brand names such as Zim Zam,
