May 27, 2020 • 12 mins
There was a time when kids had to look out for flying darts that could pierce their skulls when they played in the backyard.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
This is short stuff getting up. Let's go look out above?
Is that what people shout? Look out above? It feels wrong.
I think I think they say look out below. But
that didn't make any sense, No neither one. It just
say how about just look out or heads up? No,
(00:26):
not heads up, you'll get a lawn dart in your eye.
Just move out of the immediate area quickly, duck and cover.
There you go. Yeah, I don't know if that would
help either, because Chuck, get this. We're talking about lawn darts,
and when they get a real wind up under them,
they strike with a force of around twenty three thousand
pounds per square. That's right. And we are talking about
(00:50):
lawn darts. And if you're like, what is a lawn dart?
That means you're probably younger than we are because we
grew up in this seventies and eighties these with these toys.
Uh that was It's basically a giant oversized dart like
you would throw it a dartboard with plastic fins, and
(01:10):
they're about what are they about a foot long or so? Dish? Yeah,
and the idea is that it was sort of like cornhole.
You would get on opposite sides of each other like
horse shoes, and you have these big hula hoops basically
you would put on the ground and you would throw
the lawn dart up in the air and try and
get it to come down and stick inside of that hoop. Yeah,
(01:31):
and you get some points for that. You just let
it arc gracefully back down into that hoop and that
was it, And there was a lot of fun. The
problem is it was a lot of danger as well
because these things, again a lot of them had like
a blunt end, but not all of them did. Some
were sharp, especially the first ones. Um, they would come
(01:52):
back down to earth with a lot of force behind them,
and if they happened to come back down to earth
via your boy, they could really mess you up, really well,
especially if you were a little kid whose skull hasn't
fused fully yet because you're not twenty years old. And um,
some kids suffered tremendously at the at the hands of
(02:14):
the lawn dart industry. That's right. And uh, you know,
the government comes into play here. Before we were born
in nine seventy and this was I think they debuted
in about nineteen fifty ish. Uh, the f d A
banned these things because they're like, these are really really dangerous,
and the manufacturer said, nah, they're not so dangerous. Let's
(02:37):
let's send our lobby in the toy lobby and get
them brought back to the market, because we got to
get these lawn darts out there. Nothing was more important,
right right then getting the lawn darts back to market,
getting the people their lawn darts and chuck. You lived
through the seventies. I lived through the seventies, although I
wasn't fully aware except towards the end there. But do
(02:59):
you know how dangerous something had to be to get
banned in the seventies, Yeah, I mean SNL had a
skit about dangerous toys exactly. So there was, um, there
was a push to get rid of lawn darts, but
the lawn dart industry, very surprisingly if you ask me,
pushed back and they struck a deal and said, look
(03:19):
how about this. We won't um, we won't market to
kids anymore. So lawn darts are officially not a toy.
Will sell them in the sporting goods section of like
department stores, and we'll put a warning on the box
about just how dangerous they are, because we didn't say chuck.
Lawn darts are the direct descendant of a weapon of
war called the plume bada. Um. I read this Mashable
(03:42):
article about these, and a plume bada is a lawn dart,
except a lawn dart that you used in war. Starting
with the ancient Greeks and about five all the way
up to the Middle Ages, people were using plume bata yeah,
to great effect. Right, And so the law and dart industry,
the recreation sporting goods industry, said we've got to get
(04:03):
these weapons of war back onto the market, and so
they struck a deal with the FDA, and the FDA said, fine,
you can. You can start manufacturing them again. That's right.
And that's what we got in on the second wave
of lawn darts in the seventies and eighties, when they said,
we won't sell them in the toy section at Target.
We'll sell them in the adjacent sporting goods section at Target.
(04:26):
Kids will never see them, they'll never know. It will
be like they don't even exist to and so um
they came back. And when they came back in that
second wave, that you and I were a part of.
They were bigger than ever, even like lawn darts were
a thing for a little while there. Um, but they
weren't any less dangerous than they were before, as we'll
see right after this message break. Well, now we're on
(04:51):
the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a
thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck should know? All right? Okay,
(05:16):
so Chuck in that second wave, um that really began
in Earnest in the eighties. Um, you could go to
the sporting goods section of your department store and you
might be there to buy like a volleyball set, but
ts for you, because including in that that volleyball set
is a set of lawn darts and you have to
buy them if you want that volleyball set. And that's
(05:38):
how they were sold in a lot of cases. Yeah,
I don't that part. I don't get Oh yeah, yeah,
Like why they would include another toy, completely different toy
in this volleyball set. I just I just don't get it. Well,
I think that they were saying, like, you, customer, have
shown that you have a desire for outdoor fun and
(05:59):
recreate in your backyard. Here's another game that we're going
to throw in that we apparently can't move on its own,
so we're just was that the deal? That's what I want.
We're gonna sweeten the pot on this volleyball net, Like
why are they giving away to him? That's what I
That's how I took it well, regardless of mental Floss
reported that David Snow, this aerospace engineer in California, did
(06:22):
such a thing in April of eighties seven, and I thought,
like any reasonable parent, like, oh boy, I should hide
these from my children, which he did in his garage,
but his children found them, started playing with him, and
very tragically, one hit his seven year old daughter in
the head, lodged in her brain, and three days later
(06:42):
she was declared clinically dead and removed from life support.
And it was a big, big tragedy and a big
big deal. And yeah, so David Snow happened to be
the kind of guy who like this would get to
anybody obviously losing your child like this, but I think,
you know, there's a significant portion of people who would
just be so dead inside that they just had no
(07:04):
driver resolved for much of anything. After that. He was
the opposite kind of guy. He went the opposite direction,
and he became a citizen activist, self taught lobbyist, self
funded lobbyist, who made it his mission to get lawn
darts banned again. But by this time, this was in
the seventies anymore. This is the regularra eighties and um.
(07:25):
Getting any any industry, your business, band, or or um
regulated more than it was before was not the easiest
thing in the world to do. So he approached the
Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had taken over from the
f d A, and he said, you gotta get rid
of lawn darts. First of all, look at what happened
to my daughter. And they say, well, we're really sorry
(07:46):
about what happened to your daughter, But if you look
at the numbers, man, they're just not that dangerous. They're
certainly not dangerous enough to enact an outright band again.
So sorry, no, we're not going to be doing that
anytime soon. That's right. But what nobody noticed at first
was that these numbers included they were just dart injuries, right,
(08:08):
So that included just throwing regular darts at a dartboard. Uh.
I mean, I think we've all had one of those
bounce off and sticking to our thigh. At one point,
it's like, nothing, no big deal. You're not going to
go to the hospital for an injury most likely from
a regular dartboard. No, and if you do, if you do,
you were making a really big deal out of this,
that's right. So they said, wait a minute, what if
(08:30):
we pull all those darts out, and what if we
actually just did a little research on lawn darts, because
that's what we're talking about, and uh, it was a
big deal. Um. Over eight years, lawn darts had sent
more than six thousand people to the emergency room, of
which were kids fifteen or younger, half of which were
ten or younger. And they were to the eyes, to
(08:53):
the ears, to the face, and the head for the
most part. Yeah, and again kids were particularly vulnerable well
because their skull is infused, so when a kid got
hit in the head with the lawn dart, it could
very easily penetrate the skull. And they found that this
was happening a lot more than anyone had ever realized before.
So now they had a problem on their hands. Now
they had real numbers that showed that actually, this thing
(09:16):
is bad enough to to ban. And they looked a
little further, and they commissioned to study that found that
the lawn dart industry was not following those rules that
it had agreed to from when the nineteen seventy band
was overturned. So they were marketing into toys, they were
selling it in the toy section, they weren't including warnings
(09:37):
on the box um and just completely going back on
on the agreement from before. So it started to look
more and more like, Okay, maybe we should ban these,
And again, Chuck, it's really hard not to step back
and be like, these are lawn darts, Yes, just ban them.
Who cares? But that was they would not do it.
They were very deliberate and in undertaking this ban on
(09:59):
lawn darts. But finally, thanks in no small part to
news the week that the vote on the band was
going to go through of a little girl in Tennessee
who had been put into a coma by lawn dart um,
they enacted the band two to one. They voted in
favor of the band. That's right, and and Reagan's America.
They actually banned a toy. And it's so funny to
(10:24):
think there would be such pushback over this one thing,
like yeah, you know what, let's just get rid of
the lawn darts, manufacture some other toys. It'll be fine.
But they had to have those lawn darts out there
in the hands of children. Uh. And you can still
make your own lawn darts. You can d I y
it if you uh, if you go to on the web.
There are companies in the United Kingdom that will sell
(10:46):
you the parts, which is a bit of a work around.
You can assemble them yourself. Uh. And you can still
go to tournaments if you there is a U s
l d a h lawn Dart Association, and you can
go to tournaments and bring out your old darts and
talk about the good old days of of no government oversight,
and you can you can pitch those things and imagine
(11:09):
drinks and beer and probably have a pretty good time. Yeah,
probably have a great time. Really just sticking in the
eye of the nanny state. Just yeah, do it safely though,
keep the kids away. Yeah. And I want to say
one thing. The reason that you can get lawn darts
is because that government banned banned the important sale, not
the possession. And this one dark company in particular from
(11:29):
the UK said, oh, well, that means if we just
send these things unassembled. They're really just lawn dart pieces,
and so ipso facto it's great legally speaking. Yeah, so
that's it for lawn darts, right, Chuck, that's it. Well,
Chuck said, that's it everybody. So that means that short
stuff is a way stuff you should know is production
(11:54):
of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts for
my heart radio? Is it the iHeart Radio app, Apple
pod casts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?
H m hm
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
This is short stuff getting up. Let's go look out above?
Is that what people shout? Look out above? It feels wrong.
I think I think they say look out below. But
that didn't make any sense, No neither one. It just
say how about just look out or heads up? No,
(00:26):
not heads up, you'll get a lawn dart in your eye.
Just move out of the immediate area quickly, duck and cover.
There you go. Yeah, I don't know if that would
help either, because Chuck, get this. We're talking about lawn darts,
and when they get a real wind up under them,
they strike with a force of around twenty three thousand
pounds per square. That's right. And we are talking about
(00:50):
lawn darts. And if you're like, what is a lawn dart?
That means you're probably younger than we are because we
grew up in this seventies and eighties these with these toys.
Uh that was It's basically a giant oversized dart like
you would throw it a dartboard with plastic fins, and
(01:10):
they're about what are they about a foot long or so? Dish? Yeah,
and the idea is that it was sort of like cornhole.
You would get on opposite sides of each other like
horse shoes, and you have these big hula hoops basically
you would put on the ground and you would throw
the lawn dart up in the air and try and
get it to come down and stick inside of that hoop. Yeah,
(01:31):
and you get some points for that. You just let
it arc gracefully back down into that hoop and that
was it, And there was a lot of fun. The
problem is it was a lot of danger as well
because these things, again a lot of them had like
a blunt end, but not all of them did. Some
were sharp, especially the first ones. Um, they would come
(01:52):
back down to earth with a lot of force behind them,
and if they happened to come back down to earth
via your boy, they could really mess you up, really well,
especially if you were a little kid whose skull hasn't
fused fully yet because you're not twenty years old. And um,
some kids suffered tremendously at the at the hands of
(02:14):
the lawn dart industry. That's right. And uh, you know,
the government comes into play here. Before we were born
in nine seventy and this was I think they debuted
in about nineteen fifty ish. Uh, the f d A
banned these things because they're like, these are really really dangerous,
and the manufacturer said, nah, they're not so dangerous. Let's
(02:37):
let's send our lobby in the toy lobby and get
them brought back to the market, because we got to
get these lawn darts out there. Nothing was more important,
right right then getting the lawn darts back to market,
getting the people their lawn darts and chuck. You lived
through the seventies. I lived through the seventies, although I
wasn't fully aware except towards the end there. But do
(02:59):
you know how dangerous something had to be to get
banned in the seventies, Yeah, I mean SNL had a
skit about dangerous toys exactly. So there was, um, there
was a push to get rid of lawn darts, but
the lawn dart industry, very surprisingly if you ask me,
pushed back and they struck a deal and said, look
(03:19):
how about this. We won't um, we won't market to
kids anymore. So lawn darts are officially not a toy.
Will sell them in the sporting goods section of like
department stores, and we'll put a warning on the box
about just how dangerous they are, because we didn't say chuck.
Lawn darts are the direct descendant of a weapon of
war called the plume bada. Um. I read this Mashable
(03:42):
article about these, and a plume bada is a lawn dart,
except a lawn dart that you used in war. Starting
with the ancient Greeks and about five all the way
up to the Middle Ages, people were using plume bata yeah,
to great effect. Right, And so the law and dart industry,
the recreation sporting goods industry, said we've got to get
(04:03):
these weapons of war back onto the market, and so
they struck a deal with the FDA, and the FDA said, fine,
you can. You can start manufacturing them again. That's right.
And that's what we got in on the second wave
of lawn darts in the seventies and eighties, when they said,
we won't sell them in the toy section at Target.
We'll sell them in the adjacent sporting goods section at Target.
(04:26):
Kids will never see them, they'll never know. It will
be like they don't even exist to and so um
they came back. And when they came back in that
second wave, that you and I were a part of.
They were bigger than ever, even like lawn darts were
a thing for a little while there. Um, but they
weren't any less dangerous than they were before, as we'll
see right after this message break. Well, now we're on
(04:51):
the road driving in your truck. Want to learn a
thing or two from Josh Damn Chuck should know? All right? Okay,
(05:16):
so Chuck in that second wave, um that really began
in Earnest in the eighties. Um, you could go to
the sporting goods section of your department store and you
might be there to buy like a volleyball set, but
ts for you, because including in that that volleyball set
is a set of lawn darts and you have to
buy them if you want that volleyball set. And that's
(05:38):
how they were sold in a lot of cases. Yeah,
I don't that part. I don't get Oh yeah, yeah,
Like why they would include another toy, completely different toy
in this volleyball set. I just I just don't get it. Well,
I think that they were saying, like, you, customer, have
shown that you have a desire for outdoor fun and
(05:59):
recreate in your backyard. Here's another game that we're going
to throw in that we apparently can't move on its own,
so we're just was that the deal? That's what I want.
We're gonna sweeten the pot on this volleyball net, Like
why are they giving away to him? That's what I
That's how I took it well, regardless of mental Floss
reported that David Snow, this aerospace engineer in California, did
(06:22):
such a thing in April of eighties seven, and I thought,
like any reasonable parent, like, oh boy, I should hide
these from my children, which he did in his garage,
but his children found them, started playing with him, and
very tragically, one hit his seven year old daughter in
the head, lodged in her brain, and three days later
(06:42):
she was declared clinically dead and removed from life support.
And it was a big, big tragedy and a big
big deal. And yeah, so David Snow happened to be
the kind of guy who like this would get to
anybody obviously losing your child like this, but I think,
you know, there's a significant portion of people who would
just be so dead inside that they just had no
(07:04):
driver resolved for much of anything. After that. He was
the opposite kind of guy. He went the opposite direction,
and he became a citizen activist, self taught lobbyist, self
funded lobbyist, who made it his mission to get lawn
darts banned again. But by this time, this was in
the seventies anymore. This is the regularra eighties and um.
(07:25):
Getting any any industry, your business, band, or or um
regulated more than it was before was not the easiest
thing in the world to do. So he approached the
Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had taken over from the
f d A, and he said, you gotta get rid
of lawn darts. First of all, look at what happened
to my daughter. And they say, well, we're really sorry
(07:46):
about what happened to your daughter, But if you look
at the numbers, man, they're just not that dangerous. They're
certainly not dangerous enough to enact an outright band again.
So sorry, no, we're not going to be doing that
anytime soon. That's right. But what nobody noticed at first
was that these numbers included they were just dart injuries, right,
(08:08):
So that included just throwing regular darts at a dartboard. Uh.
I mean, I think we've all had one of those
bounce off and sticking to our thigh. At one point,
it's like, nothing, no big deal. You're not going to
go to the hospital for an injury most likely from
a regular dartboard. No, and if you do, if you do,
you were making a really big deal out of this,
that's right. So they said, wait a minute, what if
(08:30):
we pull all those darts out, and what if we
actually just did a little research on lawn darts, because
that's what we're talking about, and uh, it was a
big deal. Um. Over eight years, lawn darts had sent
more than six thousand people to the emergency room, of
which were kids fifteen or younger, half of which were
ten or younger. And they were to the eyes, to
(08:53):
the ears, to the face, and the head for the
most part. Yeah, and again kids were particularly vulnerable well
because their skull is infused, so when a kid got
hit in the head with the lawn dart, it could
very easily penetrate the skull. And they found that this
was happening a lot more than anyone had ever realized before.
So now they had a problem on their hands. Now
they had real numbers that showed that actually, this thing
(09:16):
is bad enough to to ban. And they looked a
little further, and they commissioned to study that found that
the lawn dart industry was not following those rules that
it had agreed to from when the nineteen seventy band
was overturned. So they were marketing into toys, they were
selling it in the toy section, they weren't including warnings
(09:37):
on the box um and just completely going back on
on the agreement from before. So it started to look
more and more like, Okay, maybe we should ban these,
And again, Chuck, it's really hard not to step back
and be like, these are lawn darts, Yes, just ban them.
Who cares? But that was they would not do it.
They were very deliberate and in undertaking this ban on
(09:59):
lawn darts. But finally, thanks in no small part to
news the week that the vote on the band was
going to go through of a little girl in Tennessee
who had been put into a coma by lawn dart um,
they enacted the band two to one. They voted in
favor of the band. That's right, and and Reagan's America.
They actually banned a toy. And it's so funny to
(10:24):
think there would be such pushback over this one thing,
like yeah, you know what, let's just get rid of
the lawn darts, manufacture some other toys. It'll be fine.
But they had to have those lawn darts out there
in the hands of children. Uh. And you can still
make your own lawn darts. You can d I y
it if you uh, if you go to on the web.
There are companies in the United Kingdom that will sell
(10:46):
you the parts, which is a bit of a work around.
You can assemble them yourself. Uh. And you can still
go to tournaments if you there is a U s
l d a h lawn Dart Association, and you can
go to tournaments and bring out your old darts and
talk about the good old days of of no government oversight,
and you can you can pitch those things and imagine
(11:09):
drinks and beer and probably have a pretty good time. Yeah,
probably have a great time. Really just sticking in the
eye of the nanny state. Just yeah, do it safely though,
keep the kids away. Yeah. And I want to say
one thing. The reason that you can get lawn darts
is because that government banned banned the important sale, not
the possession. And this one dark company in particular from
(11:29):
the UK said, oh, well, that means if we just
send these things unassembled. They're really just lawn dart pieces,
and so ipso facto it's great legally speaking. Yeah, so
that's it for lawn darts, right, Chuck, that's it. Well,
Chuck said, that's it everybody. So that means that short
stuff is a way stuff you should know is production
(11:54):
of iHeart Radios. How stuff works for more podcasts for
my heart radio? Is it the iHeart Radio app, Apple
pod casts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows?
H m hm
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