Furthermore, in the early 1970's, I asked the school if I could get a school color football helmet. It was before bicycle helmets were available. They said absolutely not, unless you join the football team. I was too damn skinny to play football.
Bell had a the first bicycle helmet, but it was five hundred dollars ($500.00).
I was just a kid, but when I tried to make a case of it, some old lady shouted me down and said "there's children starving in Africa! For five hundred dollars each, we could feed all the starving children in Africa!'
So everyone wrote out a check for $500.00 (pick any number, doesn't have to be the cost of a mortgage on a hemet factory.) and sent it off to Africa.
The begging and pleading we had to put up to get bicycle helmets when we were kids.
Kids today don't realize how lucky they are to have bicycle helmets.