The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

Even as a (nominal) adult, this coronavirus thing is hard to get my arms around – face masks in public, no haircuts, avoiding other people, businesses and schools closed. I can’t imagine how confusing it must be for children. As kids in the ’60s and ’70s we had our share of bogeyman scares, but those all seem rather silly now by comparison to COVID-19. 

Children of my era were conditioned to believe that quicksand was a major threat to our health and safety. It didn’t matter whether you lived in the Wild West or Midtown Manhattan, that sticky substance was only a step or two away, ready to swallow you whole and leave no trace. It is a well-researched fact that every television show and movie produced between 1962 and 1972 had at least one quicksand scene. Okay, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but “rescue from quicksand” was a dominant trope of the era. From Oscar-winner “Lawrence of Arabia” to “Gilligan’s Island,” “Gunsmoke” to “Bonanza” to “Lassie,” quicksand was the lazy plot device of choice for a generation of screenwriters. 

The problem is, there is no such thing as quicksand, at least not in the way Hollywood depicted it. When sand becomes highly saturated with water, it does indeed take on the properties of a liquid, and heavy objects will sink into it. People, on the other hand, are significantly less dense (with maybe the exception of the screenwriters) than sand, so a person can’t sink into quicksand and drown. It might be possible to become temporarily stuck up to one’s knees or waist, but even that is a rather unlikely and easily overcome scenario. 

The apex, such as it was, of the quicksand trope came in 1967 when “The Lucy Show,” set in New York, found a way to incorporate a quicksand scene in an episode called “Lucy Gets Jack Benny’s Account.” The setup was that to win the account, Lucy had to navigate Benny’s extravagantly booby-trapped vault, which included a quicksand pit.

The only trope of that era which was arguably more common than quicksand was rabies. Now, first of all, rabies is a very real and very dangerous disease. At the time, 40 to 50 people were still dying from it each year in the United States, even though a vaccine had been invented 80 years earlier. Still, the use of rabies as a plot device far exceeded its reality as a health threat. “Old Yeller,” “To Kill A Mockingbird,” “The Fox and the Hound” and “Rage” on the silver screen, as well as “Bonanza,” “Gunsmoke,” “Wagon Train,” “The Rifleman,” “Hawaii Five-0” and “Little House on the Prairie” all featured scenes or episodes in which rabies plays a vital role. Television Westerns, in particular, seemed to embrace it, likely because there was no effective treatment in the era the shows were set, and it allowed the writers to explore people contemplating their deaths in a way that shootouts and quicksand drownings couldn’t. 

The “Bonanza” episode, “A Time To Die,” was memorably chilling: A female friend of Ben’s was bitten by a rabid wolf and forced to face her mortality as the painful symptoms began to manifest themselves. I’m not going to lie; I avoided going anywhere near our family dog for about a month after watching that episode, and I still have a bit more concern over the disease than is completely rational. 

Today, between one and three people die in the United States each year from rabies. The vaccine protocol has become simpler and more effective, and a treatment that can be administered even after the victim is symptomatic has shown some (albeit mixed) promise.

What recurring threats do you remember from the TV and movies of your childhood? Do any of them impact the way you think about things today?