Recollection of things past helps a generation anchor a sense of self.

Lawn darts, a dangerous toy, once enabled a popular game.

Across the last half-century, we have moved to limit risk.

Over-supervision extracts a cost in gumption.

On a website that catered to the appetite for nostalgia, a couple dozen 1960s iconic artifacts appeared. Among them was an avocado-colored commode, a half-empty bottle of extra-strength Vicks Formula 44 cough medicine (extra strength because it contained a morphine derivative), a photo of a row of women at the salon poaching under conehead-shaped hair dryers, Twiggy in a flowered dress, a Mickey Mouse watch, a mood ring, and a dial-it-yourself Princess telephone, also appearing in a shade of “moss green” that closely matched the avocado toilet seat.

These photos are meant to transport the over-65 cohort instantly. Memory is time-travel. Memory is also about belonging and exclusion and what we have gained and lost. The generations that came after will scarcely remember or regard these once ultra-familiar everyday things. Generations X, Millennials, and generations Z, Alpha, and Beta will have no recollection. But Baby Boomers will have incorporated the collective recollection into their identities, and, sharing the backward look, their secured sense of themselves.

One featured object proved especially eye-catching and memorable; this one was a toy and the game it enabled: lawn darts, or “Jarts.”

Sometimes called “yard darts,” the game depended on an American postwar socio-demographic phenomenon: the explosive growth of suburbs. Before, city dwellers lived in apartments or in typically smaller houses packed together. The lawn, formerly a luxury and an emblem of........

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