We used carboard to slide down a grassy hill, like a sled. NOT SAFE!
Also, I caught a giant toad. Bigger than a baseball.
We made lego vostok capsules for frogs. Many test flights ended in disaster.
Catching crawdads in the creek.
Playing wall ball (aka buns up, butts up, etc) at school during recess, lunch, and before and after classes.
We called it “off the wall”
Bugging the babysitter to play board games with you.
Football with jumpers for goalposts and no clear consensus on how high the invisible crossbar was.
Car journeys with no air conditioning and overflow luggage making a barrier between you and your sibling on the back row.
The smug feeling of superiority when the head teacher banned a hobby you never played, compared with the self-righteous indignation when they banned a hobby you loved.
Running out to the corner shop every Wednesday for the copy of the Beano the owner kept back for you.
Brick and board bike ramps.
Tarzan swinging on weeping willows.
Clothespin and starwars card (duplicates only) bike spoke motor sound.
Going to granparents in the 70s and finding dad’s toys from the 40s.
Tennis ball baseball in the street using a manhole cover as home plate, designated trees as foul posts, and rooftops as out-of-the-park home runs.
One, two, three… NOT IT!!
Want me to draw a map with my finger on your hand of where I went to camp?.. and here’s the lake!
My mom said I Can’t GeT WET!!
Oh, yeah? Well you’re gonna pay the doctor bill!
Telling kids to stay out of your yard and then standing guard at the property line.
Becoming blood brothers by picking a knee or elbow scab then pressing them together.
Childhood summers were the best! I spent most of them up trees with a book and a sandwich. When I climbed back down, I jumped off the dock into the lake or sat on the dock and caught sunfish–then let them go. There were tons of rocks around the shoreline, so it was fun to turn them over and find crawfish. To this day I have a scar on my thumb from the biggest crawfish I ever caught.
My best friend and I used to hunt for returnable bottles, then turn them into cash to spend on penny candy–which, at that time, really was a penny. Often you could get “two-fers” and “three-ers” as well. There were licorice whips, tiny tin frying pans with yellow glup in the middle that looked (but didn’t taste) like an egg; squirrel nut zippers, Mary Janes, Mint Julips, cherry drops, chocolate babies, pixie stix, tiny marshmallow “ice cream” cones in actual miniature ice cream cones, Bonomo taffies, “frenchies (white nougat with chunks of red and jelly gumdroppy stuff in them),” spice drops, caramels, fireballs, little “Coke” bottles made of wax with sweet goo in them, and big red wax lips. If you had .25, you could eat a LOT of candy.
I spent many weekends at my grandparents’ house, and played for hours on the shore of the lake, catching tadpoles and newts (and letting them go). I also liked climbing the pitchy pines there, and came home covered in black pitch. My grandmother would give me money to buy her cigarettes at the little store/post office (back then, no one cared if kids bought cigs–everyone either thought they were for an adult or just minded their own business), with enough money left over for me to buy myself a little Table Talk cherry pie.
My grandfather used to let me take his old wooden kayak out on the lake, and I’d take a book and either drift, or paddle my way up an imaginary Amazon for adventures with the “natives” (on this lake it was strictly ducks, loons, fish and the occasional great blue heron).
The Fourth of July was a real celebration in my little town–complete with a parade, a fair that lasted three days (carousel, spinning swings, bumper cars, games of chance, all kinds of gooey, sticky, fatty fair foods, etc.), and fireworks over the lake at night. It was so much fun to sit with my family and all my friends and neighbors all around on blankets, swatting mosquitos and going “Ooooooo!” and “Ahhhhh!” at all the fireworks.
Summers were mainly spent outdoors playing, and suppertime was about the same time for everyone. You came running when you heard your mom call out “Supperrrrrrrr!” And if it was a really hot and sticky night, you’d come home to find that your mom had apparently lost her mind and made strawberry shortcake for supper as it was “too hot to cook!”
It was a great time to be a kid.
My friends and I felt that we had built the mother of all treehouses.
Running home from school to catch The Three Stooges.
Buying hot dogs to roast on sticks over the fire we made outside the treehouse, and drinking gallons of rootbeer.
Born in 1960, one of the best times to be a kid.
Walking three blocks to the candy store, where we could buy comics, Bazooka bubble gum, baseball cards, and, if I had enough money, a model to build. Even better we had two to choose from within a few blocks - Jack’s and the place we called “The Candy Store Next to Constatine’s”, Constatine’s being a small deli.
Playing ping pong at the junior high which was open for the summer.
Playing dodgeball there - dodgeball being the only sport I was good at.
Building a truck out of wood with my friend Joel. We actually finished this one, and took it seven blocks to a park to have lunch.
Best of all, lazy summer days where I could just read and go to the library if I ran out of books.
You might be interested in viewing http://memoryglands.com/
Neighborhood “Steal the Flag” game
Friendship Rings.
Playing “Doctor” and “Postman.”
Riding bikes in the old field out back, trying to get enough momentum to make it up the other bank of the dried up canal.
4-H
Getting indoctrinated into the boy’s club while having a light shined in my eyes for 10 minutes.
Making forts on the hayloft.
Raising too many gerbils.
Spin the Statue - like the “Statues” game above, only the salesperson, could spin the statues, and the statue had to say how fast they wanted to be spun (ketchup = slow, mustard = medium, pepper = fast)
All sorts of elaborate Hot Wheels races and competitions, include double elimination knockout contests with my brother
Army man fights. We would set up out men as opposing armies and get behind them and throw things at the other side to take them out, starting small, like a marble, and eventually big, like a baseball. If the last general was taken out, 5 men had to be sacrificed for a new one.
blankets and lawn furniture and cardboard box forts
swimming in the neighbors pool, especially rafts and “pearl” diving to search for the oyster with the black pearl in it.
smurfs. We built elaborate structures for them with wooden blocks, lincoln logs, and other similar toys. Using the same we also built boats for army men and put them in the pool for naval battles. With smurfs we had “shake wars” by setting them up on a table and vibrating the table with a leg underneath. If they fell over, they were dead.
Star Wars figures and figures from most other science fiction movie or TV show from the 70s and early 1980s
Recreating the Mesozoic in the sandbox. Especially fun was lugging a bucket of water out to it and creating temporary lakes. Also fun was digging tunnels in the wet sand.
Scratch and sniff stickers.
Bally Basic video games, and much later the Commodore 64 and games like M.U.L.E. and Zork.
Skating on rough asphalt, with skates that needed a key.
The twang-slap of a screen door.
Going to the movies, all the neighborhood kids would cram into the back seat of the car. One parent would drop us off, another would pick us up. A quarter for the movie, coke and popcorn.
Plunging your hand into ice cold water to pull a bottle of pop out of the old time pop machines, and using the bottle opener on the side to pop metal cap off the glass bottle.
Walking barefoot through prickly grass at the beach.
The jolt when your friend jumped off the see-saw and you hit the ground - hard.
45’s
Too big for us kids. Dad let us use 22 LR
Rushing home from school to watch Video Hits (Canadians will get this)
Wig Wags (delicious, discontinued Willy Wonka chocolate bar)
Borrowing books from the bookmobile.
Fishing with granddad.
Tee-ball
The cable box where you selected channels by moving a sliding plastic tab across the front of the box.Showbiz Pizza Place (the company eventually merged with Chuck E. Cheese)
Pulling each other’s orange safety flags on our bikes and letting go, thwacking the rider. Man, that hurt.
Crepe papering our bikes for the 4th of July parade.
Playing pickle.
Building toad houses with bricks for my dear little toad friends.
Dancing in front of the record player, making the needle jump, until my dad yelled “Damn it”.
Playing Twister!
I saw some mentions here of slingshots. Those were not popular where I grew up. I always saw them in Dennis the Menace and the like and wondered if anyone really used those. The once or twice I actually tried one, I just wasn’t impressed.
Opening the new School books and smelling them.
We made our own with just our thumb, forefinger, and a thick rubberband. The Y shaped stick ones are much harder to aim, imho. Our ammo was big paper clips broke in half.
After Bible Studies one week, I made a real sling, like Davy and GoliBoy. Now, THOSE things allowed for some precision, let me tell ya. Unless you were a clutz. Then, you hurt yourself a lot, also breaking things behind and to the side of you.