Days that seemed endless and doing 10 different things during each one. Chores at home, playing army down Tommys yard, riding our bikes to little league practice, lunch and a few more chores, an hour playing in the river, basketball at the playground, picking on some kids from the next community over and a friendly game of pick-up from that, dinner and the rest of the chores and then all the kids gathering under one of our few streetlights to catch moths and play hide-and-go-seek. And that was a slow day.
When a neighborhood kid started giving my sister rides on his bike, sneaking up with a “Just Married” sign and attaching it as they took off. Then alerting all the other kids in the hood. (For a second I thought the humiliated kid was going to run me over.)
The Op hasn’t posted in a long time. I wonder if he will he this.
The teacher handing out papers and every student picking theirs up to smell it.
Neighborhood games of man hunt.
Snowbanks so deep that we built tunnels you could walk through.
Kicking the lamp posts to make the lights go out.
Schoolhouse rock!
Prank phone calls.
The Midnight Special.
Finishing gathering eggs quickly enough to catch the Stooges, or starting late enough to watch the Little Rascals. Seeing both was out of the question.
Eggs without shells.
Captain Crunch with Crunchberries.
Box Scores in the newspaper
Singing “We three kings of orient are trying to smoke a Tampa cigar” and getting hollered at by the Sunday school teacher.
The syndicated Loony Tunes from 7:30-8 followed by the networks from 8:30-9:30.
Rita Moreno yelling, “Hey you guuuuuuuuyyyyyysssss!”
Stores with bare wooden floors that creaked
Roadside lamps that looked like cartoon bombs (spheres with a little cylinder at the top) before the flashing electrical things took over
Appliances that say “Universal” indicating they can be used with AC or DC
Emergency vehicles with a single rotating light on the middle of the roof and a motor-driven siren
Car windshields with a seam in the middle
Car vent windows you could angle outward to catch a blast of air
…playing with neighbor children on large scrap pile at street’s dead end until deemed unsafe by parents
… snow skiing, using the rope tow
… school class singing “Puff the Magic Dragon” and various Simon & Garfunkel (the teachers liked folk pop)
… not being able to watch after-school shows because dad was watching Watergate (whatever the hell that was)
…friends and I roleplaying the assigned characters of various TV shows while at school
…hunting for crawdads in the local park stream
…passing time with friends in park’s cement tubes
… communicating with friends via walkie talkie using the lingo
…sending 25 cents in to address on back of cereal box for a complete set of Freakies miniatures
… playing dodge ball in a long dark hallway with glow-in-the-dark Nerf ball
… playing haunted house with the older children scaring the young ones going through it
… playing Atari 2600 in neighbor’s den
…sharing collected Farah Fawcett photos cutout from magazines, also KISS memorabilia
… going to Disneyland with family in a large RV, riding the Matterhorn and Space Mountain
… the bicentennial (1976), wearing red white and blue, going to parades and exhibits
… games of “football” played on school desk top with folded paper
… also games of “tank battle” played with sheet of paper and pencil
… playing primitive grognard wargame with chess pieces flicked with finger to knock over other chess pieces arranged on patterned area rug
… playing stacks of 45’s on the record player, listening to 8-track tape in the car
Picking up a couple packs of Luckys for Dad at the store.
Collecting empty pop bottles around the school grounds and cashing them in for penny candies.
If we really struck it rich, we could afford a (cheap) bottle of pop - Big Red was a fav.
It was Toronto Rocks first at 4 pm, then Video Hits at 4:30 and Flipside (more obscure new wave, IIRC) at 5 pm.
Waking up super early on Saturday morning to watch “Banana Splits”.
When the park got a big new wooden play structure and a zip-line type thing (metal ring on a track between two platforms.)
Dickie Dee ice cream - hearing the bells and chasing down the guy with the freezer on the bicycle.
Striped stretchy tube tops in the summer. Also those sundresses with the stretchy fabric on the chest and thin ties on the shoulders.
Tahiti Treat.
Playing in those abandoned refrigerators. Ah, good times.
Somewhere one of my friends still has the shotgun we found wrapped in a bunch of rags in the town dump. My bet was always that there was a body on it somewhere but he (as of last year) still uses it for hunting. Which brings me to bicycles - all of ours were pieced together from odds and ends we found. We had a FANTASTIC dump (the city folks used it) and the hours of enjoyment it provided was almost endless.
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Playing football (soccer) with my younger brother in the garden until sunset on summer days. We lived literally on the edge of town so the countryside almost completely surrounded our house. Smells of flowers and grass, a thousand shades of green all around. Swarms of gnats at dusk.
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Hitting the bull’s eye with my toy pistol without even aiming (happenend only once :D).
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Running towards, then sliding on a long patch of ice in rapid succession with my classmates until one of fell down and we all piled on top of each other.
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Getting an Atari 2600 at Christmas (1982?). Pac-Man, Yars’ Revenge, Space Invaders, Defender, Spider-Man, Vanguard, Asteroids, Centipede, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back and the one I never got: Haunted House :mad:.
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Playmobil toys like the Pirate Ship (http://pictures.todocoleccion.net/tc/2010/09/11/21453933.jpg), Masters of the Universe Mattel action figures and of course Kenner Star Wars action figures.
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TV that had no remote. You had to get up to change the channel (we had a dozen of them at most, half of which we never watched). Getting a black and white one for three weeks when ours was broken (it sucked).
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Watching music videos and documentaries at my grandmother’s house on Saturday afternoons.
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Freaking each other out with horror movies that none of us had watched. Basically improvising with the few pictures we’d seen or, rarely, what someone’s older brother had said.
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Big catalogues of VHS tapes with no pictures from the only video rental shop in my medium-sized home town. We based our choice on hearsay, posters and sometimes purely on the title/genre combo.
-Hearing that new Beatles song on the radio for the first time.
-Driving 24 hours straight with the parents to go see family for 5 days and then turning back and going home in 24 hours (or less!)
-Toothpicks soaked in cinnamon oil
-Watching that new Star Trek episode on the black and white upstairs
-Changing TV channels and adjusting the antenna for dad
-Seeing and gawking at 1st gen hippies
-Watching Fat Albert, the Jackson Five and Speed Racer cartoons
When “PAY TV” was free for a week. Got to watch movies on First Choice and Superchannel and 24 hours of videos on MuchMusic. Was very disappointed when I stayed up for 24 hours straight watching MuchMusic only to realize that it was on a programming loop (same show every few hours.)
Sticker collections.
Friendship pins - arranging beads on safety pins and putting them on your shoelaces. My Cabbage Patch Kid still has one.
Going to the Roller Rink and trying to step on the circles of light when they turned on the disco ball.
Doing “hock-offs” - hanging upside-down from the back of your knees on the monkey bars and swinging yourself until you do a flip and land on your feet.
Lists of MIAs on the elementary school bulletin board
Girls (mostly, I knew very few boys who did) buying the MIA pins and bracelets
Motorcycle rallies at the local park that my dad felt very perfectly fine bringing his two elementary school age boys to. And Dad was a total suit, too. Worked at CF Braun as an engineer. We had to both sit behind him on his bike. Lots of hippies, lots of old guys, jiggly chicks, music, hot dogs, very interesting things being sold on tables…
Slow cooking brisket starting from the day before the actual gathering at the neighbourhood park.
Very odd gelatin dishes. Gelatin was for more than just dessert back in the 60s/70s
Perfect flavor of Orange Crush in bottles, super duper ice cold from the bucket all the drinks were in
That little bit of salty taste on my bottle of Orange Crush because they mixed in salt with the ice and water in that bucket. My parents and their buds liked their beers to be really cold. Sodas all mixed in with the alcoholic drinks was no big deal.
Buying nine cents of penny candy and then going back in the store to get the one cent left over. If I bought all ten at once, I got charged eleven cents. Tax. The store keeper didn’t mind. I only had a dime, you see.
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Pretending different rooms of my home were different planets.
Ice pops (clear plastic tubes of frozen vaguely fruit-flavoured water).
Buying a new Star Wars figure every three weeks.
Imagining that the lawn was some sort of malevolent organism with small green tentacles that would drag me into its mouth, the bare patch of soil under my sister’s swing.
An old derelict farm house that my friend Shaun claimed had mammoths living in it.
Eating at the diners inside of stores like Woolworths, K-Mart, and (I think) Sears.
I know Sears had popcorn and Ice-ees (or Slurp-ees)
Spending a good portion of a Sat afternoon at Sears, getting all sorts of stuff. From replacing parts of the fence, to buying a new water heater, and clothing, and even trying out some new fangled food. Plus, the toy section had ROCKETS!
Lusting after all the WAY COOL! camera stuff in the Sears, Wards, and JC Penneys camera catalogs.
JC Penneys had purdier ladies in their catalog’s undies section (curious boys looked, try and stop 'em!) than the other two catalogs.
Sonic!
Not to derail the thread, but unless the water were 165 F or higher (in which case it would cause severe scalding,) would it really prevent infection by germs?
Finding a mostly water-logged log in a mountain lake and paddling around on it.
Sliding down the stairs in a sleeping bag.
Playing with space Lego.
Playing the board game Axis & Allies.
Fishing for crawdads at Lake Tahoe.
Finding an old, abandoned tree house in the woods and making it a fort.
Building model rockets.
Baseball cards.
Sitting on the lifeguard stand to watch the fireworks on the 4th of July.