A couple of things I missed on my first post…
My brother and I had a little model steam engine. You lit a small block of fuel and put it somewhere? that heated up the water in a little boiler that made the wheel spin.
Standing up in the front seat of our Dad’s car with our heads out the sunroof of playing tank commander. We were only allowed to do this on the road to the cottage.
I flew by myself from Atlanta to Daytona Beach, FL two days before my fourth birthday. Tickets were expensive!
I had forgotten about chemistry set I had as a kid (I’m 52). In addition to the compounds mentioned upthread, mine had sodium ferrocyanide.
When I was around six, the local National Guard Armory had a sort of ‘open house’. One of the most popular attractions was a tank, which they let everyone climb into for a look. Then, they offered rides on it. Kids clung to the outside of the tank as it clambored around the hilly range. Two of those kids were me and my four-year-old brother. I remember being scared, trying to hold on to whatever makeshift handles we could find. But it was the kind of ‘managed’ scary you get on amusement park rides - as soon as it was over, we all wanted to go again! When I thought back on it years later, I found it hard to believe my memory that it actually happened (a six-year-old’s memory can be faulty). But my older brother has pictures he took that day. And yes, both of our parents were present and OK with it.
TruCelt, I’m 42, and if I ride with my mom, she still throws out her arm to save me during sudden braking. And I’ve worn my seatbelt religiously since getting my learners permit at 15!
Alcohol and the driving culture have both certainly changed since I was a pup. When I was a kid, the county-run package store sold draught beer in a convenient waxed cardboard quart carton. At the drive through window! Very handy for my father! (Who was actually crazy-protective of us kids, allowing for those changes in culture over the past few decades. We had to wear our life jackets on the boat, and sit down in the back of the truck, and wear a helmet when the neighbor took us for a spin on his motorcycle. Shoot, Daddy even rigged up ear protectors for me, with a hardhat and some adult-size headphones, because the noise from shooting or going to the drag races made me cry.) But he had no problem letting me sit in his lap and steer when we were out in the country, or taking me to the bar at the fishing lodge.
And speaking of bars, after my father died, my mom dated a guy who worked construction for a while. One summer, the construction company rented out a mountain lodge for a big celebration at the end of a project. Families were expected and welcome, so JD invited my mom and us kids. Two full days of horseback riding and swimming and open bar, with kids wandering in and out of the smoky barroom. There’s no doubt in my mind that several of my older brother’s Shirley Temples were actually sloe gin fizzes, but I had a far more nefarious plan: after everyone was pretty well toasted, I “casually” mentioned to one of the guys that my 12th birthday was the following week. I knew perfectly well that Mr. Terry didn’t have much money to just throw around, but he was such a sweet man. And he did exactly what I expected: he gave me a more-than-nice gift (I still have that $2 bill) and then hoisted me (way) up on his shoulder, started singing Happy Birthday, and insisted that all those freshly-paid drunks give me a birthday gift. My mother was appalled, but how could she politely make me return those generously-offered gifts? (I don’t think she ever realized that I hauled in over 300 bucks! When a six-foot-eight, 300 pound redhead insists you give a little girl a gift, most people are generous!)
Does anyone remember what size light bulb you were supposed to use in a Kenner EZ Bake oven? I don’t think most of the girls (or their parents) took the trouble to figure it out, or bothered to run out and get one when they had a perfectly good 100-watt bulb handy.
We still have actual candles on our Christmas tree (and many of my German friends do), and I won’t have it any other way. You can be in the same room, you know? If you set them up properly, the danger of burning anything really is neglegible.
In the late 60s on an Air Canada flight, the pilot sat me in his lap and let me hold the contols above where he was holding them.
Us kids rode in the back of my dad’s pickup truck with the stuff in the '70s. It was fun to stand up and stick your head above the cab - until dad pounded on the window because we were blocking his rear view.
Leaning out of the back window of my mom’s LTD wagon playing tailgunner charlie and having other drivers shoot back at me lol.
I recall being 8 or so and getting a huge (to me at the time) lockback knife with a 4 inch blade, from my grandpa; I took it everywhere with me, including school, church, the store, friends’ houses, etc. A couple weeks ago, a kid was suspended from my 9 year-old daughter’s school for bringing a pocketknife to class, and a note was sent out to the parents to reassure us that our kids are in a safe, respectful environment, yadda yadda.
My brother and I built a BMX track in a vacant field over a couple summers, with some wicked jumps - of course, no helmets. Aside from the inherent danger of the track, we had to watch out for rattlesnakes - but that’s why my bro brought his .22.
Speaking of his .22 - he decided to make blanks one day, by removing the bullets from some .22 cartridges, and replacing them with paper wadding, crimped down. He fired one on accident in our house (a very old converted barnhouse), and the wadding punched a hole clear through the plaster, lathing, and termite eaten clapboard - you could see daylight through it. About 6 inches from my head, since I was sitting across from him, against the wall at the time.
My grandpa had an ancient table saw - no safety mechanisms, just a table with a saw-blade in, and an old duct-taped toggle switch. My brother and I would make wooden swords with it, and beat the crap out of each other.
When I was a kid, my dad would catch air in his '63 Chevy pickup, when going over a raised railroad crossing, just to get a laugh out of me. I swear when we landed it felt like my spine was a couple inches shorter.
We used to make flamethrowers out of Aquanet cans. We also improvised napalm by mixing some kerosene with detergent - that crap was hard to put out.
Between the stunts, knives, guns, power tools, improvised ordnance, etc. it’s a miracle I survived my childhood.
Just so this doesn’t sound far too fun, and fail to dissuade the 12-year old in the OP, on the flip side, I got the crap beat out of me regularly. Got the belt from both my dad and grandpa on several ocassions - if I was really bad, my dad would threaten me with the buckle end, but he never followed through (wussy!).
When I was at Grandma’s, and I acted up (or as my Grandma would put it “gettin’ fussy”, as in “don’t go gettin’ fussy on me, or you gonna get it’!”), she’d make me go grab a branch from her apricot tree in the backyard, strip all the leaves off, and come back in. More often than not, I was so terrified when I got back in, that she’d let it slide, but she let me have it a couple times, and it was no freakin’ fun. Plus, if I got caught swearing - Lava soap went right in the mouth.
You kids don’t know how good you got it, with all these “child protection laws” and this concept of “human decency” in parenting.
True, but some parts of Azeroth are breathtaking and the emotional high of killing a Lich King for the first time after 3 months of trying was amazing 
I grew up in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. When I was 11 or so, my friends and I went to the forest outside the city (hitched a ride on the freight train there and back), and found an unexploded mortar round from WWII. I brought it home and cleaned it, when parents came home from work they found it. Hilarity ensued. Thank God the explosives in that thing were probably completely degraded.
Or, of course, the fond memories of gathering live rounds from WWII (there were literally millions of them still in the ground in countryside) and throwing them in a firepit, then dropping on the ground immediately and waiting for the bang bang bang and bullets whizzing around. That was at the 11 or so age as well.
Born in 1972. We had wars on our street, where the kids would form two teams and build forts, then attack each other. We’d set up dangerous traps (rocks balanced on a piece of wood to tip down on the other guys, tree branches bent back and tied with cactus in them to whap the other guys.) We made home-made throwing stars out of soup can lids.
I remember one fort we built where we managed to make a roof over a corner of the walled-in yard where it was up against the house. We used scrap wood for this, with old nails sticking out of it and all. We put a turret on top, which was the gutted remains of that family’s old dryer–they’d just gotten a new one. I was in the turret when the other team attacked, throwing rocks and bricks. Our roof caved in and the turret fell, but not before I could stand up and grab onto the only thing available–the roof of the house. I had to scoot myself down along the roof to where a landscaping wall was to drop down onto, all the while being pelted with rocks and broken bricks.
Our goal in these wars was absolutely 100% to injure the other team as much as possible. Our parents didn’t care.
Johnny, do you like movies about gladiators?
My husband got a real power drill (small, but still) when he was around three or four for Christmas one year. He promptly put it to use, drilling a hole in the wall.
In 1976, I was at my best friend’s house for her 16th birthday party. At the end of the party, her dad loaded us all in the back of his pickup truck and drove us around town… with most of us sitting up on the edge of the bed! We were sooooo lucky!
At 8 my dad gave me firecrackers. We lived in France. When I ran out he gave me money so I could go to the store and buy more. They were sold at a toy store… the owner was a round old Santy Claus looking man who laughed and said have fun.
Many of the posts bring back memories but my favorite is my earliest memory. We lived in a tiny little house in front of a small woods. To the west of our house they were just starting to build what eventually became a lumber store and there was a large - higher than our house - pile of dirt. On the other side of the woods was a gas station with a small convenice store. My mother used to send me to the store to pick up her cigarettes and I was allowed to buy a coke when I went. She sent me because she was busy with my baby brother which means that at the time I was 4.
Apparently my preferred route was over the top of the hill of dirt and sliding down the back to the woods. I was forbidden to take this route to return home after the day she had to shake the dirt out of her cigarettes.
1963, Commonwealth Day, Sydney Australia. The whole street (well, the kids in it) built the most awesomest, biggest, fantastic bonfire ever on the empty block next door to the Masons. We dragged dead tree branches, scrunched newspaper, carried buckets of wood offcuts and it was high.
We had a half day off school, so we had all afternoon to build this most wonderful bonfire and when evening came, we lit it. The adults were kind of hanging around but they were smoking cigarettes and complaining about the government, so the kids lit the bonfire and we lit all the crackers, double bungers and all. And we sent up the skyrockets and hammered catherine wheels onto the fence post.
It was a cold night so we got closer and closer to the bonfire and threw more wood and stuff on to keep it going.
A most memorable Commonwealth Day and the next day, when the pall of smoke still hung around for hours, we went hunting for those skyrocket sticks. I didn’t find any (wonder where they all ended up?) but I did see quite a few letterboxes which had been demolished by the insertion of lit crackers by those rotten kids in Farrington Parade.
Like a lot of kids in the 70’s, we were allowed to run around outdoors till the street lights came on (we did have to tell Mom the general direction in which we were headed, but beyond that we were free to chase butterflies, fight, ride stolen shopping carts down a rocky hill, or play with the display toys at the local dime store.) We also waded in a polluted creek that was filled with broken glass; the fun of this wore off a bit after we’d limped around with infected cuts on our feet and our babysitter recommended a poultice made from a paper towel soaked in salt water to draw out the infection.
Speaking of babysitting, I started when I was 12. Everyone I looked after survived, although we got locked out a few times. The neighbor kids either had a spare key or would let us hang with them till the parents showed up. When I was 10 I was in charge of my younger brother and sister on an airplane trip from Lexington Ky to Jacksonville Fl. My brother was only 4, too young to fly without an adult, so my mother just lied about his age. We got to Jacksonville with no problems and my only concern was that my brother would see a friend named Jack on the plane and say “Hi, Jack!”