I missed the word “by” and thought you said you flew yourself. I thought, “Man, this guy’s parents rocked!”
Born in 1978 and we did the same thing. Honestly, our childish minds never devised any seriously, seriously dangerous traps, but still…we meant it. Oh, and all of this was in the local woods, too, which was filled with pits people dug out to smoke weed in and stuff. We never lost anyone, though.
I was 4 when my mom started lying about my age and saying I was 6 so I could fly unaccompanied to visit my dad in the summers.
I thought “and boy, were his arms tired!”
No one commented on this?!?
Bringing back some great memories for me! I’ll just list mine instead of seeing if they were mentioned or not. I’m sure some of these will be repeats, but some will be very unique to my world.
The idea of being gone all day from the house with friends or by yourself was great. I had a bunch of kids in my neighborhood who were all around the same age, so there was always someone to play with. We could literally be gone all day, never stopping back at home until dinner. bathroom breaks were usually done on the fly in the woods (number 1 mostly, number 2 was done only if desperate times called for it… which was rare).
There was a school near my house which had a huge playground behind it. When we played kick ball, it was a matter of pride to kick the ball on the roof of the building, a good 25-30 feet off the ground. When the weekend rolled around, we used to climb to the top of the roof and retrieve the balls, never worrying about falling off the roof. This was extremely dangerous and we were idiots for doing it. We all lived.
As mentioned I’m sure a hundred times, no bike helmets. No safety gear of any kind. No knee pads, no shin guards, no nothing. You go ride your bike and come back when you are hungry.
Riding in the back of pickup trucks was a good time for kids in the summer, and we’d actually sit on the wheel wells, so if someone hit a bump or pothole, the potential to getting bounced out was high.
No car seats. I’m not sure if they were available or not, but my family had too many kids and not enough space.
My father’s pickup truck had a steel dashboard with a steel dash pad. It was a stick shift. So, no room in the cab for more than 3 people if you are lucky. I remember on more than one occasion cramming the entire family into the front of that truck. any accident would have been fatal.
Anyone remember those campers that sat on the back of pickup trucks? My parents had one, and when we’d go on a trip, the kids rode in the back of the camper, while mom and dad (and usually my youngest brother would sit in the front). We would lay on our stomachs and look out the front window of the camper, which sat right on top of the truck’s cab.
Toys - click-clacks (glass balls that shards of glass would sometime fly off into a child’s eye. Shrinky dinks, requiring the use of an oven, high temps, melting plastics and hot trays. Very little parental guidance. Wood burner and chemistry sets here also. Also lawn darts, (a brother of a classmate of mine **did **die from a lawn dart.)
tackle football with no padding.
Ice hockey with no protective cups, helmets, masks, or padding of any kind. equipment requirements were ice skates, stick, and hockey gloves. That was it,
drinking water out of any hose we could find in the summer. I don’t think you can even do this anymore, with the chemicals in the hoses and all.
no fancy sneakers. I remember chuck taylors for basketball and gym, and kmart came out with trax shoes when I was 11 or 12.
Nerf was a part of my childhood, so I’m not sure what the OP means, except they were pretty hard in my day. I have no idea what they are like now. Anyone remember Itza Balls?
My own motorcycle, with a field behind my house to ride it. I was riding my honda 50 (very small bike but too big for a kid) by myself at 7 or 8, and no helmet until I got one for my birthday.
Punishments - at home, the leather belt, the hand… anything within reach, I suppose. Let’s not forget the liquid soap for bad words. School punishments included wooden paddles with holes in them (supposed made it sting more). Terrifying to see used on a classmate as a kid and kept us in line.
I’m sure there are more, but I’ll stop here for now. I’m going to go back and read the second and third pages of this thread and see how psychotic my parents really were. They should probably be in jail and we should probably have some life altering injuries, deaths, and/or broken bones. I have some scars, but other than that, I made it through just fine.
That’s with no timeouts, no drugs, and no child psychologists.
.
When I was in first grade a kid ran in front of a school bus and got smeared onto the road. Nobody brought in a grief counselor of any sort, and the school day just went on as usual. I believe the person who lived in the closest house used their hose to wash the blood off the street into the storm drain. Now if a kid gets a hangnail in school they close the whole school down and bring in grief counselors. :rolleyes:
That was the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw the OP. Not that I’m actually old enough to remember a Mr Potato Head where you had to supply your own potato.
This sounds suspiciously like the school I went to!
I was part of the blowing up of the lab: my friends turned on the gas, I got the pickle bucket of water and threw in the 5-lb lump of sodium, we all ran when the sparks were higher than the counter it was next to, and we all made it out of the room in time for all the windows and the door to be blown out in to the hallway - and out in to the field on the other side of the school. I got a 3-day suspension out of it, not for unsafe operation of chemicals or blowing up half the school, but rather because I was told specifically not to mess with the sodium and I disobeyed a direct order from a teacher. BTW - my teacher wasn’t demoted nor was he from England…
As for the student out the window, I knew about it happening but wasn’t part of that experiment in gravity.
Other things that happened: the home economics class had to be canceled one day because while curing leaves in the oven they caught on fire and burned and the smoke was so thick you couldn’t hardly see in the hallway. I’ll leave it up to you to determine what kind of leaves we were trying to dry out. (Tobacco - really!)
In the elementary school I went to, we had some disabled people and we used to call them the 'Tards. The SpecEd teachers were 'Tard Wranglers. The kindergarten students in that school were pretty much miniature mobsters in the making and had total control of their domain, and the teacher knew it and gave up on trying to teach them and just tried to point their destructive frenzy away from anything valuable or that got easily hurt.
Lawn darts, fun stuff. How about the old Croquet sets? Wooden balls hit with wooden mallets and the goal was to send the balls thru the loops and eventually to the wooden end stake driven into the ground. How many games actually were completed, and how many games were nothing less than a whack-a-ball free-for-all that the goal was to simply survive as three of your “friends” waled on their spherical missiles trying to peg you?
LEGO sets were another great thing, especially at 4 or 5 or so. Now the boxes are labeled “small pieces, choking hazard, keep away from young children”, but then they were just a great way to express your creativity. Especially in combination with the Erector Sets. Nothing like sharp metal pieces to drive home the point of being careful around sharp metal pieces.
Old Lionel trains also are a great memory of mine. We used to take that old transformer, wire it up to some of the lichen, and burn the stuff as we drove a train through the conflagration. Just like the movies!! Woo-hoo! Wait - the fire isn’t going out and is, in fact, spreading all over the top of the train set because it was sprinkled with this lichen in order to make it look more like grass. Wow - it looks GREAT! After the fire was out and the basement aired out enough to see, my Dad and I would repair the train layout and glue back more of the lichen, this time with the admonition to not start the train on fire while Mom was home.
I’m surprised that nobody mentioned the walk to school in 10 feet of snow, uphill there and back, in the middle of winter, with only the snow to eat, and we liked it because the snow had more taste than the dirt we had to eat in summer.
Honestly, SOME of my childhood I’d love to relive with my kids, but some of it I’m quite frankly surprised I even survived!
http://www.canada.com/Parents+foul+after+Toronto+school+bans+hard+balls/5726499/story.html
It would be a lot safer for everyone if children were banned from school yards.
Yeah well, it kinda shot my doing-straight-through-1400km-trips-rolling-around-in-the-back-of-the-station-wagon-in-sleeping-bags story to pieces.
This is one of the sweetest stories I’ve ever heard.
I did this all the time. When I was about 8 or so, waiting in the checkout line, some lady smacked my ass…hard…and when I looked her in shock she just grinned and said “Birthday spankin’s!” (My mom didn’t see it happen.) Holy shit, imagine if that happened nowadays!
My brother, 6 years older than myself, blew himself up in science class making fireworks for a school parade. He was in hospital for some time, lucky to have his eyesight - one of my childhood memories is of him picking bits of glass out of his skin some time later.
The science teacher - a very good one I might add, who had been a teacher for many years - was lucky to keep his job; he had authorized the project. I gather it was very bad for him. The school paid something like $8,000 out of court, lots of money in those days.
The kicker is that I had the same teacher 6 years later.
The first day he called out the roll, he got to my name and looked up: "are you the brother of … "?
I said yes I was.
He put his head down on the desk and wept. It’s the only time I’ve ever seen a grown man weep at the mere mention of my name … but he soon got over it and was, in fact, a very good and inspiring teacher (if always a little wary of me).
I got drunk and passed out when I was about a year/18mos because at some party my mom was at (an official type party, not a social party… maybe graduation for her or something?) everyone was giving me sips of their champagne, thinking it was adorable that I’d drink it. My mom was pissed.
Modern day ones use a 100 watt bulb; what will they use when incandescent bulbs aren’t available?
I too had a Thingmaker- the 1978 or so version. Actually the coolest thing about it was that my mother figured out how to mix up some sort of jello with extra knox gelatin that was firmer than normal jello, and I had the coolest birthday party ever once; we all got to eat jello worms and bugs!
I remember one thing we did- not really destructive or dangerous, but modern-day kids would still have been prohibited from doing it. I had these two things much like a jai-alai scoop, with a notched track inside, and a rough-surfaced ball. Basically you were supposed to play catch with them- you could use the track to put a wicked spin on the ball and make it move in all sorts of crazy ways.
What we’d do is wait in ambush for cars to come down our street, then launch the balls in such a way that looked like they’d hit the car’s windshield, but curve away at the last second. Or we’d just throw shit at people’s cars sometimes… that was fun too.
I wore clothes to school that were actually made by my MOM! How cool do you think clothing made by your mother would be? Not very cool my friend. How much shit do you would take if you wore clothes made by your mom* to school*?
Adults were more permissive too. I recall going to buy beer and cigarettes for my father. All I needed was a note from him to the store.
The other kids and I would follow Joe the mailman around and he’d give us the mail and we’d run up and take turns putting it in the mailboxes. I can’t see a letter carrier letting anyone do that.
Every car ride consisted of myself and my siblings flopping over from the front to the back seat and back constantly.
It’s not to say everyone didn’t care. I remember “water wiggle” was pulled pretty fast when the found out, it was knocking kids out.
Stupid Shit Dotchan (born 1979) Did as a Wee Warner Sister:
Funny thing is, I still consider myself to be rather sheltered compared to other kids my age.
I didn’t even need a note. Mom would give me the money, and I’d happily run down the the store (where Mom always got her cigarettes, so they knew I wasn’t buying them for me) and get them for her. What was in it for me? Usually, I could spend the change on a candy bar or similar. I was 8 to 12 years old at the time.
And the Strange Change Machine!
http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/str.html
Make your own monsters.
And burn your own fingers!:smack:
Still, I was very glad to have it.
Where to start?
In 7th grade science class, we enjoyed holding a big blob of mercury in our bare hands. I blame the resulting loss of IQ for every stupid post I’ve ever made to these boards.
I used to swim in Lake Erie in the 1970s, and I’d inevitably swallow a big gulp of water. I only puked a few times. My mother would take us to beach all day in the summer, because we had nothing better to do. There was no sunscreen. I once was left at an outdoor pool for at least six hours with no sunscreen. I actually missed a day of school from the burn, and still have marks on my shoulders from it.
We climbed trees and built our own treehouses, actually in the trees, not like these bonkity-ass kits you see in peoples’ yards now.
I once cut open a model rocket motor and lit it, just to see what would happen. Lost a good fraction of my eyebrows.
Around the same time, a kid showed me how to make a blowtorch with a can of WD-40 and a match. Good times.
I used an 18-volt transformer from a model train set to…had to look up this word because of the mercury…electrolyze water.
I made “gunpowder” from a chemistry set (potassium nitrate and charcoal). It never burned well, because I couldn’t get all the water out of it. Once I put a big yellow smear on the wall of my bedroom when I wiped the solution off my hand.
I chewed a pouch of Red Man tobacco when I was 13. It really wasn’t bad; I only gave up after one pouch because I didn’t have any money.
We lit the gas jets in high school chemistry. We also used a burette to make a blowtorch, and created gas bubbles using glycerine and dish soap that we then ignited as they floated away.
Did you know that if you pour acetone into a styrofoam cup, it goes clean through the bottom and all over your shoes?
When I was 6, my friend and I rode our bikes “to Pennsylvania”. We ended up lost, at a fruit farm a couple of miles from home. We had to call from the farm to have our parents pick us up. I am sure I got in trouble, but these days the police would have been there sooner than the parents.
I did get old-school whippings and switchings regularly, the kind that leave marks for a couple of days.