Ah, smear the queer. My mother didn’t like us playing that, because of the name. So we changed the name of the game to “kill the man”. She was OK with that. Same game.
We made our own gunpowder too. Saltpeter and sulfur were available at the drugstore, and carbon we got from ground-up charcoal briquettes. We used the proportions that the encyclopedia in the school library told us, and we ended up with something that would burn.
Watching it flare up on a metal trash can lid got boring fast though, so we put our homemade gunpowder in the little glass paint bottles we had from painting plastic models (remember those little bottles of Testor’s paint?), added a fuse from a firecracker, and lit it. Naturally, we ran like hell. The explosion was impressive–“fragmentation grenade” doesn’t begin to describe it, as bits of glass fired out from the resulting explosion. Surprised nobody was ever injured.
And being able to buy the paint and the glue without trouble no matter what your age.
In third grade after-care (in the mid 90s), they would always take us to this big, vacant field on one corner of the campus to play. Not sure why we couldn’t use the playground at the time, but we were okay with it. Most of the kids played whatever they could with soccer balls, either makeshift soccer games or smear the queer. So yes, they still had that. My friends and I, though, had different plans. There were a lot of bees in the field - a lot. Could find them anywhere. Mostly just honeybees with an occasional wasp or yellow jacket. (Nearly every building had paper wasp nests on it, though). Anyways, my friends and I would go bee-hunting every day in the field. I was the spotter, because for some reason I was the best at it, and I was also kinda afraid of bees. Then one of my friends would stomp on the bee, and we’d stick pine needles through their bodies and feed them to the ants.
Overall, we still got in to the same playground antics as you old folks did, although I didn’t have toxic chemicals or fireworks until I was a teenager. The worst injury I ever saw was when one kid pushed another in to a chain link fence post, and his leg got caught on a jagged piece of metal, ripping it open to the muscle.
Every summer, we spent a week at a cottage on a lake in northern MI, along with various relatives. Keeping yourself afloat in the water was something you pretty much figured out on your own: you swam or you dogpaddled. The oil drum raft was moored out where it was over everybody’s head. My two older cousins and I took the motorboat out to the middle of the lake regularly to fish: I was about 8, oldest cousin was 12. Lifejackets not included. I also have a photo of several of us bouncing around on an inner tube being pulled behind a pontoon boat. I’m the oldest kid in the photo, and I was 12. Not one of us had a life jacket. (Also, none of the adults on the boat could swim, and most of them were drunk, IIRC).
I cannot even imagine now taking a kid out on a boat without a life jacket, much less sending them out in the boat on their own! Imagine the possible lawsuits. And yet…those were great summers!
We called it “smear the queer” too, but my husband called it “kill the guy with the ball.” I have a theory that it’s the oldest playground ball game. Probably existed in the Pleistocine as “get the guy with the rock.”
Geez, are you me? That sounds like my childhood growing up.
In addition, my dad gave me a rifle for my 9th birthday. And for a while, I thought it would be cool to be a bus driver. My folks thought nothing of giving me a couple of bucks and letting me get on a bus and riding it all the way around its route until I got back off at the place where I got on.
Born in '62.
Lawn Darts. Toy guns. Lots of toy guns. Candy fake cigarettes. Most adults smoked. No bike helmets, no seat belts in older cars. No infant safety seats. Hearing from friends how their dad would punish them with a belt. My dad, being an atheist Jew, punished us with sarcasm. Which he regretted as soon as we were old enough to understand what sarcasm was. Mom always threatened to beat us with a hairbrush. Never did. Really, a hairbrush. Ooooohhhh!
I lusted for a chemistry set in vain. Mom had heard of children hurt by them.
Well my older brother in '69 was a boy scout and with my dad in the USAF we lived in the Philippines. They went off base on a camping trip and Tom brought back some unexploded Japanese shells. They took them away from him when he got off the bus.
So I played the game </begin caveman accent> “guy with rock die” </end>. So what? 
Malthus, I hope there were no permanent physical injuries to your brother. I’m sure if anything would have gone slightly different with me at my school, I may have been in his condition also. Or even dead.
One more story of how things were as a kid: one evening at dinner, I had the audacity to back-talk and be sarcastic to my mother. She nor my dad were not amused, and since I was sitting across from my dad, he couldn’t cuff me like he so obviously wanted. He did the next best thing in his eyes at that moment: he threw his fork at me. It stuck in my right arm. I’ll say that again. The tines of the fork stuck in the bone of my right arm, right in the middle of the humerus bone. I looked up in shock to see the look on my dad’s face, and after it registered that I was lucky to get away with only having a piece of tableware stuck in my arm (as opposed to the alternative of a spanking, and his spankings were not to be trifled with!), I quietly asked if I could be excused to wrap my arm. He said no because he didn’t want me to disturb his dinner anymore. A few minutes later my mom excused me because I was dropping blood on her good tablecloth. If I remember right, it really didn’t bleed all that much though. Sure did hurt, and I NEVER sassed my mom again, whether around my dad or not!
My grandma had a hairbrush for that purpose. Large and made of hardwood. Believe me, it hurt like the dickens (and she only did it once and frankly, I deserved it).