We threw rocks at everything… including each other. We also shot each other with pellet and BB guns.
We were idiots.
I can take the credit for curing the neighborhood kids of this one a few years ago.
Y'see, after the door has been knocked you run. While you can get out of sight/ hearing of the humans in the house before they answer the door, the family dog is a different manner. She got out by acident the first time, after thaat I started releaseing her whenever the door got knocked on and no one was there.
Nothing says "guilty" like a group of kids hiding in the bushes with a doberman poking at them (we're not talking attack dog here BTW, she thought it was a game and wanted them to come out and play some more).
Once they figured out I could catch them, the knock games stoppedWow…that’s certainly a different name than what we called it as kids. We called it ‘Ding dong door ditch’. We’d ring the doorbells and run like idiots. Fun!
We called it something completly different.
:o
N-word knocking
:o
Rock incidents that I can recall from childhood:
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The playground of my elementary school was adjacent to a private Catholic school, with a 5 ft concrete block wall separating them. A kid in my 4th grade class thought it would be fun to throw rocks over the fence one day. One went through a window in the Catholic school and hit a kid in the head, resulting in a concussion. The rock-thrower was immediately suspended, and almost expelled.
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A friend decided to throw a rock at a schoolbus (unoccupied except for the driver) for the hell of it. Unfortunately, a cop happened to be present, and he went to juvy for aggravated assault, as the bus driver thought she was being attacked. The friend is now homeless and addicted to heroin. (See what a great crime deterrent juvy can be?)
Other general mayhem we participated in:
- Knocking over trashcans with our back tires during the bmx bike craze
- Blowing shit up. A LOT of it
- Pirating the local AM radio station (yeah, we really pulled it off)
- Stealing street signs
- A lot of tee-peeing (but that’s a given)
- Pumpkin smashing (but we thought of ourselves as a “free after-Halloween pumpkin removal service”
- Saving stolen pumpkins till mid-December so they became utterly fetid and rancid, and then blowing them up in yards of people we didn’t like
- Positioning ourselves in a 30 ft tree on Halloween night, and then shooting paintballs at the ground within a few feet of the trick-or-treaters so they ran away screaming
- Did I mention blowing shit up?
- Trespassing on private SoCal Edison property and converting it into a total bike course complete with ramps, jumps, and birms (but we got booted. Hey Edison, it was just a stupid empty dirt lot with no fence, what bug got up your ass?! They actually hired workers to come and level the whole thing. See where your tax dollars are going? :mad: )
- Water-ballooning passing cars. Extra points if the windows were rolled down!
- Lighting stuff on fire - and we got pretty good at aiming, first with the giant slingshot but then with the homemade potato/lemon cannon. Our accuracy was within 5 ft over a range of half a block
- And blowing shit up
Ahhh, the memories. Above is such a small sampling of our mischevious creativity that knew no limits…and in retrospect, when I have kids, I’m NEVER going to let them do this stuff!
Ditto.
I did all the usual stuff like dropping things off the overpass (got caught on that) and stuff. My gang and I soon go creative with our mayhem. We would tie fishing line between power polls or signs across the street from each other, and hang fishing sinkers at about grill height. Once you get things set, just sit back and watch (from a safe distance); no throwing talent required. 
My father seem to have done some stupid stuff. He always tells my brother and I about the rock throwing wars he would have with other neigborhood kids in an alley. He always ends the story with how he hit a running kid in the head with half a brick: he takes pride in his throwin accuracy. He never new what happened to the kid though.
Then there’s when he put nails in the old school potato gun. Awesome.
I used to do something way more stupid than that. I would wait on the side of the road, and then run across the road just in front of the car at the last moment. The closer to the car, the better (the goal wasn’t really to piss off the driver, it rather was a kind of prowess).
I assume I can post here today thanks to the reflexes of a number of drivers.
I sincerely hope that this “pastime” is now definitely out of fashion…
Yes, I heard that, too; I had forgotten about it until now. The phrase “thunder and lightning,” obviously, referred to knocking (thunder) and then running like lightning. I’m not sure what point was being made by the name “n-word knocking.”
Ah, these stories are bringing back all sorts of fond memories. I remember:
–leaving all manner of debris on the railroad tracks and then trying to find it afterward
–lighting bonfires alongside the railroad tracks (we especially enjoyed burning the old clamshell-style foam Big Mac containers and watching them melt)
–lying motionless alongside the road to make motorists think we were dead
–leaving half-assed fishing line “booby traps” on bike paths
–intentionally crashing bikes for fun
–shooting each other with bb guns
–throwing rocks at an abandoned greenhouse
–breaking florescent light bulbs to watch them explode
–taping firecrackers to balsa wood gliders
–throwing trash into the river to watch it float downstream
–breaking bottles under the bridge
–crossing the tracks under slow-moving trains
Rabid Child and laina_f’s stories made me laugh because I never did those things, but only because we didn’t think of it.
I’ve been there. Ar age 9, I threw bottles and cans at a parked car–across our alley. The guy had recently had the car repainted…boy did I catch hell for this from my parents! 
When I was the “manager” for the baseball team at Redondo High in the 60s, someone hit a pop foul that landed in the front seat of a car going eastbound on Vincent Street (along the first-base line). The angry driver held the ball up as he turned left onto Prospect Avenue (beyond the right-field fence) and continued northbound away from the field.
I’ve posted on the SDMB about my older brother; he was 13, I was 12, when he did this: We lived in Lawndale near two telephone poles on opposite sides of the street. My brother tied fishing line between the poles! I can leave the rest to the Teeming Millions’ imaginations. :eek:
When I was already in my 20s, I was gardening at a place in Manhattan Beach, and I’d pick up snails and throw them into the street.
I used to hang out with a friend at a place where a narrow, wooded footpath crossed a residential road - we did a variety of things - throwing Mahonia berries at white cars and running naked across the street in front of them. One time we upped the stakes and started throwing stones; on about the third try, there was a screech of brakes and we scarpered, with the angry driver hot on our heels. Apparently (I don’t remember this, but my mother swears it is true) I ran into the house, straight upstairs and changed my clothes. We got caught anyway and it turned out I had broken the car’s windscreen. My Dad’s travel insurance covered it somehow, but I was in seriously deep shit for a while afterward.
This thread is bringing up memories of many idiotic things my brothers and I did. Here’s another: On family trips we made signs saying “Help! I’ve been kidnapped.” and displayed them in the back window for the drivers behind us to see. Can you imagine what would happen if someone saw such a sign today?
You guys are bringing back so many memories from my youth! One specialty my brother developed was making life-sized dummies out of his old clothes and trying to toss them onto the hoods of passing cars in the dark of night. We also left them lying in the middle of the road, either on there own or entwined around an old bicycle.
When in Germany, my grandparent’s house was directly on the sidewalk. The opened bedroom window on the second floor was used for much entertainment, including trying to hit pedestrians with cherry pits and throwing cups of water out into the street trying to time it perfectly to hit passing cars. what a :wally I was. Once I dropped a cigarette butt (still smoldering, I’m ashamed to say) onto a passerby’s afro hairdo. That was from a hotel balcony so I didn’t get caught.
In my neighborhood the following are big pastimes: mailbox baseball, shooting road signs, blowing up mailboxes with homemade bombs, propping up dead possums with beer bottles (makes them look like they are passed out drunk with a longneck) and generally running over assorted wildlife.
Two words: Cherry Bombs
They were legal to buy when I was a tad.
holy moly! You guys!!!
the worst we did was wave at cars as they drove past. We enjoyed seeing the drivers’ reactions. Most of them would smile and wave back.
We never even THOUGHT of throwing stuff at cars!
When I was just a wee little 11 year old I saw some bats in the neighborhood. I told some of the other kids that we could get the bats to swoop down by throwing small pebbles into the air.
So we did this, and the bats did swoop, and all was well and good until our neighbor’s car went by and we heard a ping.
The neighbor, a rather stuffy old guy, was not happy. The other kids tried to blame it all on my brother, who was known to be a bit of a troublemaker but was asleep in bed at the time. Oddly, the man didn’t go to anyones’ parents.
I apologized to the neighbor (and not because my parents made me do this) and he just said if there was a hole in the car we would get the bill. Never heard anything from him again and we didn’t ever play that game again.
My siblings and I were always perfect little angels. We lived too far away from anything to get into trouble. But my father told me a story about how he and one of his brothers used to lay in front of the snowplow in the winter, and get pushed up and along by the pile of snow. Yes. They were f*cking crazy.
Yeah, that’s what some friends of mine used to call it. I think we only did this to a another friend though, when we were fighting with her.
My dad his friends as children placed a row of medium sized rocks across the road in front of their house once. The cars would have to drive over them very slowly, and would start screaming at my dad and co, who laughed hysterically.
Years later, he and his sisters would blow up a neighbor’s mailbox with a lit cigarette and an M-80.
(Apparently one of my aunt’s had a paper route and this customer refused to pay when she tried to collect. And if I’m not mistaken, my GRANDFATHER told them how to do it and covered up for them later on!)
We used to play chicken with the cars too, and throw popcorn at them.
Put rotten apples on the road and try to see if cars would run over them.
Playing with matches. In the woods. During a dry spell in August. :smack: (No, nothing ever happened, thank god!)
Our neighborhood is built on three roads, going up one small hill, leveling out for a bit, then another STEEP hill back to some small woods. (although there’s another neighborhood right behind that). Okay, we’d drag our bikes up to the top of said steep hill and just coast right down-even though there were a lot of hidden driveways with bushes blocking us from seeing any cars from pulling out.
And then there was one house whose driveway wrapped around the back of the house, and came out on the other side. It was on slight slope-you’d go up the hill, then come down one on the other side. We’d ride our bikes around the house-even though the old couple who lived there used to holler at us when they’d catch us. (Once, when my cousin came home from school with me, we were riding there and he gave the guy the finger)
Oh, and while this is pretty lame, one pastime was to try and clog the toilet down at the BP station. We finally succeeded with an old pair of reading glasses we found along the curb.
I like peeing in the pool.
What is an M-80?! I’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere on the SDMB…
A friend in high school told me about “lady fingers” and “cracker balls”; I had no idea what those were, let alone where to get them or what to do with them…