Speaking of slides, one of the coolest ones I ever saw/rode is still in use (I think, at least according to the picture I found). It’s located at Turner Falls, which sets on the Texas-Oklahoma border, and it will burn your ass alive during the summer as it is made out of metal! It also has a pretty lengthy drop for what just amounts to falling into natural springs.
I miss it. 
Although it seemed much bigger (like a bazillion miles long) when I was a kid.
It was called a Thingmaker, and used Plastigoop. There were several versions of it, depending on which molds were packed with the oven. Some packs had only molds, no ovens, and some packs had both an oven and a Vacuform. The user would heat a sheet of thin plastic over the oven, then flip the sheet over a mold on the Vacuform and pump the air out of it. The “oven” was actually sort of a sunken hotplate. One could indeed get some pretty nasty burns from it. I used mine a lot and had a lot of fun with it.
I also had an Easy Bake Oven. This thing baked miniature cakes and cookies using a light bulb. It too could burn the user, and the tiny cake and cookie mixes were ridiculously overpriced.
We had them in summer camp. Of course you had to swing out just right otherwise you would land smack on top of a big rock (no one did). I suspect kids are too fat and uncoordinated for such things these days.
It’s all these soft, wimpy toys they get. Getting bonked on the head with a Tonka truck toughens you up, I say! Tickle me Elmo won’t make a man out of you. An Erector-set, now that’s manly. In fact, any toy with the word “erect” in the name is manly.
Same here! We kids would gather 'round the bathroom sink and chase the mercury around in our hands. This was even sanctioned (and closely supervised, I should add) by my father, who was a bomb disposal expert and pretty safety-minded.
Is it a coincidence that all three of us mercury kids are in the Bay Area? :dubious:
Oh, yeah. The rope swing. We had one in the back of our yard, off an old crooked willow tree. Great fun. The tree had odd branches, including one on the opposite side from the rope swing that extended horizontally. If you went out to the end of that branch you could make it bounce. That tree was a playground all by itself. It could be anything.
Absolutely. Over one of the huge hills in McClaughrey Springs. I grew up basically at the intersection of 119th and 92nd. There were plenty of bonfires on that hill in my high school days, that involved everclear, kool aid, and people jumping off that hill…
Yeah, I actually picked up and used a Wheel-O quite recently - can’t remember where or when. But the toy I (and jsc) were remembering had 2 discs threaded on string, instead of the Wheel-O’s wire loop. I believe the discs on both toys were similar in terms of size, material, color, etc.
Yeah, but if we hadn’t been so drunk…
On our elementary school playground we had what was called a “witch’s hat.” I couldn’t find a picture of it to link but I’ll try to describe it:
It was a tall pole with something like a ball joint at the top that connected to a circular swing-like thing with handles. The intended purpose was, say six kids hold onto the handles (at about head height) and run around the pole and then lift their feet and swing in a circle.
The actual use was one kid on one side and one on the other both holding the handle. Kid 1 pulls the circular piece to the pole, lifting the Kid2 way off the ground, hanging by his hands. Then Kid 1, with hands on either side of the pole, uses the leverage to spin around the pole. On the other end of the circular thing, Kid 2 is now spinning very fast about twelve feet off the ground, so fast that his body is extended straight outward.
The usual outcome was that Kid1 gets rocketed across the playground when he could no longer handle the G-force. I myself was thrown that way, and I saw one kid actually spinning like a bullet and shooting all the way across the playground.
Then one day a girl was flung into a tree and broke her leg, and they took the witch’s hat down.
Where’s the love for post #42? 
Oh man, I remember one of those! I was in Canada, and our class was visiting a different elementary school for some reason and we saw one of those on the playground (but with only two handles, and it had chains, not poles). It looked like the coolest thing ever but none of us managed to work it. Then this pair of twins came along and man were they good. I had never wanted a twin as much as I did at that moment 
Hmmm…I wonder if it’s a coincidence that there are so many 3-headed babies born in the Bay Area.
There’s a similar trick you can do with the merry-go-round wheel thingy. A science teacher I had told us about when he was in college, their physics class had a group project, and one of the groups was two or three big guys and one little guy. For whatever reason, the little guy never showed up for group work, never helped out, etc. Finally they talked him into showing up for the final experiment for the project, by basically threatening to tell the prof that the guy had been slacking off. The skinny guy agreed, but didn’t apparantly ask what was going to happen.
They all get on the merry go round, and once it gets spinning, the three big heavy guys start making their way to the middle, and the little guy was apparantly launched at a speed of about 30-40 MPH accross the playground. 
Was Iceland neutral in WWII? I thought it was part of the Allies because Denmark owned it at the time (of course, Denmark might have declared nutrality after being conquered by the Germans). In any case, I always understood the US was there mostly because they needed airfields there to move bombers to England.
Some of the worst things I remember involved trampolines.
My best friend as a kid had a trampoline and a 3.5 ft deep pool. We would drag the trampoline next to the pool, put a sprinkler under the trampoline, making it wet and extremely slipppery. Then we would attempt to jump off the trampoline into the pool. If you were lucky, you didn’t slip and land on the metal edge then tumble into the pool, or get stuck in the spring part on the edge of the trampoline. Painful.
Another neighborhoood girl had a trampoline and an uneven backyard. The flattest part of the yard was near the fence. I flew off the trampoline one day into the wooden fence.
My school used to have two of these. Everyone used to climb to the top and hang upside down by their knees. Then a couple of years later, they were removed and replaced with a new wooden and plastic playground.
Without trampolines, *America’s Funniest Videos * would go off the air.
No, there are still plenty of wiffle-bats to the groin to go around…
I had both a Thingmaker and an Easy Bake Oven, and I did burn the crap out of myself, but had a lot of fun too. I was quite surprised to find that Easy Bake Ovens are still sold, though they no longer use a light bulb. I imagine they’ve managed to bombproof it somehow …
I just saw a minibike for the first time in forever, only Dad was taking his kid for a ride on it instead of letting the kid drive it himself.
msmith537, I had one of those geodesic dome things in my backyard. My dad bought it for me for Christmas. I bet he was up all night putting it together. The metal bars were joined using steel nuts and bolts, and the bolts had these plastic covers on them that eventually all fell off, which meant you could scrape the hell out of your wrists and ankles while climbing on the inside of it.
The most dangerous (and fun) thing I had as a kid was a construction site right next to the street where I lived. Three or four new streets were being put in, and on days that the construction workers were not there, we kids went down there and had a ton of fun messing around with stuff. When the model houses were completed, we’d pop open the back windows and play house for real :p. I’m not even sure we realized that breaking and entering was wrong.
Sadly, there was a kid who was killed down there when a concrete slab fell on him. RIP, Dana.
Realistic-looking toy guns. We used to have wood-and-metal, bolt-action rifles with canvas slings.
Totally nonfunctional, but they looked a lot like military-surplus carbines.
We’d spring out of the underbrush yelling like demons and run toward people with those things.
It nevert occurred to us that we were likely to get drilled in self-defense by some startled off-duty cop.
Sailboat
