How nice of them to leave it installed as a reminder of their generosity.
Possibly WWII? We went to school on the Naval Air Station near Keflavik, and I’m betting the base might have been built during the Battle of the North Atlantic. Or maybe some later, during the Cold War. Obviously, it was never used, but who knew if the Germans or the Russkies might not try to blind one of our forward bases with a sneak attack back then?
Completely true. It was only later, as an adult, that I figured out how weird i was. Or how weird Iceland was in general, to most folks. To me it just seemed like a very cold, dull, rocky place, where the streets were made of pumice.
You guys are going to think me a terrible liar, but here’s another one. I was an Air Force brat, and after Iceland we were stationed at an airbase in Sioux City Iowa. We lived on base there, in bachelor office quarters housing that had been converted over for enlisted men with kids and seniority.
We kids had noticed there were some abandoned WWII era bombers on the base, and several times we sneaked into them so we could pretend we were pilots going on air raids in a way that other kids could only dream of. The bombers were stripped of all their gear, but it was still fun to climb around in them. One time we got chased out by the MPs. That was even more fun.
Should read “I figured out how weird it was.”
Of course.
That’s how I broke my arm the first time – see-saw injury.
The reason they now lock the lower end of the rope on a flagpole is not to keep the flag from being stolen.
If you take the lower end of that rope and tie a larks-head around a chunk of broom stick, you can then hang onto the stick, you can run around the pole and get your feet maybe 3’ off the ground. If you get your buddies to push you around, you get maybe 10 feet off the ground.
If you bring along another rope, so you buddies can “tow” you from inside the circle you are discribing, you can get maybe 20 feet off the ground.
Tip: do not let go of stick.
Our schools had stout tapered aluminum poles about 10 inches around at the base, and maybe 50’ tall.
Oh, the “thingmaker” stuff from mattel: As the youngest of three kids, this was one of the few really cool toys I got new. I had the mini-dragon set, and went through many of the large economy size bottles of “goop”. “Incredible edibles” used a slightly different heater thingy with IRRC round molds and a lid. The older neighbor girl had one, but all the edible goop was gone by the time it got handed down to the sibling my age.
Not an actual toy…but…
I had this large, overgrown backyard a few doors down from me. It was essentially a vacant lot that grew wild. We played in there all the time (the few kids in the neighborhood, that is). I was in there alone one day and was looking at this tree…when I got a “brilliant” idea. I thought that I could get a rope around my ankles and some cinder blocks on the other end and sling them over a tree branch, thus shooting myself up in the air, upside down. I did, by balancing the cinder blocks on th ebranch, then poking them over with a stick. One learns quickly about how long the rope should be to get you airborne and not just knock the wind out of you.
Anywhoot, I perfected it and had enough foresight to take the wheels out of a pair of rollerblades for the “boots” so we wouldn’t have huge, nasty rope burns around the ankles. I told a good buddy about it (after doing it myself for about a week or so) and, for some crazy idea, he thought it was sweet as shit. We spend about a week in that backyard gabbing and having fun and hanging out, but we’d take turns hanging each other upside down from a tree by rollerblades for hours at a time until we were about to pass out. We told a mutual friend, and for some crazy reason, HE thought it was a sweet idea and did it as well. So there we are, the three of us, hanging each other upside down from a stupid tree, by a pair of gutted rollerblades.
Yes, we got the kid we picked on up in the tree, tied the other end to a log, and went to the gas station for candy. We came back, him still hung upside down, a puddle of tears on the ground, and his shirt flipped over his head, exposing his fat belly. So sad…so plaintive…so…so funny.
Kids can be cruel. Little bastards.
Nope. The Canberra one is based on our design, just made a bit smaller to fit into their gallery.
Biggest in the Southern Hemisphere, baby!
Jarts, baby!
The thrill of throwing a sharp object at your friends, who were all bare foot and then they would throw them back at you! Good, good times!
I passed up the chance to buy a rusty set of jarts at a garage sale a couple of years ago because the guy wanted $10. I have regretted it since.
I wanted to put them in their own black velvet shadow box and hang it on the wall.
Oh, and Maypoles.
Large steel pole with a bunch of chains that had handles on the bottom of it that you got to a good running start with your friends and hung on and flew and when your arc brought you to the ground, you ran as fast as you could while holding on so other kids would get the maximum air time. If you were small, your feet never touched the ground.
To make things even better, you dragged the picnic table over to use as a run way.
I’m pretty sure those have gone the way of the buggy whip.
- Haven’t seen a pogo stick in quite a while.
- There was kind of a shoe-based pogo variant, basically a pair of shoes with with big springs underneath. Every bounce sent you caroming further out of control.
- Another crazy kind of shoes – like small life rafts that you strap on your feet, and walk on water. If you tipped over and the floats got stuck on your feet, you were in deep shit.
Turns out, they can lead to you getting eaten
Not a toy, but there were these bushes that grew near my house - I not sure what they were. They had lots of long, narrow sharp-edged leaves, some bushy bamboo type things growing around a small space in the center. Small group of kids would go in and try to hold it against invaders. There were a couple of us with knives and we’d cut the bamboo things to a point.
Lots of injuries, none fatal. Lots of paper cuts from the leaves!
Another fun thing was this walkway that encircled a creek. Periodically there were crosswalks to get from one side to another…very steep, wonderful crosswalks (you could go straight down the grass, but you wouldn’t go as fast). The contest was to see not only how fast you’d go down, but how far up you could go to other side.
Then there was the circular pipe next to the bridge (bridge? what bridge?)
Strangely, I’ve yet to brake a bone and my worst injury happened when I slipped climbing up my swingset (slipped and hit an uncovered screw - made this nice cut around my knee).
We called it the Giant’s Ride. One kid would take his/her handle on a chain and walk it around the circle, over everyone else’s chains. Then we’d start that that kid would fly up in the air. I knocked out a tooth and pretty near put my teeth through my lip on that thing. Seeing as the accident happened in 1978, we were still allowed to play with sharp objects.
When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco in the 80s, the SF Zoo had this fabulous structure that I loved loved loved. (My parents were zoo members, so we went a lot.) It was a very tall pole - probably not as tall as I remember it, but it must have been at least 30 feet high - with a big net made of ropes attached to it, with the edges of the net pinned to the ground 15 feet or so from the base of the pole. So, a big net pyramid. Great great fun to climb on.
I can’t even remember the last time I was at that zoo, but no way is it still there. They also used to have some old train cars that you could climb on. Loved those too.
Iceland was a sovereign state as of 1918 and took the opportunity of the fall of Denmark to declare full independence. Shortly afterwards it was ‘recruited’ to the allied cause by a British landing force. Still, it all worked out for the best - wouldn’t have been nice if the Germans had established a Luftwaffe base there…
Did no one here ever have a Flexy Racer?. For the unitiated, these were wheeled sleds that you rode in the street, made by the good folks at Flexible Flyer for those of us in warmer climes where it never snowed. You rode it lying on your stomach, without a helmet of course. The handlebars allowed you to steer it and brake it (in theory). Man, you could build up speed on those things! You could flip one at the drop of a hat, too, and come away with serious street rash! They were way popular in the southern US in the late 50’s and early 60’s. I guess they haven’t been manufactured for decades now. One web site describes them as follows: “They appear to be nothing short of a suicide trip for the rider, although there are hand brakes attached to the handles for steering.”
In the park next to my house there was a tall metal sliding board, much like the one pictured in faithfool’s link, except it didn’t go out over water - it just just stopped about two feet off the ground.
One day, we got the wise idea of taking a Flexy Racer up that slide and riding it down to the bottom. The Flexy would shoot out from the end of the slide a good ten or twelve feet, before it hit the ground with a thud and continued rolling along. The first time I got the wind knocked out of me was hitting the ground on a flexy jumping it off a sliding board.
Incidentally, that metal sliding borad was good for other thrills. We’d sit on sheets of wax paper riding down the board. You could get it nice and slick after eight or ten wax paper runs. ::zoooom!::
You know, one of my first memories…I may have been 4 or 5, was having one of those things almost kill me - it literally skinned the side of my face coming down.
I’m surprised no-one has mentioned that suburban classic - the tennis ball cannon. Somebody somewhere noted that a tennis ball would just fit inside a tube made of beer or pop cans. In those days, beverage cans were straight sided and a can opener could be used to remove both top and bottom. It was de-rigeur to use electrician or duct tape to series 7 or 8 cans together to make the cannon itself. Ronsonol, Zippo lighter fluid, hair-spray etc was the propellent. Today, whole websites are devoted to sophisticated potato cannon and the like, but noone ever had more fun than us kids making our own and generally raising havoc in the neighborhood.