Oh man, what memories! It’s amazing any of us survived, and I wonder what today’s kids will talk about when they’re older.
At one place while growing up we lived next to a park. The swings first had heavy wooden seats supported by chains. (This was the mid 60s). Great to stand up on, get swinging to a full arc and jump off in to the surrounding sand. One night a kid got clobbered by a swing, gashed his head and was brought to our house. My mom, a nurse, cleaned him up a bit while dad called an ambulance.
Not long after that they replaced the wooden seats with fabric ones. Still had the chains which you could spin someone around until the chain was all bunched up and the swing was several more feet off the ground – then release. Lots of spinning and dizziness. There was also a jungle gym that was great to jump from, and climbing on the park and rec building roof.
I saw the park earlier this year and it has really been toned down. Made safer to the point that it can’t be any fun.
Kyla, you mentioned train cars. For real danger my friends and I loved to walk down the railroad tracks to where they stored box cars on a railroad siding. There were many hours spent climbing around on those, pretending to be hobos or train robbers running along the top. The tricky part was to keep an eye out for the trains on the main track that would rush by at 60 mph.
Potato gun. (Big tube of PVC pipe filled with accelerant, block barrel with chunk of potato, ignite accelerant, shoot potato 200 yards.)
Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper and Cylon Raider that shot real red pellets until some kid choked on them.
GI Joe Doll with built-in parachute. (Okay, not dangerous in and of itself, but it is when you stand around in a circle and throw rocks at it as it comes down. I’m looking at you, Cervaise. :))
Our elementary school had a “tire castle”. It was about ten huge construction-machine tires, stacked in a sort of pyramid.
In the summers it got blisteringly hot and we would all smell like oily tar after climbing on them. In the winters, they would pool with slimy water inside and it was a challenge not to fall into one and end up all stained black.
We also had a “Thunderdome” as was mentioned earlier.
Of great amusement were the “Tetherchain” poles. About a half-dozen tetherball poles, with the balls missing. The only thing left were a long chain (which the balls were attached to) with a heavy fastening bolt on the end. We whipped these about the poles with great zeal, I remember many bleeding scalp wounds
Ok, recently, while cleaning out my mom’s house, we found the Cast-Rite Metal Casting Set. Apparently it was my brother Tom’s that he played with in the mid to late '60s when he was about 10.
As far as trains are concerned, we lived in an area where the trains would run through at about 5-10 odd mph (i.e., relatively slowly but fast enough where you had to run to keep pace). We would think nothing of catching the trains, running alongside the boxcars and jumping on the ladders, taking the train to school or the arcade.
70’s era Wisconsin. There was a big Hill (note the capital letter) behind our house. Steep, & about a quarter of a mile from top to bottom.
Toboggan. Warp Factor 5. Hit a hidden log. ZOOM! WHOOP! CRASH! COO-COO!
We made wooden swords & battle axes out of particle board. Morningstars from wooden dowels & a section of old Klick-Klack. Also ouch.
Finally: did anybody, anywhere, ever, use Tether Balls for anything other than clobbering someone or just wrapping them around the pole? Anybody? Surely theycouldn’t have been fun?! :dubious:
I nominate vac-u-forms. They rate up there with the creepy crawlers sets. In fact, I used to make the creepy crawlers on my older brother’s vac-u-form. Ahh the smell of melting plastic in the morning…
I had both an easy bake oven (my mom wisely refused to buy the mixes and instead would use proportional amounts of standard cake mix) and a Creepy Crawly Thingmaker II. They got hot, but I never really considered these things dangerous. My parents bought an old cottage and the owners threw in some Jarts, which I always liked. Wonder where they are now? Wonder where you can get more thingmaker goop.
We had a big steep hill near our school, right on the edge of the forest, which had a big divot in the middle. We used to build a luge course down the middle, through the trees. You’d build up a surprising amount of speed.
They took down all the playground equipment we had as kids. I remember the big geodesic domes and puke-o-whirls in Canada. At our school, they build this big wooden tower fifteen feet off the ground. Some hundred foot ropes were attached to the ground, and you could glide down usng T-shaped handlebars attached to the rope. Good times. Apart from getting a metal dart i the chest, I was hardly ever hurt as a kid. I see kids in the ER with fractures from trampolines all the time.
My mom still has lots of esophagus clogging Fisher Price People. The castle with the dungeon rocked.
Those were awesome. I hate it when some dead kid ruins it all for the rest of us. Millions of kids playing with this toy and not hurting anything. But one kid snuffs himself and boom, “They’re too dangerous!” You know, if two or three kids out of a couple million get killed using it, maybe it isn’t the* toy* that’s a problem, if you catch my drift.
I played with mercury through high school – my friends grandfather was a dentist, and among the artifacts my friend salvaged from storage was a number of 10 lb. bottles of mercury. It’s amazing to dip your whole hand into liquid metal, and it’s cool when droplets stick to you.
Nobody’s mentioned wood burning kits yet. I got a wood burning kit for Christmas one year. If it’ll burn wood, it’ll burn skin, carpet, walls, etc. As long as something was within 4 feet of an outlet, it wasn’t safe from the ultimate graffiti machine.
