What crazy stunt did you survive in your youth that you wouldn't tell Mom about?

In My Humble Opinion
21

We used to spend a lot of time on our roofs in the bungalow belt on the NW side of Chi. You know the area? 30 foot lots, house walls 6’ apart, with overhanging eaves probably no more than a 3-4’ gap. We used to run down the whole block, jumping from house to house. Really wasn’t too hard, but sure was stupid.

The HS golf team used to play a lot of golf in the N burbs - Glencoe, Winnetka, etc. When we finished, we’d race back to one guy’s house on Addison - which meant 2-3 cars literally racing down the Edens in rush hour, doing 90 mph, using on/off ramps and shoulders as passing lanes. At least we should have had the courtesy of taking ourselves out without endangering other folk.

While on the Lane Tech track team, we ran in the halls, and took advantage of the opportunity to explore the basements, tunnels, and attics of that huge building. Before we thought to bring flashlights, we were up in the attic and found a place where we had to scootch along a wall one-brick wide. For whatever reason, we decided that if we fell, we had to fall to one side in particular, because it was a short drop. When we went back with lights, we saw that the side we had chosen as the safe drop was probably a 30’ drop down to the auditorium stage.

In college, jumped off a 3 story apartment building into a pool. Also climbed over the steep roof of a 4-story apartment building to drop down on my buddy’s balcony to surprise him.

What an idiot. Lucky I’m alive.

22

I’m 33 yrs old and when I was a kid in the 70’s Evil Kneival was huge, and also happen to be my hero…Thus my affliction with dirt-bikes. Anyway I was 9, I tied a towel around my neck - like a cape - got on my Bannana Seat Huffy and went up to the small cliff over my shed… prepared to jump it over my shed. Down the Cliff, over the edge and somehow over the shed.

I only broke my clavical that day. :slight_smile:

23

I wanted to be a stuntman when I was kid(after watching the movie Hooper, that is).

Let’s see…
We used to ride our bicycles under moving tractor trailers in the shopping center parking lot.

We used to tie a rope to the back of a Honda 125 dirtbike, sit in a wheelbarrow, and one of our freinds would run for a few feet with the wheelbarrow and then dump us out and we’d get dragged behind the dirtbike(imitating the chariot race scene).

We’d don street hockey gear(helmet, elbow and knee pads), ride our bike’s down the hill and stick our foot in between the forks and the front tire so we’d get thrown over the handle bars.

When we hopped moving trains we’d hang on to the ladder on the front and let our feet drag on either side of the rail(I still can’t believe none of us died doing this one.)

That’s all I can think of now, but there was certainly more.

24

This one’s kinda freaky.

When I was a little nine-year-old Ouisey is Newmarket, there was a character called Uncle Bunty who lived in the neighborhood. He was a man in his late 30’s/early 40’s maybe, and was a transvestive. That’s not the freaky part.

The freaky part is that a group of about eight or ten of us little girls went over to his house quite regularly, where he would share with us such things as his porn magazines, panty collections, what-have-you. He taught us how to roll cigarettes. He let us cook chips on the stove…standing on a chair by the stove with a huge kettle of boiling oil was not something our mothers ever let us do. I remember sitting on his lap watching Shirley Temple’s “The Blue Bird”.

As far as I know, none of us girls ever got molested. I think the guy just really enjoyed having a bunch of little girls swarming around his house, but I don’t think he liked it in a nice way, if you know what I mean.

Of course, none of us ever told our parents. It was kept a very strict secret.

25

Personally - I got hit by a car at age 9 and knocked off my bike about 20 - 30 feet into an intersection (very busy) right when the light turned green. Basically just curled up and waited for the inevitable, but the cars stopped and a man helped me load up the bike (which still worked - how I don’t know) into his El Camino. The car that hit me - rolling through a stop sign while I was biking down hill through that intersection - took off.

Why didn’t I tell my mom? I was FORBIDDEN to go fast down that hill so I wouldn’t get hit - the very thing that happened.

I had a friend at age 16 or so who liked to climb out of his car while someone else drove it and he would hold onto the roof while we sped 40mph through our suburb’s streets. Never got caught and no damage done - but consider the possibility of a sudden stop…

26

After some careful consideration, I think y’all are crazy.

The nuttiest things I ever did were only pale reflections of the insanity displayed thus far in this thread.

27

… Dear lord, I hope my mom doesn’t read this. o.O;;;
Ahem… When I was in junior high, fourteen or fifteen years old, I had a friend named George. Now, George wasn’t the brightest of all people, nor was he the highest role model for any kid. But, me being the natural follower, and George being the natural leader, we ended up as good buddies.

Well, durring our friendship, we spent lots of time at the mall, we were good little mall-rats, for the most part. One day, George and I decide that we’re going to go into the novelty gift shop/gothy jewelry store, and we’re going to grab a few handfulls of the really cool necklaces they had out for display, and run!

Well, we didn’t run out of the store with anything, we just dropped it at the enterance of the store, before the alarms went off… Well, when the security gaurd that was standing about fifteen feet away saw us bolting out of the store, he decided to give chase.

Goerge and I ran forever, and eded up on the third story of a parking garage. George kept going up, but I decided I was going to be smooth, and hang over the ledge so I didn’t get caught. Once I started hanging, I heard the security getting too close, and let go, falling to my inevitable doom! Lucky for me, there was about five years of ivy and shrubbery to break my fall before I hit the ground.

I got really high, then limped home that night. -.-;

28

… Dear lord, I hope my mom doesn’t read this. o.O;;;
Ahem… When I was in junior high, fourteen or fifteen years old, I had a friend named George. Now, George wasn’t the brightest of all people, nor was he the highest role model for any kid. But, me being the natural follower, and George being the natural leader, we ended up as good buddies.

Well, durring our friendship, we spent lots of time at the mall, we were good little mall-rats, for the most part. One day, George and I decide that we’re going to go into the novelty gift shop/gothy jewelry store, and we’re going to grab a few handfulls of the really cool necklaces they had out for display, and run!

Well, we didn’t run out of the store with anything, we just dropped it at the enterance of the store, before the alarms went off… Well, when the security gaurd that was standing about fifteen feet away saw us bolting out of the store, he decided to give chase.

Goerge and I ran forever, and eded up on the third story of a parking garage. George kept going up, but I decided I was going to be smooth, and hang over the ledge so I didn’t get caught. Once I started hanging, I heard the security getting too close, and let go, falling to my inevitable doom! Lucky for me, there was about five years of ivy and shrubbery to break my fall before I hit the ground.

I got really high, then limped home that night. -.-;

29

Wow, these are some hair-raising tales!
I’m starting to feel a little better about running across the highway - but there’s still no way I’d tell my Mom!

30

I sneaked into an abandoned hospital. But that was fairly recent.

Too many of my exploits are still “fresh,” so to say. Ask again in 10 years. :wink:

31

I hopped a train with a freind and we road it to a town about 130 miles south of where we lived. We then hopped a northbound train and made it home before dinner. On the ride north a couple of hobos threatened to cut us up if we didn’t give them money. When one of the hobos stood at the door of empty train car to take a leak, my friend pushed him out. The train was doing at least 50 mph too. We didn’t hear anything about any dead hobos so we figure he survived.

32

Shit, racer. One time while in college, on the way home from the bars a girl and I hopped on a slow-moving freight. Of course, as anyone with a functioning brain cell (apparently not us!) would have anticipated, it did not remain slow-moving for long. It stopped well into the next state. Man, that was a long hitch home.

33

My brother and I would get into bb-gun gun fights. Mom never asked about all the little round bruises.

When I was 12, I would spend the night at my best friends house, and sneek out to see the midnight showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show.

(But Mom knows about the 2 cars I rolled in high school, and the 3 head on collisions in college. Ya know, you CAN see better wearing your glasses!)

34

I did something similar to this, except I bribed a friend to sign my mom’s name for me. My 9th grade English teacher sent me home with a write-up notice for poor grades and an overall poor attitude about the class (she was a bitch and everyone hated her, so yeah, my attitude was bad) The slip was to be signed by my mom (or dad) and then returned (there had to have been some kind of consequence for not returning it, or I would have just tossed it). I wasn’t able to duplicate my mom’s signature, but after locating something my mom had signed, my friend demonstrated that he could duplicate it, and so he did. My teacher never suspected a thing.

35

BB gun fights - reminds me of bottle rocket wars.

Gad, it’s a wonder I survived.

And to think I’m such a tightass laying down the law with my kids!

36

17 at the time, my friend had a beat to Hell '64 Impala. We were scewing around and he locked all the doors and was driving off without me very slowly, so I jumped across his hood and held on to the edge by the windshield facing him, and spit on the windshield. He then thought it would be funny to speed up. Somewhere around 45 miles an hour, he also thought it would be funny to swerve right and left to see if I could hang on. After considerable yelling on my part, he stopped and let me in.

Oddly enough, we weren’t friends much longer after that…

37

Ran accross a highway - check. Late at night too, so they couldn’t see us very well and it was hard as hell to judge the speed of the cars. Dumb.

Road on the top of my station wagon with somebody else driving. Also dumb.

Same station wagon (Ford Escort). Found a downward slope and tried to see how fast it would go - the needle pegged somewhere past 90, so I’ll never know. Now I realize I had almost no traction or control at that point and that I’m damn lucky I didn’t flip it. Bleh.

Joking around, I shot an arrow at my friend - I missed, thank goodness.

38

Way, way to many to recount them all. But here are a few:

  • Unsanctioned cliff diving (i.e., going to the lake, seeing a cliff, and saying “Hey, let’s dive off that.”);

  • Borrowing a van from a friend’s dad so we could go camping, and ending up riding three-across on the roof while going 60 - 70 mph down dirt roads, across fields, and through trees (the game ended when the driver finally hit the brakes, skidding to a stop and throwing me off the side, at which point I broke the passenger side rearview mirrow with my ass, from which I still have a scar);

  • Sneaking out with some friends one night and breaking into a nearby chalk processing plant – which we had thought abandoned until we walked up the glass of the security office (like something out of a comic, the guard was asleep) – but before leaving, we climbed along the scaffoldings and into the towers and road along the conveyor belts and played along the edges of machinery;

  • While at a summer camp in North Carolina, some friends and I snuck off one afternoon to go climb a nearby mountain. As if a bunch of teenagers scaling cliffs without ropes, supervision, or experience wasn’t stupid enough, when we got to the top, we sat at the edge of the sheerest part of the mountain, had someone hold our feet, and leaned back out over the drop so someone could stand over us and take a picture straight down to the ground perhaps 200 feet below;

  • Perhaps my opus – some friends and I went up to the high school one night, dragged a high jump pit (maybe 10 feet wide by 6 feet deep) to the back of the football stadium stands (about 8 or 9 stories high), and jumped off the back of the stadium stands into the high jump pit. Some of my friends were on the gymnastics teams, and being more brave (idiotic?) than I, they did flips.

There are more, but I’m starting to calculate the chances that I could have made it through all this alive and intact, and thinking that maybe I should go play the lottery.

39

When I was ten or so, I made molotov cocktails. Hid them in the hedge and never used them…but I did use a can of chain lube as a flamethrower, and lit that hedge on fire. Uh, oops…luckily I was a clever boy and had a fire extinguisher on hand, and then spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning up the mess it left to eradicate the evidence.

40

All of them. Somehow.