Me and a buddy stopped by a neighborhood garage sale. We found a tub of .22 blanks, they guy said we could have them for a dollar. We went back to his house and discovered we could open the blanks and get the gun powder out. We open all of them then made a spiral on the garage floor, our plan was to light one end and watch the gun powder burn a trail like in cartoons. When done, the spiral was about 6 feet across. My buddy decided to light the gun powder from the middle. We taped a wooden match to a stick, lit the match and he touched it to the gun powder. Instead of burning like in cartoons, there was a big flash and a lot of smoke. We ran out of the garage to catch our breath. Went back in a bit later and found a spiral burned into the concrete floor. His father was pissed off, the floor was only a few month old. Years later stopped by the house, it was for sale and open for viewing. The spiral was still visible on the garage floor.
When I was a kid, my family would go on vacation every summer with three other families (the families of friends of my dad’s, who had been his fraternity brothers in college). We’d often go to these “state resort parks” in Kentucky, which were essentially state parks that had hotels on the property. While we were on these vacations, my sister and I would hang out with Steve, the youngest son from one of the other families, as the three of us were the three youngest kids out of the four families.
The “hotel” areas where we’d stay had ice-maker machines, which made ice cubes that had a big divot/cup on one side. One evening, the three of us were catching fireflies, and I came up with an idea. I caught a firefly, then set it on the sidewalk, putting an ice cube atop it (inside of the open space from the divot). After a few moments, the firefly stopped moving, its “tail” glowing continuously. I thought that I’d frozen it to death, but after I took it out from under the ice cube, and warmed it up in my hand, it woke up, and flew off.
We then spent the rest of the evening putting fireflies in “suspended animation” under ice cubes, then reviving them.
I had The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments that told you how to take apart those old carbon-rod batteries and use the carbon rods as electrodes, the zinc for various other experiments, and the moist powdery stuff (mostly manganese dioxide) for other experiments.
The GBoSE has been condemned as some as dangerous, but I found it extremely useful and informative. I still have my copy, and learned a lot of basic chemistry from it. You just have to be extremely careful when you generate chlorine gas, or taste hydrochloric acid, or burn a strip of magnesium that you do so with proper precautions. I’m being entirely serious there.
The book is available in its entirety in several online locations. Here’s one. The way to disassemble batteries and use the carbon-rod electrodes to perform electrolysis on water is on page 25:
Things a girl did:
Trained the family dog to go up to the top of the driveway, pick up the newspaper, fetch it back to the front door. Among many other tricks (that was probably the only useful one). Kept every kind of pet that was small enough to fit in my room. Including those I caught – snakes, spiders, lizards, snails, sowbugs …
Made a series of forts all over the property, under and in trees mainly. These we ‘lived’ in, storing up caches of fruit and vegetables we picked and imagining ourselves as a primitive tribe.
Endlessly played a game we invented we called PassAround which was identical to the Surrealist’s game Exquisite Corpse. My friend Charlie who later became a painter and I played many games involving drawings, including many iterations designing a machine which turned household garbage into live puppies.
We also played a game called Kings and Queens, which involved taking turns being royalty and slaves. The King or Queen could command anything (‘make me a dessert! I want a beautiful throne! and then play me some music’) of his or her slaves. Being a slave was always a lot more fun, but there was never a shortage of kids who wanted to be king.
I would take apart old televisions for all the vacuum tubes, which I would smash with a rock or hammer.
I got pretty good at catching flies, pulling their wings off, and watching ants attack them.
We used to hang out at the mud flats of Cook Inlet in Anchorage. It wasn’t a very safe place to fool around, as the mud there is almost like quicksand, but. . .kids. A favorite pastime was to catch sticklebacks in the tidal pools and take them home in a can of sea water. They always died pretty quickly, though. Around July 4th, we’d set off cherry bombs and M-80s in the mud, which created a very satisfying crater. I still can’t believe they used to sell that stuff to kids (or anyone else, for that matter). Oh, and of course building a fort of some sort was always a priority.
I had a chemistry lab in the basement when I was growing up. I would have loved to have had this book, but it looks like it wasn’t published until I was 16. I can’t remember where I was getting my ideas for experiments, but I do remember that there was a hobby shop walking distance from my house where I could buy all sorts of chemicals. I doubt they would be allowed to sell most of it today if they still existed.
You make jealous, I should have thought of that. I spent hours collecting them with a glass, trying to get more into it without letting the others get out in the process. I wanted to see how densely packed I could manage to get them without further intruments: no sieves allowed. But a transformer? I would have immediately allowed that!
I did that with grasshoppers. You had to take off the big legs too.
Boys did that too, I can tell you. And caught lots of butterflies. I am sorry for those now.
Built arches and arrows. They were no good: either the wood was too thin, then it snapped easily, or too thick, then I could not bend it. Wish I had known then what I know now about composite materials.
Built dams.
Did not have firecrackers for the 4th of July: we had them for Christmas and New Year. The neighbors must have hated that.
I became quite good with yo-yos and spinning tops.
We’d build hay houses in the hayloft. You could do tunnels without boards, but to put a roof on the main chamber you needed to haul up a few boards. Eventually my allergies got to bad for this activity to be enjoyable.
We took the gun powder out of a LOT of real .22 bullets and put it into a metal coffee can and placed that into a fireplace. It blew the fuck up… blew out the fire and left burning debris on the carpet of my buddy’s mom’s house.
When I was about 4-5, I’d come in from playing outside, with pockets full of all sorts of bugs, worms, snails, etc. According to my mom, she always checked my pockets carefully on laundry day. Some of the critters were still alive.
A few years later, I started a serious insect collection. Part of this was raising various insects in my room. One day, a praying mantis egg case hatched, and hundreds of tiny mantises started swarming into the house (of course, I had neglected to put a lid on the bottle). I remember my mom vacuuming them out of the drapes and ordering the rest of my collection to the garage.
But it was fascinating to watch the mantises mating, including the canibalization.
CalMeacham already mentioned that you can use those carbon rods to generate hydrogen via electrolysis. Lots of surface area.
I built a remote-control squirt gun out of a crappy RC car (one of those deals that could only go forward or turn in reverse) and battery-powered squirt gun. Just a matter of wiring it up the right way. I only got my sister with it once before she caught on.
I made “Chinese throwing stars” out of wire ring terminals, nails (inserted into the wire tube backwards, then clamped) and some nuts and bolts. They were sturdy enough to go into a wooden fence. I brought them to school once; I’d probably be expelled today if I got caught.
I once got a pretty good shock by poking my finger in one of my mom’s umbrella flash units (she was a photographer). It wasn’t actually making a flash at the time, but it had some standby light that must have been at a decent voltage. Anyway, it made playing with electronics even more enticing.
Oh, we did this thing called “Death-Mo War”.
Six stupid kids, split into two team would spend about a half hour constructing a “fort” in the woods. Then the other team attacks, throwing anything available at them (except rocks, that was the only rule). If you got hit, you were out. Amazingly, there were no serious injuries. Just one kid who took a head shot from a soda can filled with sand. That drew some blood.
Boy, this one time, I picked up a bent stick, and threw it side-armed, and it curved like a boomarang, and I hit all three of the other kids with one shot! Just bounced off each of them, one after the other. It was a thing of beauty! Another time, some kid got hit in the forehead with a pine-cone (and these were proper Ponderosa Pine Cones, not no little shit jobs) and several pieces were stuck in his head.
Good Times!
A lot of these are familiar. Forts, tree houses, pine cone wars, water dams/diversions. Did a lot of blowing things up with fireworks, which we had stolen as we were all so dirt poor none of us could have ever paid for. I think that was my only foray into elementary school crime. We also played war with bb rifles, but could only shoot below the waist, which was always covered in denim. Worked about 99.9% of the time, I don’t think anyone ever got hit much above the belt line. No eyes were put out.
For all of you that pulled wings and legs off of insects, how many progressed to being serial killers? You can be truthful, I promise not to tell anyone else. 
Oh boy, lots of them. We had an old Massey Ferguson farm tractor that I used to mow our 5 acres. I also had a bb gun.
Well, shooting at that old tractor would make a satisfying ding when you hit it. I mean, how can you hurt an old tractor with a bb gun? It was basically a big hunk of steel.
Except for the radiator… oops. Dad was not pleased.
Every plastic model ship I built as a kid was burned for the benefit of my friend with a super 8 camera. We lived near a beach on the bay where we would float the Bismarck or the Queen Mary or whatever stuffed with paper. The plastic burned slow with a thick black smoke and the ship would stay afloat quite awhile before the flames reached the waterline when enough water got in to capsize it. I don’t think we ever got a sinking on film because the models always outlasted the film supply.
Thank you all for these stories that makes one smile.
It is amazing how similar how our childhoods were.
I look at the kids around me glued to their phones and think of all the simple fun they are missing out on.
I try to keep my son on 1/3 reading and craft ,1/3 music, 1/3 phone but it is getting harder. Can’t blame him. TikTok is the most addictive thing I’ve come across. I got stuck in the TikTok rut there for a bit until I realized I am doing nothing else but watch videos until I got to sleep. I uninstalled it in a hurry and life is much better.
Mosquito Larvae- I have to confess that I may have been responsible for a spike in Malaria cases in the neighborhood. I used keep them as pets.
Watch every stage of development until they are ready to fly away.
At the slightest disturbance they would quickly wiggle their way down to the bottom of the bottle. I felt a little sad when they got into the pupal stage and stopped moving.
I also used to keep wild guppies, tiny turtles, paddy snails and mud crabs. Mud crabs never survived for than three days.
My family only had a mono tape recorder when I was growing up. I used to listen to my favorite 70s hits with a 3" speaker on one ear and a speaker from a telephone receiver on the other ear using a Y connection from the earphone jack. It was still mono but sounded a LOT better.
There are landscaping companies here that will charge some serious coin for creating this exact same setup.
When I was a kid the lot next door to my grandmother’s house had a huge municipal water tank on it: probably 40 feet in diameter and 30 feet tall. It was surrounded by an apron of river stones – the little smooth golf ball-sized rocks that are bigger than regular gravel.
Anyway, it was quite amusing to pick up a big handfull of those rocks and throw them at the side of the tank. Each impact resulted in a loud metallic echo sound that would reverberate for a second or two. It was great fun and quite amusing for a kid.
Until the day one of the stones went off target a bit and hit some pipe infrastructure that was attached to to the side of the tank. Instead of nice loud TWANG! we heard a dull clank followed by a barely audible hissing sound.
::whistes innocently, shuffles feet and slowly walks away, totally innocent::