The things we did as kids

[Ed62]

It's a wonder any kids grow up. When we were kids, we did some stupid things. Among them:

1. We'd look for long cigarette butts that someone threw away. If we found one, we'd smoke it.

2. If we could find a thermometer, we'd break the glass, then pour the mercury in our hands to rub on a dime to really make it shine.

3. We'd play baseball during a bad thunderstorm.

Don't ask me how, but I'm still kicking. What did you do?

Ed

[Richard in Smithville]

We use to climb the Scarborough Bluffs. I can remember sitting a the base of the Bluffs one fine spring day. We decided to move along the shore line and when we got a few hundred feet along, a mud slide burried where we were sitting!

[dkhoward]

hehehe . . we used to

* climb up under the railroad trestle, right under the tied and rails and sit there while the express freights went over, sometimes putting our heads against the ties to feel it

* stick two pieces of rebar in the ground, attach wires to each one and the other end of the wire to a welder and watch the worms come wiggling out of the ground.

* pack black cat firecrackers into a coke bottle and through it into a metal barrel that has a fire built into it.

[LCHIEN]

put a firecracker into a glass bottle, lit it and ran a "safe" distance away...
then the pieces of glass come flying by my head and I thought, how stupid was that?

[Uncle Cracker]

Although I did do the mercury and the dime thing, probably the most dangerous thing I did with regularity was spend a month or so every summer tent camping in the Everglades...

[Cheeky]

pile leaves up in the middle of a country road, and across the whole thing......really, really high

pull a really big panda bear across the road with a strong fishing line

seems like everything we did was to disrupt traffic

[leehljp]

Firecrackers, trains, mercury, all of that. I loved to take the firecracker powder out of firecrackers and try to make a home made rocket with those small CO2 packs. Never worked but it sure made some good mini b-ombs.

Living on a farm with about 40 acres of virgin forest back in the late 50's and early 60's, It was my duty to clear out the stumps. I was in my early teens when the total responsibility was transferred to me. Do you know that dynamite makes good firecrackers?!! Not only did I get the stumps out of the ground, I sent some flying 200 - 250 yards!

Dad told me that we would have to rent a dozer to fill in the craters! Oh yea, Did you know that the seemingly oderless dynamite smoke can cause migranes? IT DOES! Believe me, it does!

Those were the days! And Yes, I am very fortunate to be alive with all that I did.

[crokett]

Let's see...

A pipe in the ground at an angle makes a nice mortar when you drop a lit cherry bomb in it. Shoot enough of em and eventually the pipe will start to bulge at the bottom. Ride a bike with no brakes down a STEEP hill in the back yard. Jump off the kitchen roof - Approx 9' drop. BB gun wars. I will post more when I think of 'em.

[twistsol]

Our neighbors owned a gift and hobby shop and had lots of cardboard boxes that we burned in the driveway. We'd line them up on the driveway, cover them in gas, light them up and try to jump over them on our bicycles, just like Evil Knievel. No injuries but the whole neighborhood had rather curious hair. No pads or helmets of course.

One summer they were putting high voltage power cables through the fields about a mile away. They stretched the cables across the last tower and tied them off to a big CAT and left them for the weekend. We got the neighborhood kids to hang from one cable and then all but one of us would let go at the same time. Whoever was left hanging on got launched. The parents put an end to it after Mark broke his leg and I came home with a broken arm two hours later.

Every summer day, you'd leave the house in the morning, have lunch at whoever's house you were close to and had to be home by supper time. We also played a game called tie up tag. It was just like hide and seek except that we played it at night, and instead of counting to 100, whoever was IT, was tied up and thrown in the weeds. When they got themselves untied they went looking. If my older brothers tied you up, you never went looking.

My wife thinks I grew up completely unsupervised.

[Tom Slick]

what about riding in a cars without wearing a seatbelt. I remember being small enough that I could stand on the seat while riding down the road. we'd also side on the sides of the bed of a pickup while going down the road. both of those have been illegal in calif. for at least 17 years, for good reason.

[DJehlik]

My brother and I flew control-line model airplanes, tethered with wire lines 40 - 60 ft. long. It got real exciting when we flew them during the approach of a summer thunderstorm (central Iowa) and the static build-up was such that it would produce a series of arcs from the wires to our hands. That was a real exercise in endurance since we couldn't land the plane safely until the engine ran out of fuel.

[Wood_workur]

My english teach told us stories of crossing a train bridge in our neighborhood that is about 100 feet over a river/boat docks. I went to check it out once, and it is just ties across a truss with the tracks on that, so if you fell, or a train came.....

[jon_ramp]

We had a hay barn that still had the old rail at the roof peak designed to be used with the block and tackle hay fork system. While originally designed to be used with horses to pull the load up, we used the tractor instead. Once the barn was about 3/4 full, while we were waiting for loads to come in from the field, my friends and I for fun would pull each other up from the ground by hand rather than with the tractor to the roof peak. Once to the top you would ride down the rail until someone on the ground pulled the trip rope and fell into the hay below. There was no "safety" for the rider if your friends should let go of the rope before you got to the top and engaged the rail.

Once a year there was a senior lock out night at the fraternity house. My brother and another friend fed bottle rockets into the back of a 6' section of electric conduit that I held over my shoulder like a bazooka out a strategic 2nd floor window. Fortunately no injuries suffered, just the back of my t-shirt was full of burn holes.

[BobSch]

We used to fly hydrogen baloons. Took a glass bowl, put water and a little acid (don't remember where we got that) and two wires. Connect a battery charger to the wires and oxygen would bubble off one wire and hydrogen off the other. Used the hydrogen to fill dry-cleaning bags and let then go. That all ended when we sent one up at night with a chunk of slow burning fuse attached. The whole neighborhood came out to see what the bright flash and boom was all about.

[prlundberg]

It's funny how many of these things sound familiar.

I remember contests to see who could stick a lawn dart in the ground the furthest. By throwing them straight up in the air.

And of course, soon as there was any ice on a lake or pond we would have to check the thickness, jumping up and down on it to see how safe it was.