...And we liked it!
Posted on 04/14/2015 3:48:13 PM PDT by ButThreeLeftsDo
By today’s safety standards, every baby boomer should have been dead by the time we were 12.
We defied danger on a daily basis. We never knew that we were doing risky things, of course; we just thought that we were having fun. Nonetheless, we spent our days immersed in activities that we’d never for a second allow our children or grandchildren to do. Or even think about doing.
Here are some of the ways we courted trouble:
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Drank water out of the hose!
The 3 biggest families on my street were typical Catholic families, my dentist had 12 kids (yes, my dentist lived on my street), an aircraft engineer who worked with my dad) had 13 and an attorney/ judge had ‘only’ 10. What a great neighborhood...once we made a hot air balloon out of a trash bag, gasoline soaked rags and charcoal...it almost got the woods behind my friend’s house on fire...
Heck with the hot rods... the Schwinn choppers were bad ass...
...And we liked it!
Melting lead? How about a chemistry set with mercury and lead in them? I got it for Christmas...my brother got an electronic set from Radio Shack the same year... and we try to see what lead mercury and electronics can do together...
My brother and I had an indoor Bb gun range. We shot each other a few times...
I thought I was the only one who loved the taste of water out of a hose.
Burned my hand a few times on this.
Yes.. we had those...Creepy Crawlers molds too... I made fishing lures with them...
I remember when I was a tyke, when my dad bought my mom a new 1957 Ford station wagon, a big selling point by Ford was that the newly padded front dashboard would do less damage to the faces of any children that smashed into the dashboard during a wreck than the hard dashboards of previous models.
Googling confirmed my memory:
https://www.mecum.com/lot-detail/SC0514-184424/0/1957-Ford-Country-Squire-Wagon/
Nevertheless, I can distinctly remember going many blocks from home on Halloween when I was four only accompanied by my brother who was a few years older. Nobody thought anything of it.
7 of us walked 6 blocks from our upper middle class neighborhood to the upper class neighborhood at Halloween because we heard they had great candy. One Halloween, I was dressed as the ‘Frito bandito’ and two people up in that neighborhood thought it was wrong. My first taste of Liberalism and PC. I was 9.
LOL. Forgot about the mercury. We had “tons” of it. We’d get it from the old thermostats and the old McDonnel/Miller low water cut offs from the steam boilers. They had a huge glass vial filled with “quick silver” on them.
Made our own hydrogen with some softener salt, a battery and a piece of copper tubing.
Then there was the fun with Estes rocket engines, bamboo garden rods and cannon fuse for industrial sized bottle rockets.
Then there was anything fire related. Homemade Napalm, etc.
Don’t know how I’m still around. (grin)
Oh yes... drank water out of the hose. Anyone remember lawn darts? Oh yes, remember when a cartoon character said, “I shot an arrow into the air, where it lands I do not care.’ My brother did and my brother didn’t care, but my mom did... she took our bow and arrow set away after he put an arrow into my head. Just only for 2 weeks...
“It’s a wussy country now.
Boomers grew up in a golden age. Testosterone met technology, and the result was a LOT of good times.
The girls were just as bad-ass in their own ways.
No computer-phone will ever out-cool a hot rod.”
LOL, ain’t it the truth. I’m a tail end boomer (1962). Building something and seeing it run and make a lot of noise while doing it was the best there was. I also remember girls that were actual tomboys but were all woman in the final analysis.
“One of our things we did was to “accidentally” break a thermometer”
I sure do miss those thermometers because they were so accurate. While visiting my mom at the family homestead built in 1830, we ran across five “real” never-used thermometers. A treasure!
Most teenage boys are pyromaniacs to some degree. I have it under control now.
Oh yes... kids in the front seats... today, it’s a no-no...
“My brother and I had an indoor Bb gun range. We shot each other a few times...”
BB gun fights. We wore two pairs of pants and three shirts. My one friend wore an old welding helmet for a face shield.
Speaking of welding, we had a neighbor who was a welder and huge gun collector. Talk about a fun place to hang out. LOL
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