Posted on 04/14/2015 3:48:13 PM PDT by ButThreeLeftsDo
“One was “Army”. Get a baseball bat or a healthy stick and be Vic Morrow mowing down krauts or japs (any brother that wasn’t you) with a BAR or a Garand.”
That brings back memories. All the good “gun” sticks were hoarded and kept inside or hidden for later use. My dad smoked Murial Air Tips cigars with the plastic mouthpiece, so we would look for a cigar butt laying around outside. The best ones still had a piece of cigar in them.
You had to have a cigar in your mouth when playing Army. You also had to be able to make the best machine gun sound with the cigar in your mouth. (grin)
“Often electric equipment, fans, drills, saws, electric lawn mowers, would have the metal casing around the motor grounded to the neutral. If you touched it with wet hands or while standing on wet grass, you got a jolt! The plug was not polarized with a wide and narrow slot to keep polarity straight. It was common to see a plug with the “ground” plug clipped or broken off so it could be used in a two prong outlet.”
Yes, the advent of “double insulating” power tools and plastic/bakelite housings.
Remember the ones you were supposed to be able to eat? Absolutely horrid.
We had station wagons. Never any fear of getting our little faces smashed in on the dash. We were always rolling and sliding around in the “way back” part...
Oh, get a grip on yourself and take some smelling salts.
The highest death rate for males was 37.7 per 100,000. Not even close to one percent. I’ll leave it to you to do the arithmatic to find the fraction of one percent.
Prefer more deaths my ass. Stupid people doing stupid things earn stupid prizes. And they some times learn important lessons. It was ever thus.
I remember one woman turning us down because she didn't recognize us as any of her neighbor kids. And we lived maybe three or four blocks away from the %$%$## (rhymes with witch). Not that we didn't get enough candy from the regular sources.
But as I got older and stopped trick or treating, I remember my mother (who always passed out the candy) never asking anybody where they were from and turning them down if they weren't from our neighborhood. Never asked when I was an adult and passed out candy.
I set the haystack on fire at 4. Set a field on fire at 9.
Matches were fun, till caught!
Now I blacksmith and can play with fire all I want! Strange. When fire becomes WORK, it is no longer fun.
I got hit with an arrow 1/2 inch below the left eye when I was 9. Hit in the shoulder a few years later.
Almost shot out another kid’s eye with a cork gun, way too many BB fights and snow fights? WOW! The other kids started putting rocks in their snowballs. We countered by putting cactus in ours.
I sure do miss those thermometers because they were so accurate. >>>>>>>>>>>
Oh, I know! I’ve spent big bucks on the new-fangled ones with electronic readouts! The old ones were the best!
I must admit, though, my daughter recently gave me one that plugs into the I-Phone, reads very quickly and accurately, and stores the data, which is handy when you’re sick and the doc wants to know what’s been going on. But it sure doesn’t make nice, shiny nickles. You are right that the old ones you found are indeed treasures!
I’m a fulltime blacksmith and make a living out of making custom bottle openers.
It’s just a flesh wound.
Compound fractures are great teaching tools. When my friend, Paul, fell off the monkey bars, I learned an important lesson about gravity.
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