A fun read, when you've got the time.
My 3 brothers and I made our own fun during the summer in the early 60’s.
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.
To add a little realism, stockpile a handful of hickory nuts or small rocks and hurl them with all your might at the bad guys. If you got hit, tough. You shoulda been an American.
So happy to be part of the last generation allowed complete freedom.
Doctors are now becoming Big Brother agents. Asking at check-ups (which I question need for, anyway) my son if he wears a damn helmet when he rides a bike, which BTW he still doesn’t know how to do and has only managed some tricycle skill. Son says no, he chastises us. Last year I got in a huffy argument with him.
It’s all BS and a great way to enrich the child companies.
Let’s see, vacuumed the toilet out twice, slinky in the electrical outlet, gunpowder manufacturing, melting lead, riding in the back of the pickup, no seatbelts, homemade hydrogen, etc.
One of our things we did was to “accidentally” break a thermometer, then coat nickles with the mercury, which formed interesting little balls amid the broken glass. We had cool-looking, shining nickles when we got done. We probably put all sorts of contaminated nickles into circulation until one of our parents convinced us we would die a horrible death if we ever touched mercury again with our bare hands.
Drank water out of the hose!
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/
Most teenage boys are pyromaniacs to some degree. I have it under control now.