Snow fort builders facing prison time

Metro West Daily News ^ | May 4, 2005 | Norman Miller

[Robert_Paulson2]

The jaw drops. Have we REALLY become this mindless that it is ok to arrest kids for making a snow fort or suspend kids for talking to their mothers serving in the armed forces in Iraq!!??

Is this REALLY what we have become??

---

apparently so.
disgusting what passes for conservatism these days.

conservatives weren't so supportive of stupid governmental policies when clinton was baggin the babes in the oval office, but now they would support a waco incident, to teach the lesson of respecting authority.

janet reno is laughing.

[Robert_Paulson2]

yup.
either the du's are here or the socialists have taken over.

[Robert_Paulson2]

yes

[pageonetoo]

Are you a total jerk, or just a part-time one?

These kids were building a SNOW FORT, when school was OUT. They were walking on SNOW, playing with SNOW, and building with SNOW, which MELTS, and there should be no damage. This is just a case of "NIMBYism in the gumt!

Why should they NOT be allowed on the snow? The property is bought and paid for by their parents, not the janitors, nor the cops.

Your comparisons are not even close to what happened. You can try to make them sound like they did wrong, but they should never have seen a cop! They should only have the local paper show up to take the pics!

Of course, these days, the cops handle 5 yr olds with handcuffs, and make high school students sit on the floor, with guns pointed, and ready, while LEO's searched for drugs.

I do not remember having as many ignorant people on these boards, as there are these days... You are crawling up the list!

Support your local police... they all "protect and serve"!

NO DRUGS WERE FOUND! But, I'll bet they made some kids pee their pants. That probably made them feel like tin gods!

[Robert_Paulson2]

it's almost here.

[eno_]

The moral of this story is: Don't smart-off to cops, be polite!

So that would be "F--- off, sir?"

[DustyMoment]

This is YOUR legacy, you leftist twit.

Go back to DU before the . . . . . .

. . . . . . . ZZZZZZZZZZOOOOOOOTTTTTTT!!

Too late.

No loss.

[Robert_Paulson2]

not sure what you mean...

[Rebelbase]

""He (Smith) told you he begged and pleaded for them to leave for 20 minutes."

When is the last time you ever heard of a cop begging and pleading for someone to stop breaking the law? Cops say stop once then get cuff happy.

20 minutes? Please. Cop is lying, IMO.

[Rebelbase]

"They should have been in a gang stealing some cars like normal kids "

In my town if someone breaks into your car the police will not respond. You have to file a report over the phone.

But they'd probably arrest you for building snow forts on school property when school is closed.

[Diva Betsy Ross]

So your position is you think this case was well handled? The cop did a good job, and is effectively working in the best interests of the community to arrest snow fort builders, and get the case all the way to trial?

This case is a joke. And your making fun of someone does not help it.

[Cobra64]

Yew (look it up). win! Eye'm proud of ya.

As one of me historee professurs one ce toll me. Do not bother to get involved in intellectual combat with and unarmed individual.

So I only work on very large accounts. Our children both have their economics, science, and (one)physics degree(s).

BTW, have you ever diagrammed a sentence?

Troll, why knot go back to DU where the DUmmies live in their Underground?

[jwh_Denver]

I know what you mean. Back when I was growing up in the 50's and 60's I broke my leg at a friends place. A neighbor fell from the top of one our trees. We kids were getting minor injuries all the time but I don't think it ever occurred to any parent to sue somebody. I also remember one of our neighbors couldn't find work for awhile and my dad and other neighbors would give them what we could afford with never the thought of paying us back.

I think lawsuits and/or the threat of them killed off some of the real neighborliness today. A good meeting ground for the neighbors to meet each other was through their kids playing with other kids and then the parents meeting each other. I really don't know how parents react now when their kid gets hurt in somebody elses yard. I suppose it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood.

Like you were saying it's hard to know now just what to do.

[Aliska]

I really don't know how parents react now when their kid gets hurt in somebody elses yard. I suppose it varies from neighborhood to neighborhood.

I don't know and don't want to find out. It would seem to have something to do with "deep pockets" vs. "squeezing blood out of a turnip".

The only thing I can think of is to circle the wagons and plant shrubs :-).

Some boys are still boys. Can you relate?

[jwh_Denver]

Oh yeah I can relate. Holes in the jeans at the knees. I would've had cuffs though and probably been up and down that tree more than a few times too. A boy needs to rest some time though. LOL!

[Aliska]

I think my greatest achievement in life was the treehouse I built at my grandmother's. Actually it was a platform with another platform that served as a "roof". Access was by three boards making a crude ladder with a 2x4 wedged into the crotch of the tree to get some leverage to make the final ascent to the lower platform. It never got enclosed or a proper door because I lacked the expertise. Getting onto the upper platform was really tricky, but I managed. When I tired of the ladder, I climbed down onto the roof of the dog house on the other side.

I was so proud of that thing and dreamed many happy dreams on lazy summer afternoons. Often I would hear the 5:00 train whistle in the distance.

Alas, after Grandma died, the house was sold, and in the process of converting it into a duplex it caught fire and burned to the ground. Everything was razed. Barn, chicken houses, all the trees, and my beloved tree house all but a memory. Someone built a fancy new one-story and graded the huge lot and planted grass and put up an ugly utility building. It was at the edge of a small town.

I suspect arson, really I do :-). It's all but a memory now. I've never forgiven those people for ruining my treehouse. It should have made the National Register of Historic Places.

[jwh_Denver]

People, places, pets, and things that we loved live in our hearts as long as we live. I moved around so much when I was a child I never had a tree fort. Then we ended up in a southern suburb of Chicago we had those soft Maple trees which weren't really strong enough for them. I think my happiest times as a kid was when I lived in a trailor court about 30 miles east of Pittsburgh PA in the country. I guess there were about 30 to 40 trailors and we were all neighborly except for the always present grouch or two. I lived there when I was 6 through 8 years old.

Next to the trailor court was a place we called the "dips" for the hills it had in them. Somehow we managed to make two baseball diamonds. One of them we had to cut a fairly good size tree down with a hatchet. Can you imagine today parents knowing their kid was using a hatchet? Well our parents just let us roam and we had so much fun out there in the country. Sometimes we would plan to do an all day hike which our mothers would make sandwhiches for us. Then off we'd go. Those were the only days we didn't play baseball amoung other things. In the winter sledding was the thing, good hills for it. One of the kids father made us a 6 seater bobsled which if the snow was good we could ride from the tallest hill right down into the yard of the guy who made it for us. He was a coal miner and his youngest son was one of the buds in our group. Come to think of it I don't know why we never built a tree fort. ??

I have resolved that I will never go back to that place as I don't want my memories to be replaced by seeing subdivisions and an asphalt road instead of a tar road. I don't want to see the changes.

You've given me the thought of maybe writing a book about my life. Not that it was exceptional or anything like that but my life is unique to me. I lived in a time that most people today would have a hard time believing.

You're tree fort is a Historical Site. It lives in your memory and hardly a sign in front of it even if saved could ever come close to remembering it the way you do.

[Aliska]

I'll try to get back to your interesting post later. Yes, you should write a book. It would be fun to reconnect with a female(s) your age (if you could find them again, hard to do) you knew at the time whose memories intersected with some of yours and compared notes on how you each viewed the world in your separate ways, how you related to each other, more on that later.

In the meantime, I have to content myself with photographing treehouses that catch my eye that some parents have built for their kids. These aren't my best photos, but I've got worse ones, too :-)

I took that one picture out from before. You had a chance to look anyway. Am a little hesitant to post pics of kids on the net. Another "issue".

I'll take these out, too, after you've had a chance to "appreciate the building skills" in the interest of bandwidth or maybe not. Depends.

[jwh_Denver]

Whoa! Very nice! The top one I would call a tree "hut" because it has more airy spaces, while the other one is really a tree house that around age 14 or so you might like to take a sweet young thing up to an work out some mysteries. LOL!

Got cable, bandwidth no problem.

I understand your reluctance to put kids pictures. How did you put those pictures in? I tried Front Page and that has always worked before but it's not working now. ??

[Aliska]

I upload them to my own domain webspace and just put in the html code right in my post here. There are picture hosting sites, but I don't like to use them.

I haven't used Front Page and use Netscape 7 Composer when I want to do an html page. Here I just code it - substitute left and right < > these things for the ( ). Each picture has to be coded in separately with a line break after. They look better centered, but you don't have to bother with that.

(center)(img src="http://www.yourwebspace.com/Treehouse1.jpg")(/center)

Simple as that. If I made a mistake, in your browser look at view>page source on fr pages and find the coding for an image.

Wish the day hadn't been so gloomy on the second one and I hate wires. There are a couple more around here I hope to catch someday.

I'm sure lots of fun stuff goes on in enclosed treehouses. Maybe you could include a section in your book about your exploits into those mysteries. For myself, better keep it private lol.

As to kid pictures, that was my grandson and I don't know if my son would like me posting it on the web. I do lots of kid pictures, and we've had discussions ad nauseum about photogrpahing stange kids in parks, etc., on a photography group. I try to never post any pictures of kids who aren't mine (have lots of neighbor kids doing cute things, strange kids in the park, etc.) without their parents' permission, and explaining why I want permission and where they were to be posted would be problematical for this site, indeed any even wholesome site, with some folks lol. The whole world can then see them It's a touchy subject. We've had huge arguments about it. I just made up my mind not to do it because I don't want some stranger taking ANY pictures of me or my kids/grandkids and posting them ANYWHERE on the net. So then I shouldn't do it with THEIR kids. I do burn cd's for the parents sometimes, and the kids love that.