1) Riding in the back of an open pick-up truck with a bunch of other kids
2) Leaving the house after breakfast and not returning until the streetlights came on, at which point, you raced home, ASAP so you didn’t get in trouble
3) Eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the school cafeteria
4) Riding your bike without a helmet
5) Riding your bike with a buddy on the handlebars, and neither of you wearing helmets
6) Drinking water from the hose in the yard
7) Swimming in creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes (or what they now call *cough* "wild swimming")
8) Climbing trees (One park cut the lower branches from a tree on the playground in case some stalwart child dared to climb them)
9) Having snowball fights (and accidentally hitting someone you shouldn’t)
10) Sledding without enough protective equipment to play a game in the NFL
11) Carrying a pocket knife to school (or having a fishing tackle box with sharp things on school property)
12) Camping
13) Throwing rocks at snakes in the river
14) Playing politically incorrect games like Cowboys and Indians
15) Playing Cops and Robbers with *gasp* toy guns
16) Pretending to shoot each other with sticks we imagined were guns
17) Shooting an actual gun or a bow (with *gasp* sharp arrows) at a can on a log, accompanied by our parents who gave us pointers to improve our aim. Heck, there was even a marksmanship club at my high school
18) Saying the words “gun” or “bang” or “pow pow” (there's actually a freakin’ CODE about “playing with invisible guns”)
19) Working for your pocket money well before your teen years
20) Taking that money to the store and buying as much penny candy as you could afford, then eating it in one sitting
21) Eating pop rocks candy and drinking soda, just to prove we were exempt from that urban legend that said our stomachs would explode
22) Getting so dirty that your mom washed you off with the hose in the yard before letting you come into the house to have a shower
23) Writing lines for being a jerk at school, either on the board or on paper
24) Playing “dangerous” games like dodgeball, kickball, tag, whiffle ball, and red rover (The Health Department of New York issued a warning about the “significant risk of injury” from these games) Walking to school alone
25) Come on, be honest. Tell us what crazy stuff you did as a child.
One year we had the urge to try it. So...we soaped our own windows. The screens, too.
The next morning mom asked, "who did that?" We raised our hands.
Do you know how hard it is to get Ivory soap out of screens? Lesson learned. ;-)
My dad teaching me to hunt and shoot before 8.
“war”... Built forts in the woods and shot BB guns at each other... No safety glasses... You will NOT shoot your eye out if you’re a good aim! lol
bump
-PJ
Our moms let us eat candy cigarettes!
I did everything on that list, except sledding. Not much snow in Houston. (And I did a lot more than listed).
I remember a roll of scotch tape and a....cat!
I’m guilty. Of every one of them. And more. I’ll add 3 more items to the list.
26 ) Experimenting with cutting golf balls in half on the kid notion that the inside was either poisonous or highly explosive.
27) Playing with chemistry sets
28) Flying model rockets to see just how high we could get a single-stage vehicle. Whooooooshhh!
Re #22. Shower? We never saw a shower let alone a hose until I was fourteen in 1954. We only had a tub. But fortunately we had indoor plumbing with a toilet.
I took a Colt 1903 .380 automatic to middle school to make a leather holster for it. Kept it in my locker until class and then the teacher kept it for me in her desk till I was done. My high school friends and I always had our Marlin 60’s or Ruger 10/22’s in our trucks and would stop at the road by the school and shoot pop cans from cafeteria. This was in the 80’s.
Take out my single shot 12 gauge and go bird hunting after school at the age of 13.
How about putting an M-80 into two cans that were pushed together...and watching it explode in the middle of the street.
30) We built our own firecrackers. And they WORKED. (Boy, did they ever.)
Holy cow! I freakin’ aced it and throw in the candy cigs for extra credit.
-Used to play with cherry bombs and M-80s back when those things packed a wallop.
-Played cowboys and indians, or WWII, using acorns or small rocks as ammo. If we got hit in a limb, we couldn’t use it till the game was over. If we got hit in someplace that would kill us, we were out of the game. Our folks didn’t call us “knot-heads” for nothing. Also used pokeberries sometimes, because then the other guy couldn’t claim he wasn’t hit. Left a stain on skin or on clothes that would result in a belt or a switch.
-Played “stretch” with a scout knife. Faced opponent and wherever you could throw your knife and make it stick in the ground, he had to stretch his foot to that place. The first to be stretched beyond his limits lost.
Or before that.
The little kids curling up inside of tires and being pushed off of a hill and where they stop no body knows.
Riding on the fenders straddling the headlights, worked fine with the independent head lights.
Doing battle on stilts.
Six to ten year old kids feeding and milking cows, cleaning stalls, chicken and pig pens, carrying water for the garden, hoeing weeds, picking up potatoes.
Kids in school trading peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for bean sandwiches.
Kids sticking their opponents heads down the out house holes and a thousand other things, gee how did any one survive to fight in the first two world wars much less win.
On the other side of the coin kids could go to town and act like kids and not get into much trouble but today they have a record if they as much as fail to do a complete stop at a stop sign.
It is pathetic.
No, it had nothing to do with homosexuality. Just a dozen or so kids, one football, an open field and not much in the way of rules, except whoever had the ball was gonna get smeared.
At the age of about 10, I, along with my younger sister, starting from a lower roof, climbed a ladder of steel rungs coming out of the side of a brick movie theater building. It had no protective cage around it as some had. I didn’t get to the top because one of the rungs was loose and when I grasped it it pulled out and I lost my balance and fell backward. I saved myself from a fall when, perpendicular to the building, I managed to hook the toe of my right foot under the rung above. I hung there by one leg, upside down, crying for help until someone in the theater heard me and came to my aid through a window to the lower roof. I’m not suggesting that such an escapade was justified as an act on independence then or now. It’s just something I survived along with many other acts less dangerous.