Posted on 08/15/2014 9:54:14 AM PDT by Drew68
My kid’s generation weren’t totally whimps. I got to see the impact of what can happen when you put dry ice into a 2 litre bottle of water, and what happens when you tape a bunch of sparklers together. Better boom factor than we ever had.
My little sister would fall asleep standing up and leaning on my dad’s shoulder in the truck. I liked to get down on the floor board and play with my cars on the seat.
“We used running chainsaws and called them Charts.”
Now we know what happened to you.
You caught a Chart while it was in the air and running with your head.
Are those “snakes” still around? Haven’t seen them since I was a kid, but I haven’t really frequented fireworks stands in decades. Mostly I recall us kids putting bottle-rockets in the barrels of our toy rifles and firing them at each other.
Used to be a lot of toys with projectiles flying out of them. Loved the old Estes and Centauri model-rockets. Still have a slew of old Tonka/Buddy toys... heavy, metal toy-cars and such, full of nice, sharp edges.
Showing these to kids nowadays, or talking about my childhood experiences seems to blow their minds. Still hard to think of the 1970s as so culturally distant from today, but it all started adding up, and you can now recognize the massive sea-change.
rock fights.
Actual fights consisting of groups of kids throwing rocks at each other as hard as we could.
We'd poke a hole in the bottom can, squirt lighter fluid down the barrel and in the bottom hole, stuff in a tennis ball down the barrel and light the bottom with a flaming stick.
Wait a second, and... THWUUUP! The tennis ball fired out about 100 yards. Of course, then we'd have “wars” with each other firing rocket-propelled tennis balls at each other.
Ah, good times. And we lived to tell about it!
After scout meetings we played a form of mumbly pegs called stretch. Stick your knife in the ground and the other kid has to step one of his feet over to it. Then he takes a turn. The point of the game is to stick it so far out that he falls over making the stretch.
When my dad found out he was shocked! “You are dulling your knife?? How are you ever gonna kill anybody with your knife so dull from stickin’ it in the ground?!”
I told the other scouts and of course we were all so moved by such unassailable logic that we never played the game again.
Our troop motto: “252 is better than you!” Good times indeed.
We made our own darts using a corn cobs, nails, and chicken feathers. My brother perfected different designs for accuracy and distance.
Yep, words can not describe in 1965, when those X-Ray glasses I bought didn't work. :(
I remember this toy we had in the 60’s that you poured a liquid plastic into a mold and then heated in a small heater which would make worms and bugs. You could make rubber cockroaches, centipedes and other bugs. We once left it plugged in and almost burned down the house.
Then we had a soldering gum like Stick you’d plug in and could burn words and pictures into a piece of wood. Left that plugged in a few times and we only would realize it cause the heat would cause something to melt and/or start smoldering and we’d smell the stink.
Creepy crawlers, that is it!
your wife would be worth her wait in gold in the near future.
With the cost of healthcare, and the fact that healthcare service quality will be like employee customer service at a downtown McDonalds, a man or woman who can do all what you posted will be invaluable.
Two words: Hobby Lobby. They have most of those things. Other arts/crafts stores (Michaels, for instance) have them as well, but HL is particularly well stocked.
But also look into whether you have a dedicated mom/pop hobby store in your area and explore that/those first before going to the large chains.
6. IGNORED AND UNATTENDED ON THE REGULAR
When I was about 4 years old we were camping with a bunch of my Dad’s siblings and their kids at a big reservoir in Kansas. Our car was parked on a big hill up above the swimming beach where all of the moms and kids (my dad and uncles were fishing elsewhere)were swimming and sunbathing (and in the mom’s case smoking and drinking Old Milwaukee). I wandered away and went up the hill to our old Dodge. It had the pushbutton transmission on the dash. I was obsessed with the car radio and apparently started pushing the buttons on the transmission and got the car into neutral. The car rolled down the hill, narrowly missing running over my mom and Aunt Lois and went into the lake. My older brother (now deceased God rest his soul)pulled me out of the car as it filled up with water. I still hear about that one from my surviving relatives at the family reunions.....
we called them Polish Cannons.
By the way, this thread is one of the funniest things I have read in years. Everyone sharing so many common stories of what we all grew up with.
All the garbage today, the Obama presidency, Ferguson Racial crap, bad economy, the Middle East, lack of border, etc etc, its nice to read these stories.
My dad kept a spray bottle with alcohol in it in his garage. His garage was also the neighborhood bar. He had a beer fridge out there full of PBR and Schlitz. His buds would be out mowing their yards at daylight so they could finish up and get to Dad’s bar by 10 AM.
For fun, he would spray the alcohol through a lit lighter at wasps to catch them on fire.
I had my first Schlitz at 14 in that garage.

I used to really love playing with mine. Mom kept having to buy me more Plasticgoop.
BDParrish, the kids I knew played stretch by throwing their knife at the other guys foot, usually 10-15 ft away.
If the knife didn’t stick in the ground, you didn’t have to stretch. I watched in fascination as the teens played such a stupid game.
Sorry about the size everyone!
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Like packing black powder from firecrackers into empty C02 cartridges to use for blowing up beehives etc. in a nearby orchard?”
Or using the same as depth charges for muskrat in the nearby swamp...
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