Gotta be from the 1960's. Three VW and they are six volt. VW went to 12 Volts in 1967.
I'm trying to raise my two boys with many of the same freedoms I got to experience, only I just don't want to get arrested and have my kids hauled away by child services.
Trying not to be too much of a helicopter parent either. Back when I was a kid, "helicopter parent" meant your dad flew choppers in 'Nam.
Those wonderful lazy summer days...
Momma would usher us out the door by 7am and we’d hear the lock click as we headed off. Sometimes, around mid-day we would come back looking for some food. The kitchen window would open up and out flew a box of saltines and a finger pointing to the spigot. :-)
Six of us kids in the family. We had our own filing cabinet down at the hospital. Stitches? Just another day in kid paradise...
I fell from a ladder in the garage while feeding kittens. About age 10.
I hurt my wrist. My parents waited one week, before taking me to the doctor to learn I had fractured the wrist.
About 7 years later, I got into a fist fight, and broke my hand (boxer’s knuckle). My father’s attitude was “serves you right” and “you’re almost 18, think you know it all, I don’t want to pay your doctor bills.”
That’s right, people paid their own doctor bills.
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.
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!
-BB gun fights.
-Playing Hide and Seek in the woods...at night.
-Remember when soda cans were made out of real tin. We would duct tape 6 together, pour a little lighter fluid in the end and touch it off with match. BOOM!!! and it was reuseable.
-Walking to and from Christmas Midnight Mass, by myself, in Chicago, in the snow, at age 11 and 12.
-Walking home from school in the rain and making it a contest as to who could get the wettest. We’d stand by the biggest puddles on the road and wait for cars to splash us.
Born in 1961, but my life was tame compared to my Dad’s...
Proposed raising our kids according to 1960’s or 70’s standards and my wife was not pleased.
Oh, well I feel sorry for them.
Gotta be from the 1960's. Three VW and they are six volt. VW went to 12 Volts in 1967.
I was born in 1967 and this brings back great memories. I remember being seven and my grandmother was staying with us while my parents were out of town. I went too high on a swing set, went sailing through the air and landed with a stick jabbing into my hand. My grandmother told me to wash it off (which back then consisted of putting it under water with no soap for about three seconds) and put a band-aid on it, so that's what I did. My parents got back a few days later and I showed my mom my hand because it still hurt, she took me to the doctor and it turned out I had blood poisoning because it wasn't cleaned out. No big deal and the doctor, my parents and my grandmother all acted like it was my fault in the first place.
Where to begin?
Cardboard sliding on the dried grass on the steep hills behind the house. We'd swipe refrigeration boxes and schlep them up hills all day long, the trick was to know when to bail off before you slammed into the barbed wire fence at the bottom.
We built a three level tree fort on an oak that hung 40 feet over the bay, I still cant believe nobody died from that project.
We build wooded coasters (No brakes) and flew down our street that ended in a "T" intersection at the botom, we'd shoot across the road and go flying into thick bushes to stop.
We'd walk from school to downtown, (a couple miles) underground in the storm drains.
I had two tall pine trees in the front yard about eight feet apart and me and my buddy would race each other to the top, and when the wind was blowing the tops would sway towards each other enough so we could cross over and race down. (I did loose it about halfway down once, hit every branch, and lost skin on my front, back, sides, and arms. The Bactine bath I got was worse than the fall. That crap stung like a bastard.)
Lots of fun with BB guns and firecrackers.
We'd get together with the kids up the street and had massive dirt clod wars in the oaks and poison oak patches.
The good ol' days...
Thanks D68 for starting this Thread, a nice change from all the depressing news out there.
YO! Guys, over here....
I was also thinking ... Mom and the kids on the bikes have this really creepy similarity to Chief Justice Roberts’ family.
Like Stepford-level creepy.
We had a mini-bike.
We lived Phoenix for a couple years when I was small, back in the mid-60’s. My parents would take the whole brood to Encanto Park for a day of jollity. There was a long concrete storm ditch that ran down the side of the mountain. We would sit on flat rocks and coast down the ditch. The only way to land was to come up short upon the rock pile at the bottom of the ditch. It was surrounded by cacti.
Had us some fun times until Mom caught us.
bttt
Thanks for the link to this - good for the new year!
Bangsite (calcium Carbide).
Lighter fluid tennis ball cannons.
Crossman 760 BB guns pumped up until you could barely close the pump.
Horse chestnut wars with slingshots, including those that still had hard dried out spike exteriors. There was nothing like getting hit in the back and having it stick.
Fun with Red Dot powder swiped from shotgun shell reloading.
Estes rockets launched horizontally from a paper tube.
Potato cannons using right guard.
Yeah, we should be dead
I threw myself on the ground crying when I had to come in a take a bath....