Posted on 03/04/2016 10:06:31 AM PST by PROCON
If you grew up in the 1960s or 1970s, then you know how relaxed everything used to be. Our parents never forced us to wear seatbelts, we pretty much at whatever we wanted, and were given way more responsibiity than we should have been given. It's a little sad kids today won't get to experience half the things we did, but looking back, there's a good reason why they won't.
Were these 12 things we did as kids kind of dangerous? Yeah, maybe some of it was.
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Of course They usually ended up in mailboxes!
>>> I looked like a road rash pizza for about a month.
Wow. We were so much more cautious. We only tried dragging our feet along the road, while sitting on the station wagon tailgate, while being driven along a gravel road.
Yep. Liberals wreck everything. But that's only for good families with working parents. If you're a crappy kid-beating parent, and on welfare, they'll keep the kid with you right through the autopsy. DCF totally sucks. It's universal. What do you expect from idiots who spent a quarter million bucks on a masters in social work for a $40,000 a year job?
We called it smear the queer. I guess that would not go over to well today.
My mom was a nurse. We had mayonnaise jars full of the stuff, it was so cool to play with.
Bummer-people sure know how to keep kids from having fun now...
We had a tall cement cistern that was part of the stock-watering setup, but ranch next to ours had an old in-ground cistern-the rancher who lived there went on stock-buying trips to Mexico, like pretty much everyone else, but since his wife was from there, they would go more often than any of my family did.
That woman was hateful-she complained to our moms because we were in their orchard picking up the oranges that had fallen on the ground, even though she always left them there to rot. We all got scolded and threatened with a switching-we were pissed, so the next time they left on a trip, we went over there with a couple of bushel baskets, wrestled the cover off the cistern and tossed in all the oranges we found on the ground in the orchard, and covered the thing back up. The whole place smelled like rotted fruit by the time they got home, and we got scolded and restricted from riding the horses, shooting, or going out of the yard for a week that time, but we remained unrepentant...
Next time they left, we lit some stuff on fire in an underground storage room they had, but that is another story...
How about bottle rockets, launched from a wiffle bat, at each other.. Yeah, that dump.
Yes I do my friend! In fact, there was a guy back in high school, who flushed an M-80 down a toilet at our school and it burst the pipe. I thought that was bad to tha' bone. Our school had to have a plumber come and take that toilet out and dig down to the pipe and replace it. Very destructive! There was no need for that. That was going to far.
If playing with mercury is that dangerous-why aren’t we all dead or maimed, since we have all played with it...
“Bend firecrackers in half, light the middle, they fizzle but then explode when you stomp on them.” Also blew up if a little piece of fuse had remained.
Great question.
I think that applies to a lot of overhyped “dangers”
We used to set up “ battlefields” with our models and then fill them with black powder. Leaving a trail of powder like the beginning of Wild, Wild West, we’d light em off. Instant carnage, and a reason to get new models. My little brother tried once when we were all out of the house—he’s still got little blue specks tattooed on his forehead from tipping the lit match into the pile. Took quite a while to get his eyebrows back.
In HS we used to go out to the Beach on Saturday night and the guys would end up doing 30 mile punchouts. Its a miracle nobody got killed but they never did.
When I was 6 years old I was hit by a car in Guadalajara Mexico. That was also a glancing blow but the driver smashed into a bridge abutment trying to avoid me and then came after me with a flyswatter to punish me. My brother who was eight and our friend who was also 8 were just running around on our own. Neither one of us believed that Mexico had any laws and that we could do whatever we wanted
How about wire ball??
In Cub Scouts, we carved rockets out of wood, inserted a CO2 cartridge into the back end, and then had them whiz across the school auditorium along a clothesline-like wire. There was even a spring-loaded tool with a needle that we used to set them off by puncturing the seal on the cartridge. These could be bought at hobby stores.
I had a plastic model car that was designed to have a CO2 cartridge inserted into the back end. The car was constrained on a tether and when the cartridge was fired (with the aforementioned tool), it would whiz around in a circle. It went around so fast it was barely visible.
I remember those!
Awesome memory.
God bless CARBON!!!
In the 50`s my grandfather would take me to the local hardware store, buy a case of dynamite and then proceed to various properties in the neighborhood, push the stick under an big old tree stump, ligh`er and run back of another tree. It was fun. Later on in 1957-58 after Sputnik, the US Army encouraged all the youth of America to build rockets so we could catch up to the Russians. I promptly got some, saltpeter, gunpowder, sulphur, sawdust, etc., zinc powder and some tubing, made some rockets with little dollar cameras you could order form the comic books. Then had a delayed Camera trip via fuse to the parachute load. The local police would say to us, when I showed him the US Army book on how to build rockets, “Be careful, boys. Try not to hit any planes flying over.” The local town board actually warned local pilots to steer clear of the 50 acre stretch of pasture where we were firing our rockets. This went on for 2 years and nobody bothered us. We even won science awards a the school area science shows. we carried the rockets, some 6 feet long, from the house 3 miles to the school right thru town and nobody even bothered us.
IT WAS FREEDOM AMERICA!!!
Another fun thing was to take the old metal tennis ball cans, put one tennis ball in, pour some gasoline over it and throw in a match. The pressure would build up and shoot a burning tennis ball about fifty feet.
I also remember taking three foot sections of pipe and using it as a launcher for bottle rockets and having wars with them.
Ah, M80’s.. Used to so them in the ponds. Toss them late, so not to go deep, water everywhere.
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