Wrist Rocket and steel ball bearings. They also made ammo that would snap and release a puff of smoke on impact. The funny thing is, with things like wrist rockets and BB guns and later .22s, we never did anything truly destructive with them. Not in a million years would we have even gone so far as to shoot out a window, and we certainly wouldn’t have shot at people with them. Bottle rocket fights were another matter, but that was only between friends. Well OK, there was that one time that we launched a barrage of dozens of bottle rockets simultaneously at the kid across the street while he was sitting on his porch, folding up the newspapers that he was about to deliver (never knew he was such a dancer), but that was a momentary lapse of judgment. During the ensuing dancing and screaming his mom came running and opened the door…big mistake. That was like opening a porthole to see what all the fuss was about as your ship is receiving a full-on broadside from a pirate ship. Bottle rockets were flying inside the house and now everyone was dancing. We got in big trouble over that one…big, big trouble.
We made bows and arrows out of hazelnut suckers. They worked well enough to shoot across the back yard. I had a sling shot made from a tree and thin strips of bicycle tire tubbing. Didn’t need the toy store. Kids this day don’t have that sort of imagination. Do they?