From thealy50 @ tumblr:
1962 ad:
Mr. Beaverhousen on Flickr.
Posted on 06/21/2015 2:03:59 PM PDT by QT3.14
My kids start camp tomorrow. This is part of the email I received from the camp:
There are a few things that we want to make sure you know before you bring your child in to begin camp:
Students must bring a lunch and snacks (if desired) for all full day programs. The lunches and snacks must be non-perishable as they will not be refrigerated. We ask that you do not bring any peanut products in for snack and lunch, as we have a large number of students with peanut allergies. We encourage students to bring a water bottle everyday, which can be refilled at our water fountain.
Did all 25.
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 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)
25.Walking to school alone
I done everyone of those things, and would do them again if I had the chance.
Oh yes, same here (all 25 and more). On the hang-glider, I went so far as to meld plastic to a sheet by using an iron and wax paper, which worked pretty well. I was up on a precipice getting ready to jump, lost my balance and the whole contraption fell straight down (no glide), hit the ground and split in two. So seeing that, I decided not to re-build and try again.
As a teenager in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood where houses were fairly close to each other, one of our favorite past-times was roof-hopping, which is self-explanatory.
Playing “war” was taken to an art form. Strategies, techniques, maneuvers, etc. We used toy guns, spears, and dirt clod grenades. And yes, people got hurt quite often. And we loved it!
“Like the author, I also survived my teenage attempt to fly a home-made hang-glider.”
In my case it was a parasail made from a surplus chute with a conduit cross bar and a swingset seat. Pulled it with a boat on the Mississippi and car at the local airport.
LOL!
You just reminded me. We used to like to try to build homemade rockets.
After enough launchpad disasters, we figured out it was more fun and much easier to just build small bombs. (Good gawd, could you imagine that in this day and age?)
Did FLOTUS approve this? /s
He left out launching cherry bombs with a Wham-O slingshot.
Making experimental Molotov cocktails back when kids could buy gasoline.
I remember smacking a roll of "caps" with a hammer just to see what happened Sometimes a nice detonation, sometimes not.
Heck, having a roll of caps now is probably a felony and bring the BATF SWAT teams down on you.
The only no-no was enclosing bits of gravel in the snowballs.
I did most of it and I'm a female.
I remember when I first moved to Seattle from Montana in the early 90s and occasionally the family I lived with would ask me to escort their first grade daughter from the library where she waited after school to her house when their schedules didn’t permit it. It was about 5 blocks, I think. I said, “Of course, I’m happy to do this, but I think when we were that age we walked home by ourselves.” The mother(from a small town in Nebraska) said, “Oh, of course we did, but but things are different now.” She was right, of course. I remember when I was 4 or 5, one of my jobs was driving the neighbors milk cows back toward their place and although it was only a quarter mile or so away, it was out of sight of our house. He let them out to graze the roadside and since we left our gate open a lot, they would come in and lounge around. The funny thing is I was a very sheltered child by the standards of the time. My mother forbad playing around building sites and other stuff that friends did. But by the standards of today, I was a free-range kid, I guess.
The nice thing about pure bombs was that they exploded where they were placed. My rockets, if they didn’t blow up on the pad, had a tendency to get as far as a neighbor’s house and blow up there.
There were steel swing sets with 8 to 10 foot chains. You could swing so high you were guaranteed to break something if you fell off. The big trick was to swing so hard you could do a 180 over the top.
There were also metal see-saws that were about 12 feet total, so you were almost 5 feet off the ground on the upswing. Some dirty rat kids (older brothers) would jump off when they were on the downswing and the kid on the upswing would go crashing down to the ground right onto their tailbone. There were also the steel and wood merry-go-rounds in the playgrounds. Hold on, run around until it was going fast, jump on, and then all the kids lean back as far as they could to keep the momentum going.
Now they don't even teach physics properly in high school unless it's about celebrating a gay physicist, but these playground adventures were one of the ways we learned about mechanical dynamics.
We did that on the front sidewalk until Dad noticed that it left black marks that took years to fade. Also, boys in our high school were notorious for throwing cherry bombs in the toilets. BOOM!
I would hunt rabbits with my .22 in vacant lots close by our neighborhood when I was about 11.
One day a police officer came out and shot me.
(Just kidding) Actually, he gave me a lesson in always insuring that I had a proper safe shooting backstop and pointed out a more safe area to shoot rabbits.
All 25 plus playing in quicksand.
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