Stuff you did as a kid? Glad to still be here?

[Henro]

Time for a fun thread. No politics. Just examples how we leaned things as kids back then...and survived...LOL

I posted a couple past childhood experiences in another thread, copied them here rather than retype, and added a couple others:

Just remembered something from when I was a kid. We had a metal can, probably would hold about a gallon of liquid, and was the shape of a normal cylinder. It had about an inch of gas in the bottom. We kept being impressed, because we could throw burning bits of sticks into the gas at the bottom of the can, and the gas would put out the burning embers and never catch fire.

AND we were close, looking into the can as we did it!

Thinking back on this, all I can say is WOW!

And:

You know, I just remembered another one. Amazes me perhaps even more.

I am not sure why we had hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid as kids.

But we did. AND we did not have any flasks. BUT we did have some incandescent light bulbs. Solution? Break open the bulb from the bottom, and open it up, after pulling the filament out, who hoo, a pseudo flask appeared.

AND we naturally poured the water into the acid, backwards from the recommended practice, and watched it bubble in our homemade "flask". Why, thinking back, I have no idea the reason we did this...fortunately no lifelong disfigurements.

Then there was the homemade table saw we made. Worked fine until my friend almost cut his thumb off. Big cut, lots of blood. Parents seemed to think that was what kids did...nothing came of it otherwise...

How life changes over sixty years!

Now for a couple others:

Not sure how in the age of no computers, no internet, no easily finding out anything...but we somehow discovered we could make black powder, if we mixed saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal in certain proportions. AND saltpeter and sulfur was sold at the local pharmacy, if you asked the pharmacist for it. Behind the counter item, not on the shelf.

We also found that we had large ball bearings, that just slipped into 1/2 inch copper tubing, with a bit of a push. And at this time they sold toy guns, which used rolls of "caps" to make a bang sound when the toy gun hammer struck them. I think the caps were just dots of some kind of flash powder that was carried on a paper tape roll.

Anyway, being inventive kids of the 12 to 15 age bracket, we decided that if we made black powder, bent one end of the copper tubing over to close it pretty much, and stuffed the tubing with our black powder and a number of those caps cut away from their paper carrier, followed by a ball bearing and a slight closing the tubing end to hold the bearing in place...if we then put the tubing on a rock, and dropped a larger rock down on it, the caps inside would ignite and the black powder we made would explode, and the ball bearing would shoot out the end with considerable velocity. Enough to puncture some sheet metal we had...

Hard for me to equate those days to today when the kids sit at their iPads or computer screens most of the time. All good fun back then....LOL

Wait...there was also a thrift store that had a barrel full of 303 caliber rifles...no problem as a kid buying one. And ammo was available elsewhere...also no problem buying it as a kid...

We learned when you cut the barrel short, you get at lest 12 inches of flame coming out when you shoot the rifle...

So many "good" memories...glad to still be here today!

How about you?

 

[ddavis83864]

There should probably be a link that describes the statute of limitations for different things people can review before replying to this thread.

 

[NCL4701]

My father’s “training” for most everything was 5 to 10 minutes of explanation, then walk away and tell me to get it done. When I was about 8 I was a big kid so I could jump off the seat of the old Ford 2N/8N/9N assembled from scraps, land on the clutch and brakes, so I got my 5 minutes of instruction and was told to bring it back home after I finished discing a 5 acre field. He walked off I don’t know where. Somehow I got it done. He was back at the house when I got back.

Same procedure teaching me to shoot around 10 years old. 10 minutes instruction with a .22 bolt action rifle then left me with a paper target and about 500 rounds.

At about 9 he “taught” me to back a trailer on that same old Ford with an 8’ off-road trailer out in the woods. Explained the mechanics of it then told me to back a long, tight, serpentine path through the trees to the tree we were working up. Told me not to tear anything up but he couldn’t stand to watch so he was walking home for lunch and he’d be back in about an hour with my lunch. As usual he just walked off through the woods and left me. Took a while but when he got back the trailer was where it was supposed to be and I knew how to back a trailer.

Driving a car was different, though. He didn’t teach me how to power slide a Chevelle through a corner at high speed or that you could fly about 75’ without touching the ground if you went over the sharp knoll by our neighbor’s farm at 100mph. He also didn’t teach me you can only stop 3 times in 20 minutes from over 100mph with drum brakes on all four wheels before they overheat and quit working. Figured out all that on my own. Drag racing in front of the high school was a favorite lunchtime activity that was frowned upon but nobody really did anything about it.

Guns were always loaded and ever present. Kids rode in the back of pickups because the cab was for grownups. Seatbelts were for weenies. 10 was old enough to use a tablesaw unsupervised and plenty old enough to get on a 5V tin roof to repaint it when it started to rust.

Don’t know how I survived all my “training”.

One funny thing about the tractor driving. 8 was old enough to start driving. I moved away for about 10 years after I turned 18 then ended up in a house 100 yards from Dad. He never would let me borrow the tractors for anything in the 25 years I lived beside him. Always some excuse. Last time I asked, I asked him if the Ford was running and if he was using it. He said it was running and he wasn’t using it. Asked him if I could borrow it for about 30 minutes. He said if he wasn’t busy I could but he didn’t have time to teach me to drive it. It was the same Ford I’d driven probably at least 1000 hours when I was a kid and it benefitted him. I started shopping for tractors about a month later. When the dealer delivered it I made sure they brought 2 keys. Gave him one of the keys and told him he could use it whenever he wanted. Don’t think I’ve ever seen him that happy. He can be piece of work sometimes but he’s still my Dad.

 

[RCW]

There should probably be a link that describes the statute of limitations for different things people can review before replying to this thread.

Good point……

I was going to say there were a couple neighbor girls my age that used to like to visit our farm…..

Never mind……

I can come up with a few that are more appropriate!

 

[skeets]

Does riding on top of 50 bales of hay piled in the bed of a 57 ford 1/2 ton across the field. count ?

 

[RCW]

Does riding on top of 50 bales of hay piled in the bed of a 57 ford 1/2 ton across the field. count ?

Nah, doesn’t count.

Now if you were looking where you been, not where you’re going, that could be different….

Had a few Texan cousins visit haying season.

We rode the loaded hay wagons over the road a mile.

Didn’t grasp the idea of look where you’re going….not where you been.

Lot of roadside sugar maples…..even at 11 mph, one of those maple limbs applied to the back of your noggin can reduce your IQ….for a while anyway…

Odd, just thinking about it. Those Texans got knocked out by tree limbs, broke legs and arms, got a ton of thornapple thorns in them, cuts, scrapes, etc.

If there were more Texans like that, there’s be less Texans like that…..

I think an upstate New York farm was a little too wild for those suburban kids from Texas.

 

[Outnumbered]

I grew up in a large family in the suburbs. Times were tight and both parents worked while my older siblings were in charge. As long as we were out of the house not making a mess things must be good so they thought. This was at the peak of the rocket race between the US and the Soviets. Model rocketry was becoming a big thing but like I said times were tight and there was no way our parents were going to buy us rockets much less rocket engines. My brother and I then crafted a rocket from the paper tube off a hanger from the dry cleaners, carved a nose cone out of a pine branch, made some fins out of cardboard and glued on two small pieces of a straw to hold it on the launch pad. Hmmmm, what to use for the engine... Our parents were smokers and we had access to tons of matches....so we cut the heads off of then and stuffed them in the paper tube.....hmmmm, now how do we ignite it without burning ourselves.....Then we had het bright idea of using my older brothers train transformer and a single strand of wire stuffed up with the matches. Low and behold it worked like a charm and the rocket went straight up and after 10-15 seconds fell back to the ground. We did this several times until we had one deflect off of a tree branch, make a right turn across the 4 lane road we lived on and land in a pile a of leaves across the street. Well, long story short we swore ourselves to secrecy when the fire department showed up. No one was hurt and only the grass was damaged....Whew! I am sure they are still trying to figure out how that fire started.

 

[David Page]

Does riding on top of 50 bales of hay piled in the bed of a 57 ford 1/2 ton across the field. count ?

And your feet on top of the cab as we went down the road to the barn.

 

[85Hokie]

Does find ol 22 shorts and laying them on the street and throwing rocks at them count? (yes - one did go off!)

Does placing a lit M80 into a metal trash can and sitting on the top .... only to have you raise up a bit as it went off count?

Does jumping on the back of UPS truck and riding up the street count ....... mom kicked my ass for that one!!!!!!!

 

[NCL4701]

Speaking of blowing stuff up, one more and then I’ll shut up.

My grandfather was quite a bit older than my Dad. Never met him. He was too old for WWII but did serve in WWI. He was a Quaker so a conscientious objector but back then that didn’t mean you didn’t serve. At least for him it meant he was attached to a combat unit as a medic. Back then you could also bring stuff back with you. So my conscientious objector grandfather of course comes back with a 1903 A3 sniper special 30.06, a pile of ammo, and a small collection of both Allied and Axis bayonets.

That stuff was well known to the family. Then there was the box in the dairy barn nobody knew about. Our neighbor had started renting the dairy barn for his operation and found a wooden box he wasn’t sure what to do with so he called Dad. The box had 6 or 8 of those grenades with the long stick handle set in individual holes like eggs in a crate. No one knew if they were dummies or live or unstable or what exactly to think about it other than they needed to get out of the cow barn.

So a very reasonable plan was devised. Very carefully remove the box, of course with Dad, neighbor, me, my brother, and the neighbor’s two sons all clumped up so the coroner would have needed at least a month to figure out how many people he was dealing with if they went off. Carried them about a quarter of a mile to a big old hollow red oak that was near absolutely nothing important and carefully stuffed them in the hollow base of the tree. Backed off about 300 yards where we all found a tree to peek out from behind. A round from the 30.06 into the middle of the pile set off an impressive chain reaction and the tree came down in a cloud of dirt and smoke. Apparently they were live and probably not very stable.

Then we went home and ate dinner like nothing odd happened because it was dinner time. If Mom ever asked what the explosion was about it wasn’t in front of us kids.

 

[DaveFromMi]

My brother and I were about 8 and 10 years old. He had a toy combination safe bank (1/16" steel) that he forgot the combination to. Anyway, a combination 30-06 case, powder, shotgun primer and a firecracker managed to blow the safe open: the back was blown upward and stuck in a rafter in my parents woodshed. The safe had holes in it from brass shrapnel. He got the money out of it.

 

[chim]

We mixed saltpeter and sugar to make our own "fireworks". Never perfected gunpowder though. Saltpeter was on a shelf of our small nearby grocery store along with spices and extracts.

Did some experimenting with carbide crystals to produce acetylene that was then bubbled through a silver nitrate solution. That precipitate was impressive stuff.

Mom didn't like us playing around the train tracks, but nothing bad ever happened.

Parents bought us neat toys. Bow and arrows, Lawn Darts (real ones), etc.

Car seats for kids didn't exist. Cars didn't even have seat belts for that matter.

After a ball game, all the kids packed into the bed of a pickup truck for a trip to the Twin Kiss.

 

[D2Cat]

When I was 10-11 yo I lived in Sioux Falls. SD. Spent many winter days playing on sleds and often put a rope on the back of a trash truck and ride for a couple of blocks. We'd ride sleds down steep city streets crossing through intersections and never consider a car coming.

One day while going down a steep road about 3 block long I went under a truck as it was coming through the intersection. I don't remember what kind of truck it was, not a big one, but I never touched anything under the truck and my clothes were not dirty or ripped!

When I go back there the thing that always amazes me is I learned to swim in the Falls. Maybe the water wasn't as swift back then as it is today, but I never felt like I might drown. We started out in some of the less turbulent areas and progressed, but we dove off of some crazy places. Here's what it looks like today. There was no park there at that time.

 

[ranger danger]

I was raised on an Indian resarvation by alcohaulic parents. My mom was married 6 times before I was 19. I was at a party at the river, sitting on the tailgate of a truck, filling cups from the keg. A guy I new was standing in the bed of the truck. A car pulled up beside the truck. A guy got out of the back seat with a 12ga shotgun and blew the head off the guy standing in the bed. It blew him out of the truck. The guy got back in the car and they drove off. I was 14. Just another day on the rez.

 

[ranger danger]

Sorry about that folks. I was remanicing about the bad old days and how the love of the BEST woman on this planet saved me from a realy crappy childhood! Today is my 38th wedding anniversary and, even though it does everyday, I just can't imagine life getting any better than it is today!

 

[Fordtech86]

Sorry about that folks. I was remanicing about the bad old days and how the love of the BEST woman on this planet saved me from a realy crappy childhood! Today is my 38th wedding anniversary and, even though it does everyday, I just can't imagine life getting any better than it is today!

Ranger, first off Happy Anniversary!

Second, thank you for sharing. I can relate, its just not a time in my life that I care to talk about. Just feel blessed to be here.

 

[RCW]

Happy Anniversary Ranger!

 

[ve9aa]

We rode our bicycles without helmets !

 

[michigander]

We rode in the back of pickup trucks !!!

 

[lugbolt]

I added 2 and 2 and came up with 4. Not the hard way (common core)
Rode bikes with no helmet
rode 3 wheelers...enough said.
died and revived of Carbon Monoxide poisoning at age 8.
ate fish out of the local lake (and still do from time to time)
ate crawfish out of the ditches around the house. Don't like crawdad's.
hiked all around what is now the city (at the time it was rural/farmland)
shot mice/rats/coyotes/cats with .22's at the farm down the road from the house. Farmer loved it
taught myself to hunt (dad never taught us). I don't hunt often, but do well when I do.
when i were a teenager in high school I got an opportunity to work at the state capital, while learning civics and "election system". This was in the 1990's. So I (or we) worked alongside a former President, and his wife and his wife's friends who are now sitting in prison, and as I learned more, his wife should have been imprisoned too. Glad I'm not there anymore and not sure I'd ever want to take a state job again. Went back to mechanic'n and still learning that 30 some years later.