The handling on the green machine was bit iffy at high speeds.
As in, ” I will never ride this thing again IF I can just survive this corner at Mach 5″
Fortunately we had Wonder Bread with 9 ways to keep a body strong. Just call me king of the jungle gym. Why did they put those on concrete back then anyway.
Ours was on sand, but nearly as hard when you fall from the top rung. And in the San Fernando Valley north of LA, when the temps were in the low 100s, that metal burned like a bitch. Good times. And I have all the wonderful scars to show for all the fun.
IndenturedServant
March 3, 2018 4:48 pm
Twice a day indeed! What a blast childhood used to be. I’d give everything I have to do it again!
I have a friend who still has a scar on his cheek from his third grade birthday party’s gory game of darts that ended sooner than we thought it would.
A few years later we graduated to bows and arrows. On many occasions, in an open field, we would shoot the arrows straight up into the sky until they disappeared into the blue. No shit. Then things became really interesting.
A surprising amount of lateral action on an arrow supposedly coming straight down.
Good terrifying times.
Firecrackers in slingshots, bb gun wars, roman candle fights.
Rope swings from one hay loft to the other across the breezeway in the barn.
Flattening pennies on the train tracks, standing so close to the train you could see the terror in the conductors eyes as he blasted away on the horn,…
Chuck
March 3, 2018 5:27 pm
Told my wife that next time we’re at my parents ranch, we need to let the girls wander off by themselves. I figure it did me all sorts of good, and I was wandering around with a .22 or .410 by their age.
Her only question was if I was willing to clean the mud off their clothes and shoes when they’re done.
BB
March 3, 2018 5:56 pm
I used to go to a lake in my home town .Had 3 diving boards at different heights .In the summer months we were at that lake and on those boards almost everyday . Now there are no diving boards and you can only swim when lifeguards are on duty.I ask why ? They said they didn’t want ANYONE TO GET HURT . (Which does make sense ) but for us kids getting hurt was just part of having fun .At least it’s now owned by the YMCA and you can still swim.
Penforce
March 3, 2018 6:30 pm
In the sixties, we climbed trees so high that we could see the seventies.
There was a cottonwood in our backyard that I could climb so high, I could see above everything for miles-funny, I have that image in my mind right now, almost 60 years later-sometimes I would cling to the branch and close my eyes and just sway back and forth in a breeze.
Penforce
March 3, 2018 6:37 pm
In the sixties, we finally made the ’55s smoke their tires like real cars.
Penforce
March 3, 2018 6:46 pm
In the sixties the only controls we had was tint, brightness, and contrast on our color TVs. No fucking wonder we couldn’t imagine a computer.
We had remote control, it’s name was David, youngest kid. But good exercise.
A cruel accountant
March 3, 2018 8:04 pm
We used to use magnifying glasses to light cigarette butts to smoke them
Zarathustra
March 3, 2018 8:14 pm
We painted lines across two lane country roads to hold impromptu 1/4 mile races at night.
rhs jr
March 3, 2018 8:19 pm
We were born poor Southerners in the 40s so we played with knives, cap & air guns, bows etc until we were 10 or so and got our own 22 and shotgun; we were Christians so shooting up a school was unthinkable. Real Country music, homemade beer, sex, trucks, etc were our fun; degenerate Yankee Culture and their hippies was and is disgusting; we didn’t even hear about Woodstock until maybe 10 years later. The Vietnam War and wounded or killed friends were very real because our Draft Board took every male for that stupid Yankee War. NYC, WDC, and liberals are proven enemies of God and Whites; the Dangers that liberals pose grows, not wanes.
We kept our beer “cool” in a drain tile. 55 degree Grain Belt beer. Yep, Z, drag races. I hope my grandson has as much fun growing up as I did. edit. Jr, you been drinking?
jr don’t drink but he does occasionally run out of meds,and it’s always on the weekend–
Francis Marion
March 3, 2018 9:20 pm
Everything we did on the playground as kids is now banned. We are raising a generation of wimps.
TampaRed
March 3, 2018 9:40 pm
bb gun fights–
snake hunting–
slipping into the farmer’s hog pen and getting as close as we dared to the boar and shooting him in his sack–
playing superman on our horses–
Had BB gun fights too. We all ‘promised’ to only pump the rifle a few pumps rather than the obligatory 10-15 so it would sting less. Safety glasses? Haha
Also, little known fact, if you take a wooden stick match and shove it down the BB gun rifle barrel, when you fire it and the match hits something hard it will burst into flame.
2-4 guys would meet for Saturday morning BB gun fights in a backyard with daisy model 25’s; thankfully safety glasses would be worn. No shirts, no shoes allowed :-), run around and give each other welts. (“I’ll give you 3 to run!” 1…2…3…pfffft…THWACK…) fun stuff.
Doc
March 3, 2018 9:59 pm
We called them monkey bars not jungle gyms, and because they were built over hard pavement, I tried very hard to not fall off. We didn’t get a color TV until the 70’s (and it also had a hue adjustment). Our parents had no idea where we were all day, but we also didn’t dare stay out after the street lights came on.
If we got in ANY kind of trouble in school (or anywhere else for that matter) we KNEW that real punishment was on its way. The very concept of punishment is forbidden today. Today’s parents immediately take the kid’s side and yell at the teacher.
nkit
March 3, 2018 11:06 pm
70s? Big Wheels were a futuristic ride when I was a kid. My kids had Big Wheels.. By the 70s I was risking my life routinely in an automobile. 70s, yeah, brutal times…damn kids..
LaGeR
March 3, 2018 11:12 pm
Summers outdoors had all kinds of risky stuff to do, but winters had a couple good ones. After basketball practice in the gym, 4 guys would sneak behind a parents car taking one guy home, and we’d grab the bumper to get a hitch ride as he drove away, with us squatting down & using our shoes, boots, or ass as skis / sleds. The last kid in usually caught the spot right behind the tailpipe, and was always the first to let go. Probably got dizzy from fumes. One poor bastards came away from that looking like Al Jolson.
The other was snowballs. Any moving target was fair game, to display our outfielder throwing skills. Truckers, Drivers w nice cars or vans would get pissed, and start chasing us to beat our ass. When we’d lose ’em, one crazy friend would step out from a hiding spot & yell to our victim: “Hey! Over here!”…and we’d run like hell a 2nd time.
Anyone remember wrist rocket style slingshots? The handle had rods extending back along the wrist, with a wide band that wrapped over the top of the forearm. Used hollow rubber tubes from both tips of the “Y”. We’d use small stones or ball bearings for ammo. Street lights, bottles, birds & squirrels were targets. Those days taught the importance of seeing what’s beyond your target, if missed. Memories.
lager,
we didn’t have snowballs but we had citrus–an orange is just about as good to throw as a baseball–the stories we could tell-
xrugger
March 3, 2018 11:54 pm
The freedom my brothers and I had growing up would probably get a good many parents arrested in the pussified, risk-averse, namby pamby culture we live in today. Of course, rural and small-town North Dakota was paradise for a fearless pack of brothers and sundry cousins back in those halcyon days.
My Grandfather would take the five of us, and any number of cousins on expeditions into the country during summer visits to hike and shoot and generally run amok. The pictures that survive are awesome. Everybody standing or kneeling in front of Grandpa Chet’s IH Scout. It had a 3 speed stick, pneumatic wipers, a rock hard bench seat, and a home built topper made of 2 x 4’s and plywood. That thing was a rattling, banging pile of rusty blue awesomness. It was a freedom wagon.
My Grandparents would drive the Scout 400 miles to visit us in Wyoming. Grandpa would coax it up and over the Powder River Pass in the Bighorn Mountains at about 45 mph. Once he crested the pass, he would switch off the engine and coast down the mountain to save gas.
In those pictures, every single one of us is cradling a rifle or shotgun of various calibres and gauges. Listing off Grandpa’s guns was like reciting poetry. There was the .243, the .22 Hornet, an old 20 ga. side by side coach gun, a single-shot .410, the scoped .270 among others. Those guns were an arsenal of blued steel and checkered walnut in the hands of young American boys who knew how to use them.
The old Scout is still extant down at my brother’s place in Wyoming. The guns have passed into other hands than mine, and the country has moved on to a place where the freedom we had as kids seems like a dream.
It makes me sad to watch my country have a nervous breakdown.
Vixen Vic
March 4, 2018 2:48 am
A “nervous breakdown,” that’s a great way to put it, Xrugger.
hardscrabble farmer
March 4, 2018 8:54 am
Broke my arm on a jungle gym, split my chin open twice, 20+ stitches both times, hit in the head with a brick and a wooden swing more stitches, got an oak splinter the size of number two pencil jammed up my thigh (hid that one from my parents for weeks, even through a terrible infection that probably could have killed me if the thing hadn’t shot out in a spray of bloody pus one night when I was messing with the wound), shot in the bicep with an arrow playing knights and vikings, run over by a car twice- once on foot, and once on a bicycle, nearly drowned twice, once in the Delaware on a canoeing trip at age 12 shooting the rapids at Foul Rift, once at the Jersey Shore caught in a riptide, cut with knives, barbed wire, and glass, knocked unconscious at least five times; falling out of a tree and off a roof, hit in the head with a line drive and a pitched ball, fell face first on the ice while skate jumping and raised a knot that lasted until spring, tore off a fingernail and a toenail, routinely pulled out loose teeth with a piece of string and a slammed door, broke fingers, nose and toes, bit by a snake, a snapping turtle, a cat and a dog and, stung by swarms of yellow jackets, severe sunburns, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac and closed out the decade with a near fatal car wreck that left me in the hospital for weeks with every single rib broken and a face full of stitches. I didn’t mention all the other stuff that didn’t require medical attention.
The 70’s were a risky time to be a boy, for sure. I always felt sorry for my mother, me showing up in a blood soaked T-shirt asking if I needed stitches again while some part of me dangled off at a bad angle, or holding my arm, folded back in the way it shouldn’t bend. She never lost her cool though and always treated that kind of thing with an almost military detachment. Staunch the blood flow, grab her purse and get me to the ER, pay the bill and then bake a cake. My Father loves telling the story of how he dropped the kids off from my birthday party one year only to come home to an empty house with the front door open and bloody handprints coming up the stairwell from the basement. He was cool enough to relax with his newspaper and a cup of coffee until my Mom and I got dropped off by the neighbor from the hospital.
I am able to recite that partial list because my kids have always been fascinated by the extremely dangerous childhood they perceived me to have had and beg me to tell the injury stories. I thought it was normal. You extended yourself and took risks until the point of injury or near death and then learned your lesson. There always seemed to be responsible adults around if your parents weren’t who had first aid kits and knew how to stop the bleeding and didn’t flip out over the blood you got on them. I think my mother made more than a few thank-you casseroles as well.
And I wouldn’t trade any of it.
Maggie
March 4, 2018 9:12 am
You know something HSF? I grew up running the rafters while my Dad nailed the greasy tin into place, which my sister and I would slide down, stopping at the edge by planting our bare toes on the board my father had placed for just that reason.
We climbed trees, crawled into culverts full of snakes and spent most of our childhoods doing things kids would never dare think about now.
However, except for one bad cut on my foot from stepping onto a recently sharpened hoe blade that got infected and had to be treated by a doctor, there were no injuries.
I can only conclude you are a lot more clumsy than I.
Maybe. I just know that most of it was the result of pushing every single limit I could reasonably try. Faster, higher, more dangerous. Plus the other kids always egged each other on until someone got hurt, then everybody scattered.
I remember that unless it was dark outside- regardless of the weather- that’s where you were supposed to be. I came in for supper and to sleep, otherwise we were feral. I remember going on bike hikes, or canoe trips and camping without ever mentioning it, sometimes for days and no one ever worried. You took as much food as you thought you needed and some matches, maybe a sleeping bag and it was lord of the flies until you ran out of supplies. My parents did what I thought was an excellent job of setting me up for being independent and resilient although if they tried something like that today they’d probably be arrested for it.
Without a doubt, arrested… my father put a “zipline” from the hickory nut tree in the back yard to the big Walnut at the edge of the chicken yard with a pulley on a cable. We kids had a seat with a foothold and there was a guide line which someone on the ground had to control, requiring two people (one on the ground to run for help, I assume.)
It was a blast, but you had to put your foot out just so at the walnut tree to stop it to avoid smacking into the bark and getting scraped.
Lots of jumpers to see who was brave, but no broken bones. I think you must have been clumsy.
22winmag - refugee from ZeroHedge who just couldn't take the explosion of doom porn and the avalanche of near-hourly Bitcoin stories
March 4, 2018 11:26 am
The 70s in America… when the very word terrorism was a joke for internal security problems faced by only by shitty, disarmed European nations.
The homemade bombs we made back then might prompt the occasional noise complaint and the cops would roll down their windows and tell kids to “knock it off”. Today those kids would be held at gunpoint and charged with manufacturing “IED’s”.
Winmag, the security guard put the toy IED on the counter and never took his other hand off his own penis. Will you stop it with the toy gun shit already?
kc
March 4, 2018 12:47 pm
pass the band-aids and asprins….
take a walk on any day in your neighbourhood and make a note of how many kids are out in the front (or back) yards playing….
wife and I notice how quiet it is when we walk around….
Mikey
March 4, 2018 4:06 pm
Navigating storm sewers in the dark. Damming up creeks with piles of sod. Smoking cigarettes in the 5th grade. sledding down almost vertical ice hills behind the school on plastic lunch tray stolen from the cafeteria. burning shit. Blowing things up. Crazy fist fights. Stealing Pops Playboy magazines. Of course BB gun mayhem. Sneaking out after folks went to bed. Numerous injuries requiring lots of stitches. Mom had a leather belt ( Think Sam Brown police duty belt) that hung on a hook in the kitchen. She was not shy about using it either!
Mikey
March 4, 2018 4:25 pm
And once we became to big for Momma to handle well, lets just say if Daddy had to leave work and come home to sort things out you would most definitely get the ever living shit beat out of you.
Mark
March 4, 2018 10:07 pm
Small mining town in PA. 1965 I was 15, and was arrested for shoplifting…found out years later my Father arranged I would be handcuffed, left alone in a cell for hours and that I would go in front of the judge. The judge had grown up with my grandfather…he was a humpback. I’ll never, ever forget him questioning me. I had Quasimodo nightmares for a year!
That was the complete and total end of my crime career.
Between 1979 and 2000 I personally apprehended over 400 shoplifters as an entry level Store Detective and even up to a Director of 3 Divisions for a 5 company retail group, I would still pull some in while visiting stores.
My specialty was teenage punk boys (like I was) and when I could I would get in touch with their parents and cops and try to arrange a good perp walk and hard lesson!
The Big Wheel!!!! I used to carry one of those to the top of a big hill for my nephew to race down, top speed. Helmets? Knee pads? Meh.
And its much cooler cousin…The Green Machine 🙂
The handling on the green machine was bit iffy at high speeds.
As in, ” I will never ride this thing again IF I can just survive this corner at Mach 5″
Fortunately we had Wonder Bread with 9 ways to keep a body strong. Just call me king of the jungle gym. Why did they put those on concrete back then anyway.
[img
[/img]
Ours was on sand, but nearly as hard when you fall from the top rung. And in the San Fernando Valley north of LA, when the temps were in the low 100s, that metal burned like a bitch. Good times. And I have all the wonderful scars to show for all the fun.
Twice a day indeed! What a blast childhood used to be. I’d give everything I have to do it again!
Lawn Darts 🙂
I have a friend who still has a scar on his cheek from his third grade birthday party’s gory game of darts that ended sooner than we thought it would.
A few years later we graduated to bows and arrows. On many occasions, in an open field, we would shoot the arrows straight up into the sky until they disappeared into the blue. No shit. Then things became really interesting.
A surprising amount of lateral action on an arrow supposedly coming straight down.
Good terrifying times.
Firecrackers in slingshots, bb gun wars, roman candle fights.
Rope swings from one hay loft to the other across the breezeway in the barn.
Flattening pennies on the train tracks, standing so close to the train you could see the terror in the conductors eyes as he blasted away on the horn,…
Told my wife that next time we’re at my parents ranch, we need to let the girls wander off by themselves. I figure it did me all sorts of good, and I was wandering around with a .22 or .410 by their age.
Her only question was if I was willing to clean the mud off their clothes and shoes when they’re done.
I used to go to a lake in my home town .Had 3 diving boards at different heights .In the summer months we were at that lake and on those boards almost everyday . Now there are no diving boards and you can only swim when lifeguards are on duty.I ask why ? They said they didn’t want ANYONE TO GET HURT . (Which does make sense ) but for us kids getting hurt was just part of having fun .At least it’s now owned by the YMCA and you can still swim.
In the sixties, we climbed trees so high that we could see the seventies.
Rayciss!
[img
[/img]
There was a cottonwood in our backyard that I could climb so high, I could see above everything for miles-funny, I have that image in my mind right now, almost 60 years later-sometimes I would cling to the branch and close my eyes and just sway back and forth in a breeze.
In the sixties, we finally made the ’55s smoke their tires like real cars.
In the sixties the only controls we had was tint, brightness, and contrast on our color TVs. No fucking wonder we couldn’t imagine a computer.
No V-hold? Without V-hold you were screwed!
Vertical hold was the old man whacking the top of the tv
You had a color tv in the 60s? Daym, must have been nice growing up rich.
We had remote control, it’s name was David, youngest kid. But good exercise.
We used to use magnifying glasses to light cigarette butts to smoke them
We painted lines across two lane country roads to hold impromptu 1/4 mile races at night.
We were born poor Southerners in the 40s so we played with knives, cap & air guns, bows etc until we were 10 or so and got our own 22 and shotgun; we were Christians so shooting up a school was unthinkable. Real Country music, homemade beer, sex, trucks, etc were our fun; degenerate Yankee Culture and their hippies was and is disgusting; we didn’t even hear about Woodstock until maybe 10 years later. The Vietnam War and wounded or killed friends were very real because our Draft Board took every male for that stupid Yankee War. NYC, WDC, and liberals are proven enemies of God and Whites; the Dangers that liberals pose grows, not wanes.
Regarding the stupid Yankee War: LBJ was a Southerner. So, yeah.
https://goo.gl/images/Sb3VJX
We kept our beer “cool” in a drain tile. 55 degree Grain Belt beer. Yep, Z, drag races. I hope my grandson has as much fun growing up as I did. edit. Jr, you been drinking?
jr don’t drink but he does occasionally run out of meds,and it’s always on the weekend–
Everything we did on the playground as kids is now banned. We are raising a generation of wimps.
bb gun fights–
snake hunting–
slipping into the farmer’s hog pen and getting as close as we dared to the boar and shooting him in his sack–
playing superman on our horses–
Had BB gun fights too. We all ‘promised’ to only pump the rifle a few pumps rather than the obligatory 10-15 so it would sting less. Safety glasses? Haha
Also, little known fact, if you take a wooden stick match and shove it down the BB gun rifle barrel, when you fire it and the match hits something hard it will burst into flame.
2-4 guys would meet for Saturday morning BB gun fights in a backyard with daisy model 25’s; thankfully safety glasses would be worn. No shirts, no shoes allowed :-), run around and give each other welts. (“I’ll give you 3 to run!” 1…2…3…pfffft…THWACK…) fun stuff.
We called them monkey bars not jungle gyms, and because they were built over hard pavement, I tried very hard to not fall off. We didn’t get a color TV until the 70’s (and it also had a hue adjustment). Our parents had no idea where we were all day, but we also didn’t dare stay out after the street lights came on.
If we got in ANY kind of trouble in school (or anywhere else for that matter) we KNEW that real punishment was on its way. The very concept of punishment is forbidden today. Today’s parents immediately take the kid’s side and yell at the teacher.
70s? Big Wheels were a futuristic ride when I was a kid. My kids had Big Wheels.. By the 70s I was risking my life routinely in an automobile. 70s, yeah, brutal times…damn kids..
Summers outdoors had all kinds of risky stuff to do, but winters had a couple good ones. After basketball practice in the gym, 4 guys would sneak behind a parents car taking one guy home, and we’d grab the bumper to get a hitch ride as he drove away, with us squatting down & using our shoes, boots, or ass as skis / sleds. The last kid in usually caught the spot right behind the tailpipe, and was always the first to let go. Probably got dizzy from fumes. One poor bastards came away from that looking like Al Jolson.
The other was snowballs. Any moving target was fair game, to display our outfielder throwing skills. Truckers, Drivers w nice cars or vans would get pissed, and start chasing us to beat our ass. When we’d lose ’em, one crazy friend would step out from a hiding spot & yell to our victim: “Hey! Over here!”…and we’d run like hell a 2nd time.
Anyone remember wrist rocket style slingshots? The handle had rods extending back along the wrist, with a wide band that wrapped over the top of the forearm. Used hollow rubber tubes from both tips of the “Y”. We’d use small stones or ball bearings for ammo. Street lights, bottles, birds & squirrels were targets. Those days taught the importance of seeing what’s beyond your target, if missed. Memories.
lager,
we didn’t have snowballs but we had citrus–an orange is just about as good to throw as a baseball–the stories we could tell-
The freedom my brothers and I had growing up would probably get a good many parents arrested in the pussified, risk-averse, namby pamby culture we live in today. Of course, rural and small-town North Dakota was paradise for a fearless pack of brothers and sundry cousins back in those halcyon days.
My Grandfather would take the five of us, and any number of cousins on expeditions into the country during summer visits to hike and shoot and generally run amok. The pictures that survive are awesome. Everybody standing or kneeling in front of Grandpa Chet’s IH Scout. It had a 3 speed stick, pneumatic wipers, a rock hard bench seat, and a home built topper made of 2 x 4’s and plywood. That thing was a rattling, banging pile of rusty blue awesomness. It was a freedom wagon.
My Grandparents would drive the Scout 400 miles to visit us in Wyoming. Grandpa would coax it up and over the Powder River Pass in the Bighorn Mountains at about 45 mph. Once he crested the pass, he would switch off the engine and coast down the mountain to save gas.
In those pictures, every single one of us is cradling a rifle or shotgun of various calibres and gauges. Listing off Grandpa’s guns was like reciting poetry. There was the .243, the .22 Hornet, an old 20 ga. side by side coach gun, a single-shot .410, the scoped .270 among others. Those guns were an arsenal of blued steel and checkered walnut in the hands of young American boys who knew how to use them.
The old Scout is still extant down at my brother’s place in Wyoming. The guns have passed into other hands than mine, and the country has moved on to a place where the freedom we had as kids seems like a dream.
It makes me sad to watch my country have a nervous breakdown.
A “nervous breakdown,” that’s a great way to put it, Xrugger.
Broke my arm on a jungle gym, split my chin open twice, 20+ stitches both times, hit in the head with a brick and a wooden swing more stitches, got an oak splinter the size of number two pencil jammed up my thigh (hid that one from my parents for weeks, even through a terrible infection that probably could have killed me if the thing hadn’t shot out in a spray of bloody pus one night when I was messing with the wound), shot in the bicep with an arrow playing knights and vikings, run over by a car twice- once on foot, and once on a bicycle, nearly drowned twice, once in the Delaware on a canoeing trip at age 12 shooting the rapids at Foul Rift, once at the Jersey Shore caught in a riptide, cut with knives, barbed wire, and glass, knocked unconscious at least five times; falling out of a tree and off a roof, hit in the head with a line drive and a pitched ball, fell face first on the ice while skate jumping and raised a knot that lasted until spring, tore off a fingernail and a toenail, routinely pulled out loose teeth with a piece of string and a slammed door, broke fingers, nose and toes, bit by a snake, a snapping turtle, a cat and a dog and, stung by swarms of yellow jackets, severe sunburns, poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac and closed out the decade with a near fatal car wreck that left me in the hospital for weeks with every single rib broken and a face full of stitches. I didn’t mention all the other stuff that didn’t require medical attention.
The 70’s were a risky time to be a boy, for sure. I always felt sorry for my mother, me showing up in a blood soaked T-shirt asking if I needed stitches again while some part of me dangled off at a bad angle, or holding my arm, folded back in the way it shouldn’t bend. She never lost her cool though and always treated that kind of thing with an almost military detachment. Staunch the blood flow, grab her purse and get me to the ER, pay the bill and then bake a cake. My Father loves telling the story of how he dropped the kids off from my birthday party one year only to come home to an empty house with the front door open and bloody handprints coming up the stairwell from the basement. He was cool enough to relax with his newspaper and a cup of coffee until my Mom and I got dropped off by the neighbor from the hospital.
I am able to recite that partial list because my kids have always been fascinated by the extremely dangerous childhood they perceived me to have had and beg me to tell the injury stories. I thought it was normal. You extended yourself and took risks until the point of injury or near death and then learned your lesson. There always seemed to be responsible adults around if your parents weren’t who had first aid kits and knew how to stop the bleeding and didn’t flip out over the blood you got on them. I think my mother made more than a few thank-you casseroles as well.
And I wouldn’t trade any of it.
You know something HSF? I grew up running the rafters while my Dad nailed the greasy tin into place, which my sister and I would slide down, stopping at the edge by planting our bare toes on the board my father had placed for just that reason.
We climbed trees, crawled into culverts full of snakes and spent most of our childhoods doing things kids would never dare think about now.
However, except for one bad cut on my foot from stepping onto a recently sharpened hoe blade that got infected and had to be treated by a doctor, there were no injuries.
I can only conclude you are a lot more clumsy than I.
Maybe. I just know that most of it was the result of pushing every single limit I could reasonably try. Faster, higher, more dangerous. Plus the other kids always egged each other on until someone got hurt, then everybody scattered.
I remember that unless it was dark outside- regardless of the weather- that’s where you were supposed to be. I came in for supper and to sleep, otherwise we were feral. I remember going on bike hikes, or canoe trips and camping without ever mentioning it, sometimes for days and no one ever worried. You took as much food as you thought you needed and some matches, maybe a sleeping bag and it was lord of the flies until you ran out of supplies. My parents did what I thought was an excellent job of setting me up for being independent and resilient although if they tried something like that today they’d probably be arrested for it.
Without a doubt, arrested… my father put a “zipline” from the hickory nut tree in the back yard to the big Walnut at the edge of the chicken yard with a pulley on a cable. We kids had a seat with a foothold and there was a guide line which someone on the ground had to control, requiring two people (one on the ground to run for help, I assume.)
It was a blast, but you had to put your foot out just so at the walnut tree to stop it to avoid smacking into the bark and getting scraped.
Lots of jumpers to see who was brave, but no broken bones. I think you must have been clumsy.
The 70s in America… when the very word terrorism was a joke for internal security problems faced by only by shitty, disarmed European nations.
The homemade bombs we made back then might prompt the occasional noise complaint and the cops would roll down their windows and tell kids to “knock it off”. Today those kids would be held at gunpoint and charged with manufacturing “IED’s”.
Winmag, the security guard put the toy IED on the counter and never took his other hand off his own penis. Will you stop it with the toy gun shit already?
pass the band-aids and asprins….
take a walk on any day in your neighbourhood and make a note of how many kids are out in the front (or back) yards playing….
wife and I notice how quiet it is when we walk around….
Navigating storm sewers in the dark. Damming up creeks with piles of sod. Smoking cigarettes in the 5th grade. sledding down almost vertical ice hills behind the school on plastic lunch tray stolen from the cafeteria. burning shit. Blowing things up. Crazy fist fights. Stealing Pops Playboy magazines. Of course BB gun mayhem. Sneaking out after folks went to bed. Numerous injuries requiring lots of stitches. Mom had a leather belt ( Think Sam Brown police duty belt) that hung on a hook in the kitchen. She was not shy about using it either!
And once we became to big for Momma to handle well, lets just say if Daddy had to leave work and come home to sort things out you would most definitely get the ever living shit beat out of you.
Small mining town in PA. 1965 I was 15, and was arrested for shoplifting…found out years later my Father arranged I would be handcuffed, left alone in a cell for hours and that I would go in front of the judge. The judge had grown up with my grandfather…he was a humpback. I’ll never, ever forget him questioning me. I had Quasimodo nightmares for a year!
That was the complete and total end of my crime career.
Between 1979 and 2000 I personally apprehended over 400 shoplifters as an entry level Store Detective and even up to a Director of 3 Divisions for a 5 company retail group, I would still pull some in while visiting stores.
My specialty was teenage punk boys (like I was) and when I could I would get in touch with their parents and cops and try to arrange a good perp walk and hard lesson!