We’ll add a few of our own, let’s see what else everyone comes up with.
- Towing a wheelchair with my motorcycle around town with a friend riding in it.
- Doing wheelstands in front of my high school on my Kawasaki 500 Triple.
- Being presented my first gun (Remington Nylon 66 .22) at the age of 7.
- Doing my own reloading without guidance at 14. (No I didn’t blow any guns up).
- Having our shotguns in the trunk at high school so we could go hunting afterwards.
Ice Blocking!
Because it wastes water, disturbs grass, and causes frostbite. 😀
Walking to the liquor store to buy Jolly Ranchers and Now and Laters all by myself when I was 11.
You guys remember when you could by cigarettes for your mom or dad with a written note? lol
Get beat by the Nuns on a regular basis. (Professional paddles) with the holes to cut down on wind resistance
Drive After a few too many drinks
Going over the bluff down to Hangmans Creek (Latah Creek) by sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night during the Summer to catch frogs with all the guys in my neighborhood when we were teenagers. I don’t think any of us told our parents about this till many years later when we had our own kids.
Hump your teacher
Turning bicycle upside down and running the pedals as fast as you could while your best friend held bicycle siren to back wheel.
Toilet papering Science teacher’s house because he gave you a C.
Christ! That’s a merit badge today!
Going to the corner store to get a packet of cigs for the parents. Mr.Sam knew the brand of every parent in the neighborhood.
Carrying a pen knife to school in my pocket every day from 1st grade to graduation.
Calling a fag a fag.
Leading all the kids from the Paper Station over to one of your customer’s house, at 3 in the morning, because they would walk around drunk and naked while fighting. Learned about make-up sex in 7th grade.
My friends and I played with a can of Raid. Sprayed bugs and watched them die. Got it all over ourselves and don’t remember washing up after.
I plead the 5th…
…and I have one open.
As a guy, going into the ladies restroom and looking around.
Oh wait, that is all cool today
Shoveling snow. In many neighborhoods now you need a permit.
My brothers and friends used to take their sleds to the top of the hill and slide down (no helmets of course)
Grilling out…
Tell two large chested girls that one of them said something nasty about the other so they’d fight until bras ripped off.
We used to fake a written note to buy a Playboy magazine.
It worked!
Dude at the liquor store is likely still laughing!
We should all plead the 5th because all the things we did as kids are probably now considered to be illegal or worse dangerous. No one I ever knew ever died from any of the escapades we did back then in the 60’s although there were a few times it was too close for comfort, believe me.
• Building a big plywood ramp so I could jump over the driveway on my dirt bike.
• Putting my toddler kid brother on the handle bars for a motorcycle ride around town. (He’s got a police-style bike today.)
• Playing INSIDE the heavy machinery at a local sand pit operation on Saturdays when they were closed down. Me and my pals did this all through fifth grade. Actually, this would have gotten my mother arrested.
Having unrestricted, un-moderated manchild fun – discovering things on your own – like girls?
Being out on your own – adventures from light till dark?
Kicking people’s asses that richly deserved it and left you alone afterwards with no ensuing lawsuits or cops involved?
Having your own key to your own house when you were 11 ’cause your parents worked for a living?
Hijacking a beer truck – no, wait….that’ll still get you arrested – if you’re stupid enough to get caught.
Chicago was different then.
Getting in a fight. Bullying some future liberal asshole.
How come we’re all still alive? Sounds like everyone here was just having fun. Believe me my Dad and his brothers did far worse things back in the 30’s with some of my Grandfather’s dynamite that he used to blow up stumps with on the farm. Like using it for fishing on Hayden Lake just North of CDA, Id.
My brother and I were left alone at age 9, 10.
Not for long but the fear of God used to go a long way.
Beating the crap out of Frankie, the 20-something not-quite-right-in-the-head perv who rode around town on a bicycle with an unlit cigarette stuck right square in the middle of his mouth. He liked to sniff girls’ bicycle seats.
It was just something that needed doing.
My dad, living as a kid in Fort Wayne Indiana, told us the story of him and his brother pushing a stuffed dummy with a rope around it neck off a train tressle into oncoming traffic on the street below. At night. All was fun and games until they dropped it in front of the local po po. The cops chewed them out, took their dummy, and followed them home to enlighten my grand parents.
Getting in a knock down drag out bloody nose fist fight with the Gym Teacher watching to keep it fair.
Then becoming friends with the guy you fought
I forget who won
Coming home from school at ten where I was expected to m entertain myself until one of my parents came home from work
Racing to get home before the streetlight came on
Two words, DODGE BALL in PE class.
Soaping car and house windows on Halloween night.
Putting dog or cow poop in a bag, put lighter fluid on it, place it on someone’s porch you didn’t like, light it on fire, ring their doorbell (or knock) and watch the action! (My oldest brother did this with a bunch of friends. The teacher they did it to recognised their laughs when they ran away. Needless to say they did chores around his house for a few weeks! No cops called, no jail time either!)
Getting the guy at the Pony Keg (a Cincinnati area convenience store where they mostly sold beer and cigarettes) to sell you a can of Ronson lighter fluid so you and Fred D. could soak the model cars you had built (with flame decals) and light them up and send them down the big slide at the local park.
Pissing over a 7 foot wall which separated the boy’s bathroom from the Girls bathroom. The nuns couldn’t do much about it. But one day they got the custodian Tom Foley to investigate. I had just finished. But he caught Timmy Murphy and Seany O’Brien in the act. He kicked them in the arses. Then the nuns
gave them a trouncing, and then the parents went bonkers. They took it like men. They never squeeled on the rest of us. We were about six or seven years old at the time. Timmy later be came a paratrooper with the 101st Airbourne, and Seany joined the British Air Force. And I live safely in New York.
That was eons before sex education. Can you imagine if it happened today? We’d be branded as sex fiends or worse.
Grandpa would give us tractor rides. Little ones rode in his lap, but I always rode on the front axle.
@MJA I had never heard of ice blocking till it was hysterically explained to me by Mr. Illustr8r who grew up in Alaska.
* Rode bikes without a helmet-stayed out until the street lights came on.
* popped asphalt tar bubbles in bare feet on hot summer days.
*angled ramps for Big Wheels into a roadway ditch filled with water-then peddled like heck through the big culvert.
* Played “Star Wars” in the woods with handmade lightsabers and blasters made out of cardboard and electrical tape. Only one of us had Han Solo’s real plastic blaster (with lights and sounds). We used that as a blueprint for the other guns.
My dad had a thick belt he would whip our asses with, ‘Big Red’.
Mom had a skinny black belt.
She also could commandeer a magazine or whatever was handy to tan our belligerent asses.
I remember one specific occurrence of her whipping my brother’s ass while destroying a yard stick in the process.
I nearly felt sorry for the son of a bitch!
But you know how it was when you were a kid and your sibling was the one getting the beating…
Sheew, not me this time, yaah!
I had a friend who would take an old purse and put snakes in it. Then leave it on the side of the street and hide and watch when someone snatched it and hopped back in their car.
All my Grandfather and my father in Law (from what my late wife told me about her Dad) had to do was loosen their belts to put the fear of God and the old man into you. It worked every time
I used to walk to grade school, eight blocks away in foot high snow and swing on thick vines from trees next to a 25 ft. drop. Yep, activities which would alert Child Protective Services today.
Hey Cardigan, did you ‘shoot your eye out’?
When I was 9 or 10, Western Auto would happily sell me and my cousins gunpowder by the pound, model rocket engines, and cardboard tubes for making rockets.
It was pretty obvious that we were making rockets that would explode into a fireball when the rocket engine burned out and exploded the little charge that normally deploys a parachute.
Today CPS would take us away from our parents, and the owner of the Western Auto would be disappeared
by the feds…
Light up some ant’s with a magnifying glass….and all of the leaves in the gutter too…..that magnifying glass left my possession for a good long while….then there was always the time when we rode our bikes to the movies (10 below and snowing) and paid for Young Frankenstein and switched theaters to watch….Last Tango in Paris ( thank God for winter hats and big jackets….we looked older )….the buttered popcorn jest didn’t seem right after that…
Starting at age 8, I cashiered and soda jerked at our store. I sold cigarettes. Still remember 20 cents per pack for Camels. Parents would have their store confiscated today and be put in prison.
When I was 5 I used to hang around and play in my grandmother’s package liquor store and talk to the customers.
got punched out by a nun in Catechism class after my asshole brother talked me into asking Sister Mary Elephant what the “H” stood for in Jesus H Christ
Western Auto!
Blast from the past, thanks ‘that guy’.
My brother bought an old Marks Zorro play-set ten years after it went out of production.
I loved that old store with old inventory.
That Zorro set is work 500 bucks these days…
Geez, my grandfather said when he was a boy going to a one room rural school house most of the boys stacked their .22 rifles in the corner during the day and popped a few squirrels for dinner on the way home.
went to the police garage on Abandoned Bike Auction Day with $20 of newspaper route money, bought six POS bikes that Shoobies had left behind, stole two sheets of plywood from a construction site, made a ramp at the streetend bulkhead next to the Yaaacht Club (say it like Thurston Howell the 3rd would), tied an old lifejacket with the kapok stuffing coming out of it onto the bike frame, going back a block to get up a head of steam and jumping said bikes about 50-75 feet out into the bay. Swam the barely floating bike back to the bulkhead, friends dropped a rope down and hoisted it up. We all kept taking turns jumping until the saltwater fucked up the gears and sprockets and they were making horrible GRITCH, GRIND, GRITCH noises, then I’d jump the bike on one last ride without the damn lifejacket. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think those bikes are still down there.
Cardigan & BFH – Best.Thread. Ever.
I hope every stick-up-their-ass Fascist Progressive Communist Socialist Libtard asshole out there reads this thread so that they will know how much we despise & loathe them and that we all turned out just fine without all this helicopter parent nerfball nanny-state over-protection bullshit
I grew up in west Texas; it was quite common when I was in high school to see quite a few pickups in the school parking lot witW as well. If you were showing a friend a gun out in the parking lot and the principal came by, he was likely to admire it as well and might even show you his. We’d never heard of a school shooting back then.
My list is long (I was a bad kid) but my most vivid memory is drag racing a kid in a ’73 Chevelle with my ’75 Camaro. I had 3 other kids in the car, and the kid in the shotgun seat (whom I’d known since kindergarten and died in 1989 in a car accident–he was not driving) was yelling out the milestones on the speedometer (110! 120! 130! HOLY SHIT 140!).
We blew the doors off that Chevelle, but even though it happened 30 years ago, it scares the hell out of me to think about it today. That Camaro was wicked fast and had bald tires—if one would’ve blown we’d all be dead. Stupid, stupid kids.
A pound of sensimilla in my trunk divided into 1/4, 1/2 and 1 oz baggies, and my Dad’s .45 1911, locked and loaded. California, Catholic HS. Don’t tell my daughter. She’s currently a legacy.
Opps, I forgot two.
In grade school ( ~ 1963) we sometimes played Mumbley Peg during recess. Throwing a knife from a variety of awkward standing positions, using different ways of holding the knife before it was flipped, so that the knife stuck into ground. Never heard of the stick in the ground version. We upped the ante by having knife throws to land as near as possible to the side of our opponents foot. Closer was a higher score, hitting the top of the foot (shoe) was a penalty, a reduction in points.
Pretty much like this video. Except its a slightly different version, and they demo a few throws I never learned..
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2011/06/07/mumbley-peg/ .
The second is another grandfather story.
He was often not well behaved in class, ( think 1910) and had to stand in the corner, near the stored snow boots of classmates, where he proceeded to chew tobacco and spit the juice into his classmates boots.
-Riding a bike without a helmet
-Drinking from a garden hose
– No car seat or seat belts
-Being a latchkey kid in 3rd grade
-Playing lawn darts
-Being able to bring your own lunch to school, i.e. peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
-Making guns out of poptarts
-Pulling the ponytail of the girl sitting in front of you
-Eating trans-fats
There are many, many more. Today committing any of these acts will have CPS called on the parents.
Geoff the Aardvark; How bout selling lots to rich Californians to build houses on the south east end of Hayden Lake, only to find out they did not have utilities?
How come the REALLY Like This has a thumbs down?
Lol! You guys can all dream all you want about getting arrested for doing fun shit when you were a kid; my family actually had to come visit me in juvenile hall a few times, and I can’t count the times my dad came down to get me at the police station just before he kicked the living shit out of me and boxed my ears like a speed bag. 8>]
My juvenile record is sealed, but BigFurHat is going to erase all this anyway. Right? Here goes, just a small sample …
Rolling down a steep street in metal trash cans on the way to elementary school.
Walking the railroad tracks several miles to Stoney Point. Sleeping atop Stoney Point.
Buying booze at the age of sixteen.
Fighting men at the age of sixteen.
Hanging out with outlaw bikers and people who sold weed.
Making nunchaku and brass knuckles in my friend’s garage. Cutting school and hitchhiking to the beach to pick up chicks. Getting kicked out of half the schools in the valley for living the John Wayne Creed.
Shooting guns in the back yard.
Being present at a home-made “rocket” launching that almost took my leg off.
Potato-tailpiping some queer’s Cadillac and hanging his air filter housing high up in a tree while also drinking beer and pounding the empty glass bottles nose first into his fabulous lawn.
Hell, I think that’s enough, I could be here for a fucking week, and i’m not sure about the statute of limitations on a lot of those activities. lol
Two thumbs up for everybody here!!
I know a guy by the name of Bobby Conners who would take turns with his friends being pushed in a milk create by the front bumper of a car doing about 40 down the road.
As for me to many close ones to count.
Toenex, my little brother used to stand on a 33 rpm vinyl record and hang on to the back of a car at about that same speed. lol. He could let go any time, though.
Front bumper is crazy!
My brother and I used to break into jewelry stores at night and take all the cheap shit. The good stuff was in the safe. BASTIDS.
In the 50s and 60s, girls didn’t engage in this sort of daredevil oneupmanship, so there isn’t much I can contribute to this discussion. I don’t think many of my male classmates could either, as I grew up in a wealthy suburb of Jewish professionals who would not have endorsed these behaviors.
But geez, youze guys here made your childhoods into one long action-adventure flick! No wonder Pajama Boy reads like such a faggot-assed pussy. He never participated in any of these wild exploits, so he never had the chance to satisfy natural curiosities, engage his imagination, and watch fear give way to manhood.
An excellent book on this topic is “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” which was a best-seller several years ago.
Actually, I do have an exploit to contribute, but only by proxy.
My father and his brother grew up in the same town I did, Maplewood, New Jersey. In the early 1920s, it was not yet the developed suburb it eventually became and was in fact still quite rural.
My Uncle Tibor’s specialty was putting horse manure in people’s mailboxes.
I have always maintained that America won World War II despite my uncle’s service in the U.S. Army, not because of it.
In high school some farm boys got a tractor with bucket and put 4 tires up over the flag pole. Same year at end of school they took the VW beetle that Mechanics class was working on and put it on top of the 2 story school roof. I took no part in these two escapades but I did witness the tire prank. The only thing I remember doing that could get arrested for today was being pulled by a truck in winter while sitting on a VW beetle hood tied to the bumber with a long long rope. It was FUN until it hit a mail box and one of the girls broke her arm.