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When I was a kid . . .

EdwinWillers said:
I remember the big swing sets where we'd have competitions to see who could jump farthest. After awhile, we learned you could bail out of them backwards, which was totally cool. :thumbs:

We'd also see how high we dared to go - the higher you went, the more slack you put in the chains of the swing and the harder the "bump" when you came down. We all feared coming down on the top cross-bar. :D
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nor will I ever forget the beating I got from my mom, when my little brother ratted me out for jumping off the swing at the highest point in a contest with my buddies. (...it was worth it... I won 50 cents! )
 
Woodman909 said:
nor will I ever forget the beating I got from my mom, when my little brother ratted me out for jumping off the swing at the highest point in a contest with my buddies. (...it was worth it... I won 50 cents! )
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50 cents! - a veritable fortune back then. :D
 
EdwinWillers said:
50 cents! - a veritable fortune back then. :D
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It got my sister and me into our local amusement park, riding the rides inside for free all day long! Yippee! :thumbs:

Greetings, Edwin Willers. :2wave:
 
I sold jars of blackberries I harvested from Grandma's back forty door to door for my vast fortune - $12. Bought Christmas presents for every member of the family and had enough left over for a comic book at the grocery store (X-Men number one, which later paid for my first year of college).
 
polgara said:
It got my sister and me into our local amusement park, riding the rides inside for free all day long! Yippee! :thumbs:

Greetings, Edwin Willers. :2wave:
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Greetings, and thank you!! :2wave:

My brother and I funded all our elementary excesses - candy, candy bars, toys, saturday matinees, etc. by working actually pretty hard. We have a college in our town and back then sodas were dispensed in bottles so we'd ride our bikes through campus collecting as many bottles as we could for the deposit money. We did pretty darn good for ourselves too! The students - many frat and sorority kids, had no sense of what it meant not to litter - enter my brother and I. :)
 
Did any of you have saturday movie matinees where entrance to the movie was with things like recycled (not a word in our vocabulary back then but...) milk cartons or pop bottles?

I remember collecting milk cartons so my brother and I could go see Tarzan at the downtown theater for free. They'd have a big stake-bed truck parked in front of the theater and we'd throw our milk cartons into it for a ticket to the movie. I forget how many milk cartons we needed, but I remember that truck... :)
 
Oh, and we haven't even touched the music:

I loved this song:


 
Drive-in music:

 
MaggieD said:
My mom worked, so every summer, my dad would drop me off early in the morning at my mom's friend's house where I'd spend the day -- probably up until I was 11 years old.

I'd go back to sleep when he dropped me off . . . and when I woke up, I'd have Cheerios for breakfast, and then "Aunt Winnie" would make me a thermos of Kool-Aid, a PB&J sandwich and a chocolate chip cookie and off to the park I'd go for the day.

The park was a block from the house. It had a kiddie pool, a huge sandbox, swings, teeter-totters, jungle gyms a pushy-thingie we called a merry-go-round . . .

And no perverts.

Clusters of untrimmed bushes became secret forts, jungle gyms became war zones, the merry-go-round took us to far-away places, kids made new friends every day, learned to get along, had active imaginations. I think times were better then.

Today, if moms have the time, their kids are organized into everything. Soccer, baseball, football, peewee ****. Where's playtime today? Where does a kid learn to use his imagination and entertain himself?

I think times were better then. What do you think?
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You know what? In most small towns in America you could STILL do that and the odds your child would be targeted by a stranger for nefarious harm would be extremely small. Most people are actually fairly decent and won't harm children; the media hype over every incident has us all thinking perverts are lurking under every bush, just waiting for you to take your eyes off your kid for TWO SECONDS so they can snatch them and they'll be gone forever except as a picture on a milk jug.

Most places though, that just isn't generally true.

Yet we're too scared to take that chance anymore because of the media hype... and let me admit mea-culpa when my son was small I was also too scared to let him spend the day in a park alone.
 
The Nylons do it better, but the original is always good too:

 
Oy



...and this classic:

 
Stained by Tom Cruise, but the original is ever so awesome:

 
Goshin said:
You know what? In most small towns in America you could STILL do that and the odds your child would be targeted by a stranger for nefarious harm would be extremely small. Most people are actually fairly decent and won't harm children; the media hype over every incident has us all thinking perverts are lurking under every bush, just waiting for you to take your eyes off your kid for TWO SECONDS so they can snatch them and they'll be gone forever except as a picture on a milk jug.

Most places though, that just isn't generally true.

Yet we're too scared to take that chance anymore because of the media hype... and let me admit mea-culpa when my son was small I was also too scared to let him spend the day in a park alone.
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Eh, I'm more afraid of getting arrested for taking my eyes off my kids for 15 seconds, than I am of them being kidnapped.


Cops are the greater concern.
 
Two words....slot cars.
 
Ahh a memory lane thread.. skimming the first handful of responses brought back memories of my childhood neighborhood. Boys all up and down the street I lived on.. all the same age.. one cute girl across the street from me, unfortunately I moved away just prior to the discovery that girls were not to be shunned. For the most part our neighborhood was boys town. Racing bikes up and down the streets, mowing the field in the spring for baseball, football in the fall. A large patch of woods behind our street, if you were to walk through the woods eventually you came into the territory of our "rival" neighborhood. Just south of the woods an open meadow with bike trails through it, one "hill" with a steep trail up it perfect for running our bikes up to catch air.. a hill responsible for multiple broken bones - and maybe a banged up scalp or two.. a bicycle helmet was unheard of . A small pond/swamp between the meadow and the jump hill. I remember catching frogs in the pond.

We always had our forts, snow forts in winter, forts in the woods, in the trees, in the brambles, in the meadow, dug under ground, it seemed our neighborhood was never in a shortage for scrap wood (one of the kids dad was a carpenter/home builder). Smuggled penthouse and playboys were always to be found in our forts, occasionally someone would swipe some smokes off his dad and we would take turns taking a puff and and then hack and cough up a storm in our efforts to act like the "big boys". Always having to be on the defensive in case the rival neighborhood discovered our fort.. always on the prowl to find and destroy their forts.. hopefully assimilating a stash of nudie mags to add to our collection.. or most of the time to reclaim the magazines that were ours in the first place. It was bragging rights as to which neighborhood had the biggest and baddest fort in the woods - as well as the best pron stash. Quite a few black eyes were shared between our neighborhoods when we encountered these forts while occupied. An attempt to burn the rival kids out of a fort on the edge of the meadow and the woods that was dangerously close to encroaching on our territory resulted in catching half the meadow on fire and a ****-ton of firetrucks coming to put out the conflagration.

Ahh those were the halcyon days.. when boys were boys and a few bumps and bruises and the occasional broken bone was just par for the course and an expected part of being a child. We were invincible in those days. Hell I thought I was invincible for another decade or so afterwards.. suddenly I found myself staring 30 in the face and stopped and looked back in amazement that I was still alive and still on one piece. I cannot say the same for all of the kids that grew up on Craig street. I eventually moved away, lost track of them and one day returning to visit my brother for christmas I bumped into one of the kids from my old stomping grounds.. I learned that 2 of the kids on my street had died young and tragically.. and 1 from the "rival" neighborhood as well. It seems our immortality was an illusion of youth... looking back I sort of wish I had never lost that illusion, but also it is a damn good thing that I did. It took me a while to dispel that illusion, and looking back I have to say that I am damn lucky that I was not counted among the lost boys of Craig Street.

edit: and reading more brings back other memories.. blowing stuff up with cherry bombs, tormenting reptiles and amphibians galore (some of those got blown up by cherry bombs too) the drive in that burned down, the gravel pit filled with water (both places were absolutely off limits.. but of course we explored.. breaking into the old shacks, finding ancient books in there at least 40 years old, other varied "treasures" I am sure, but for some reason just the old books stick out). Sleds racing down the hills.. bodies inevitably flying as we pushed one another into more daring feats of bravado.
 
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Remember those long metal slides on the playgrounds that promised an exciting ride but which were so hot from the sun you didn't dare slide down one with shorts?
 
EdwinWillers said:
I remember collecting milk cartons so my brother and I could go see Tarzan at the downtown theater for free. They'd have a big stake-bed truck parked in front of the theater and we'd throw our milk cartons into it for a ticket to the movie. I forget how many milk cartons we needed, but I remember that truck... :)
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No, I just had to pay my 35 cents. :lol:
 
EdwinWillers said:
Remember those long metal slides on the playgrounds that promised an exciting ride but which were so hot from the sun you didn't dare slide down one with shorts?
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:agree: That probably prompted the saying "you learn best by doing!" :lamo:
 
clownboy said:
I sold jars of blackberries I harvested from Grandma's back forty door to door for my vast fortune - $12. Bought Christmas presents for every member of the family and had enough left over for a comic book at the grocery store (X-Men number one, which later paid for my first year of college).
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Who said comic books don't have redeeming value?
 
EdwinWillers said:
Remember those long metal slides on the playgrounds that promised an exciting ride but which were so hot from the sun you didn't dare slide down one with shorts?
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We used to take a sheet of waxed paper and rub them down for greater speed.
 
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