Posted on 04/12/2014 6:32:44 PM PDT by MNDude
Almost everyone has a story of something where did something so dumb and crazy as a kid that their parents ground them for a long time. Rode the family horse to town? Let a homeless guy sleep over in your parents bed while they were out of town? What is your story that you're lucky to be alive after your parents found out?
In High School the wood working shop was in the basement which had no windows.
I was tired of building dang birdhouses and wanted a nap.They were working on part of the building and occasionally the lights would go off for an minute or two so when they went out I slipped over to the breaker panel and switched off all the power to the shop.
Got a good 30 minute nap before Mr. Haller realized what happened and started screaming and demanding to know who did it..... I never told it until now...
In the infamous words of Billy Ray Valentine. …”Thank you, you’ve been helpful.”
I’ll probably be stopping every five posts. Fire was big with me a a boy. I recall setting fire to a 50’ x 50’ patch of tall dry grass in between the baseball fields. Used a pack of matches and a cigarette for the “delay fuse”. (Cigarettes were in a pouch in our second-grade teacher’s purse. I thought it was a coin purse when I stole it!)
Anyway, set the “fuse” and then walked the long way around to go “watch the baseball game”. I recall almost leaving with my buddy as it took so long and figured it had failed.
But then - a faint trace of smoke! We waited for someone else to spot it, but wondering if we should be the “hereos” that saw it first. The fire department came but it just burned the dry grass patch.
Several years later they were putting in a development in some woods we played in. Forts, a little creek, etc. After continuing to pull up all of the survey stakes they kept putting them back in. We then figured the “scotched earth policy” was best. About an hour later the thing was really going and we watched the thick black smoke billow up into the sky from four blocks away.
I believe that was my last fire (probably 4th or 5th grade). That one scared us. And of course - looking back it could have killed someone!
Wasn’t the last of the stupid things I did though. A friend of my college-age son’s was out late last night and climbing on an old industrial structure in the dark. He slipped at fell 50 feet, hitting all sorts of pipes and stuff on the way down. No broken bones - except a fractured skull. But he can respond to verbal commands such as wiggle your toes, fingers, etc. Along with grunting.
I hope that he will recover. And I told my son and my other kids that I did ALL sorts of stupid stuff like that when I was a kid. And that EASILY could have been me. I hope that the other kids that were hanging out and screwing around with him aren’t too guilt-ridden. (”Why didn’t we just go home”, “how come I let him go up there”, etc.) Oh - and no drinking involved - just being stupid.
OMG - is that wrong? I didn't know.
Just the other day I saw a guy at the airport in one of the airline lounges fill BOTH pockets with handfuls of the flavored half-and-half containers. His pockets were bulging. It looked very strange. That had to be a mortal sin.
As I came in, they stopped me and brought me into the little white guard shack they had there. They sat me in a chair, asked to see my ID, and when I couldn't produce one, said "Well, how do we know you aren't a spy? Who won the World Series this year?" When I said it was the St. Louis Cardinals (which had my favorite baseball player on the team, Lou Brock) they let me go. I laugh now, they were just a bunch of bored Marines who knew darn well who I was because my dad was in charge of base security, they were just busting my chops because they could.
So, I get home, and decide to go out behind my house with my slingshot, and fire some smoke balls through the air into the playground on the other side of the road.
After I had shot a few, one of the ones I shot landed in the un-mowed, dried grass of the playground. I could see even from where I was, that this was not going to be good, and I was right. The little smoke bomb was spitting out streams of sparks and smoke, and a large grass fire quickly developed. Fire trucks arrived, and I could see I was screwed. I looked out the same window I had hidden under when I nearly got caught shoplifting, and thought for sure they were going to walk right over to my house, but...they didn't.
I don’t ever remember getting grounded. But I went on a LOT of training missions with more senior male members of the family. My one uncle still blows things up.
There was a day when the family had grouped up and for some reason (”I’m sick of your crap ya little barstard”) my grandpa tied me to a corral post and they all loaded up and went on a day long picnic. I was five or six at the time.
Set a tree stump on fire after trying to blow it up with M-80s. Got the fire out, but it kept up a very smoky smolder so we got the hell out of Dodge before any fire dept. or police showed up.
My grandparents' house was about 100 yards up the hill from our house and I sued to spend lots of my time up there with them. One day my grandmother made a chocolate cake, two layers, and frosted it with chocolate icing. I happened to walk through the kitchen just after she finished icing the cake and she had left the kitchen for some reason. Well, I couldn't resist running a finger along the bottom of the icing, but my quick aim was bad and I hit the middle of the cake.
The finger line was too obvious, so I took the spreading spatchula out of the sink and tried to smooth the surface. Didn't work. So I proceeded to hastily wipe all the icing off of the cake, even lifting the top layer to get the middle frosting. Then I put the layers on the cooling rack and imagined that the old gal would forget she iced it.
Convinced I'd pulled off the crime of the century and quite proud of myself, I walked out through the front screen door past my grandfather. His voice called me to halt and turn around. When I did he grabbed me up and spanked by backside with his great paw of a right hand until I wriggled loose. I ran crying all the way home. As I burst through the kitchen screen door my mother yelled 'what are you bawlin' about. Then she caught sight of me and started whipping me more while dragging me into the bathroom, where she stood me up in front of the vanity mirror ... there was chocolate icing all over my face, even on my forhead!
Crime does not pay, and I won't tell you about the gate post gang.
I was about 5th grade when I got caught shoplifting. My buddy couldn’t sit down for a week. I couldn’t look my dad in the eye for a week - he too was so disappointed.
For the rest of my school years I wouldn’t even pick up a pencil off the ground in case someone might come looking for it. I think my buddy progressed to stealing bigger and better things after he moved away.
I think it was about the 6th grade that I finally “got” part of what Christ was about. Thank goodness, or I would have progressed from the bad things I did to even worse. But as I said previously - not perfect in my later years. But - no more fires or vandalism, no stealing, no fighting. Drinking and doing stupid things took a while to overcome years later.
Great thread...there are some really funny stories here. How any of us lived to adulthood, I don’t know.
I guess some of us didn’t.
Locked the teacher in the closet as we were going out to lunch. She got out when the class returned.
You were staring at his what?
There wasn’t a day I wasn’t grounded. Thing is I never did anything to get grounded. My older cousins poured red paint onto the living room carpet - my fault because they’d gotten into my paint. Grandpa told me to tell Grandma something as a joke that he knew I’d get backwards - I got it backwards, he laughed, I got grounded. Cousins, again, went swimming where they weren’t supposed to but I stayed in the right place - yep, they got off scot free and I got grounded from swimming all summer. Another cousin was shooting off fireworks in the backyard and I opened the door to see what was going on - grounded. Someone sped around me on a gravel road and gravel chipped the windshield - had to hand the keys over (a hundred years later I married the show off). I didn’t have time to do anything bad for being grounded the entire first 18 years of my life.
He abruptly left and I didn't know why until I was an adult that he began laughing and had to hide it from me.
Heh, that's great...sums up the way a kid thinks!"
I was in the middle of six kids with brothers all around me, so I hardly ever got into “trouble”. The middle brother did all the time. When I was 16, my dad let me drive his T-bird to a football game, and I forgot my pom-poms. He trailed me to give them to me, and I was going about 90 mph, and he was pretty PO’d, and took the T-bird away, but not until the next day : ) He never “trusted” me with it, for another month or so..... : )
My cousin and I slathered a grassy hill in the back yard with used motor oil and then took turns sledding down it on a flattened cardboard box. Oh man, Dad was not happy about that one!
LOL! What a great story. Those wacky Japanese!
Paintball tourney.
“Hunt the nephew” run, family teams.
The fifties and sixties were indeed better times to grow up in.
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