Posted on 04/20/2023 7:54:42 PM PDT by DallasBiff
Bottlerockets didn’t make the list?
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Bottle rocket, BB gun, pellet gun wars was our past time.
At least until one of our most enthusiastic participant was asked about a swollen bump on his arm by his mother.Of course the idiot couldn’t have worn a long sleeve or said he got a “bite.”
Nope , he folded under questioning and phones started ringing as mothers started looking for the bad kid to blame.
“The good old days.”
About the only toys around when I was a kid in the 50’s were cap guns, board games like Sorry, Go to the Head of the Class, Parchesi, Monopoly, Clue, Chinese Checkers, Pick-up-Sticks, Jacks, Mr. Potato Head, Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, train sets. My brother had a BB-gun and shot me in the leg with it. All it did was sting.
My brother was three when they took his tonsils out. My mother said he bit the doctor.
LOL!! We did that too. We used to use a magnifying glass on ants, and watch them burn up. Remember those black discs that you'd light with a lighter or match, and they turned into long coils like a snake?
Well, I got a woodburning kit as a gift. After convincingly demonstrating my complete lack of talent in anything that could be even remotely considered as artistic pursuits, I managed to convert the woodburning tool into a soldering iron.
It worked better, and faster, than the ones in the school’s shop. It was better than Dad’s!
They were delicious
In a plastic-rubber-tasting way
🤣😛😂😄😝
Need 3-wheeled ATVs from ‘Diamonds Are Forever’
So the dog poops using magnets that can come loose? What kid is going to eat dog poops from two Barbie-and-Tanner sets at once?
I’m shocked that the Creepy Crawlers bug-maker didn’t wind up there - it’s way more dangerous than most of the stuff on that list.
And yet I had almost all of those late ‘80’s-’90’s toys and never got hurt once. It’s down to whose parents are dumb sh¡ts and either didn’t keep an eye on their kids who were too young for those toys or didn’t teach them basic common sense.
I had roller blade Barbie. Still do somewhere; at least her clothes.
Yep, “Snakes”, and your sidewalk or driveway had a permanent black ring on it wherever you had lit them. We lived in Illinois at the time, and the only sort of “fireworks” that were legal around the 4th were snakes, of course caps and cap guns, and smoke bombs in a variety of colors. Not exactly the makings of the most exciting 4th of July. Fortunately, we later lived in Quincy, IL, on the Mississippi River and right across from Missouri, the land of real fireworks. Around the 4th, we’d ride our bikes across the river and buy whatever we wanted, firecrackers, bottle rockets, even M-80s (though you had to look around to find those). Bottle rockets, my favorite, were cheap, sometimes as cheap as a dollar a gross (12 dozen).
On the evening of the 4th we and all of our neighbors would take turns shooting off our fireworks collections in the middle of the cul-de-sac we lived on. One time, the curmudgeonly old couple who lived across from the end of our street apparently called the cops, because in the middle of the fun a police car suddenly turned into the entrance to our subdivision (we had good line of sight to the entrance). In the maybe 30 seconds it took them to enter the neighborhood and turn up our street everyone scattered, grabbing fireworks, lawn chairs, and other assorted stuff, flew into their houses and turned off the lights. As the cops entered the cul-de-sac it was a ghost town with the lone exception of my best friend slowly walking up his driveway in the dark. The cops followed him into his garage and started questioning him about the report they received. He was about 15 at the time and without missing a beat he asked if they had a warrant. When they said “No” he told them to leave his property because they were trespassing. They tried a couple more times but he just stood his ground and they left. What they didn’t know was that his dad, who was at the time in the back yard with his mom and friends hosting a dinner party, was the big lawyer in town. So my friend knew the law.
His dad was quite the flamboyant character, too. At Halloween, he used to hand out money instead of candy. My friend also told me that when they lived in Carlinville, IL his dad, not content with just playing with normal fireworks, blew up the city’s water system with dynamite (accidentally). I never found out any more details than that.
Incidentally, speaking of Halloween and dangerous things kids used to do, one year I for some reason came up with the bright idea to dig a pit in the vacant lot to try to trap unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. I think I was inspired by the scene in Swiss Family Robinson where they dug pits to trap the approaching pirates, or it could have been from any of a number of Tarzan episodes. So we dug a pretty deep pit, and covered it with sticks and grass clippings (we used to dump our grass in that lot). At least we didn’t put punji sticks in the bottom - we weren’t barbarians. I remember suddenly growing a bit of a conscience and becoming a little concerned about what we may find the next morning. So it was a relief when we checked it and found no trick-or-treater skeletons at the bottom of it.
Don’t forget the Red Ryder BB gun.
Wrist Rocket and steel ball bearings. They also made ammo that would snap and release a puff of smoke on impact. The funny thing is, with things like wrist rockets and BB guns and later .22s, we never did anything truly destructive with them. Not in a million years would we have even gone so far as to shoot out a window, and we certainly wouldn’t have shot at people with them. Bottle rocket fights were another matter, but that was only between friends. Well OK, there was that one time that we launched a barrage of dozens of bottle rockets simultaneously at the kid across the street while he was sitting on his porch, folding up the newspapers that he was about to deliver (never knew he was such a dancer), but that was a momentary lapse of judgment. During the ensuing dancing and screaming his mom came running and opened the door…big mistake. That was like opening a porthole to see what all the fuss was about as your ship is receiving a full-on broadside from a pirate ship. Bottle rockets were flying inside the house and now everyone was dancing. We got in big trouble over that one…big, big trouble.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqU7-ZEbpiE
Above is a link to “Camping with Steve”.
At the 7:47 mark: “Okay, so I’ve lit a fire pretty much every way I know. So today I’m going to use sparklers. 120 of them.”
LOL! “Not for blind kids.”
Along the same line ... Once we ladies at work had a party and we made up a game, “101 Uses For A Tampon”. My friend’s daughter’s idea: Wind chimes for the deaf.
Pencils, firecrackers, apples.
Go out to the apple tree, stick the pencil in a rotten apple put a firecracker in the hole, light it and throw it.
Or
Get your wrist rocket put an M-80 in the pouch, bring it back to your cheek have your buddy light it and shoot it...
We were really stupid crazy!
Played lawn darts too, but that has been dumbed down to cornhole...
My hardscrabble farming uncle blew stumps with fertilizer and diesel fuel. That was something!
We used to take up teams and have fireworks battles (in the overall neighborhood war) in the farmers field. If you weren’t tough enough to get a few burn marks, you probably were going to have a rough time in life!
We once dug a pit, filled it with dog poop, and put a long board across it and made Andy Cheadle (and others) walk the plank! Fun times!
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