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Anticipating reminiscences of all you other survivors of our daily dalliances with danger while growing up !

I was born in the 1970s and lived in Suburbia and Small Town America. My whole childhood was what is currently labeled "Free Range." My summers were filled with hours of unsupervised play, and doing odd jobs for spending money. My friends and I rode our bicycles everywhere. Baseball and football games started on a whim. I still have some scars from my first efforts to ride a bicycle without training wheels (pain can be an excellent teacher). My friends and I found numerous ways to entertain ourselves with fireworks. We learned to think on our feet through trading good-natured insults, improvising bicycle ramps, modifying go-carts, and all sorts activities that might cause some modern parents to faint. My friends and I defended the neighborhood from the Russkies with our toy guns and whatever gear we could muster from a surplus store or from someone's dad (many of my friends were the kids of Vietnam vets). The only thing we feared in our youth was doing something that would earn a spanking, all else was fair game.