Strange things you did as a kid...

[billski]

Do anything unusual as a kid?
I'll bet most skiers and boarders did.

When I was about 12 years old we found an old man hole cover, frame and cover discarded somewhere. We put it in the flyer wagon and carted it to the lot behind our house. We dug the deepest hole we could in the middle of the field, deep enough to stand in. We put the manhole cover and frame over it. We used it as a place of refuge when we were in the doghouse with my mother and she would hunt us down. It worked for a few weeks, then she found out about it and made us fill it in, declaring it unsafe.

A couple years later, we created a pirate radio station in another friend's basement. You could hear it all over town. Kinda cool.


I guess a bump on the head got my old memories pushed to the front....

 

[Warp Daddy]

So much wierdness , so little time to tell about it

But one that comes to mind when i was 7 yrs old we lived in a post WW II new housing development . Our home was finished on the first floor but my bedroom was on the 2nd floor and had beaverboard walls ( pre sheetrock material ) . I want and got a chemistry set with bunsen burner, several neat racks to hold test tubes and beaucoup test tubes and chemicals .

One day a buddy and i were up tere messing around and decided to set up all the test tube racks on my window sill and fill every rack with all the test tubes filled with differant chemicals of all different colors. WE Corked up each tube and then decided to "cook" them .

Well u can imagine what happened next !! They exploded crap all over the window the walls , the floor and to make this story short --------------My ass was grass and my parents had the key to the lawnmower

Then the next day my ass was saved when the ONLY hurricane and aftermath that ever hit CNY hit our neighborhood blew our roof off and my room was totalled by the leakage.

INSURANCE covered the mess and i got a new knotty pine ADIRONDACK style bedroom --- i WAS SAVED

 

[wa-loaf]

Dressed up as commandos for Halloween in 8th grade and went out with real BB Guns and some emergency flares. Can you imagine what would happen to kid doing that these days? We wound up setting the leaves on fire on the lawn of the President of Colby. Like true commando's we disappeared into the night at that point. :lol:

 

[Marc]

The window sills had considerably less paint on them after I started staying over at my grandparent's house.

 

[Dr Skimeister]

I plead the 5th. Even though the statute of limitations may protect me at this point, payback could still be hell for some of the antics me and my *friends* pulled in tract-housing, suburban NJ.

 

[Marc]

I remember one summer I was over at my friend's house, probably in the 7th - 8th grade. They were having their house resided and there was lots of scaffolding around.

He also had a big pond. So the natural progression of things was for us to one day steal two sections of scaffolding, drag them down to the pond, call 6 of our closest frieds to lift them upright (stacked on the ground on their side) and make a platform for the top of them. I believe they were 8 ft tall, so we ended up with a 16 ft platform to jump from.

And of course we used boards of unequal length, and butted them to the edge of the scaffolding facing the pond... so there was considerable overhang off the back. And naturally we didn't anchor them down, so if you backed up to far over the overhang, the whole platform started raising up and would eventually dump you off the back 16 ft into big rocks and brush.

We had a blast jumping off it into the pond though. Needless to say, our parents and the siding company was not all that pleased when they discovered it.

 

[Trekchick]

There was an old abandoned hay wagon, probably from the early 1900's that was in shambles in the woods behind our house. My sister and I used to take our dog out there and play around that thing for hours on end. Sometimes we'd steel dad's tools and use them to take apart parts of the wagon to create our secret fort.

I'm not sure if my parents ever knew where we were or what we were doing, but back then it was good when your kid entertained him/her-self.

One thing I'm quite sure of is that what were were doing was not really safe, by today's standards

Dino was a cool dog. I miss him.

 

[wa-loaf]

A friend's mom was a diabetic and had syringes in the house. We stole some and filled a tennis ball with gassoline. I think we were hoping it would blow-up, but it just turned into a flaming tennis ball fight.


Yes fire is a common theme among the things I did in Jr High ...

 

[Marc]

A friend's mom was a diabetic and had syringes in the house. We stole some and filled a tennis ball with gassoline. I think we were hoping it would blow-up, but it just turned into a flaming tennis ball fight.


Yes fire is a common theme among the things I did in Jr High ...

Yeah, me too for some reason.

You shoudla been there the day we discovered how to fill a plastic shopping bag with propane from a propane torch and then light it off. After we moved up to kitchen sized garbage bags, we were smart enough to stop, only because we were afraid someone would hear it.

 

[wa-loaf]

The window sills had considerably less paint on them after I started staying over at my grandparent's house.

I hear those lead paint chips are pretty tasty ...

 

[Greg]

I shoved peas up my nose when I was about 3 or 4...

 

[Paul]

Yeah, me too for some reason.

You shoudla been there the day we discovered how to fill a plastic shopping bag with propane from a propane torch and then light it off. After we moved up to kitchen sized garbage bags, we were smart enough to stop, only because we were afraid someone would hear it.

We weren't. We used acetylene and leaf bags. Tried the trick of carefully breaking the glass of a lightbulb and filling it with gunpowder. Made pipe bombs (just for the noise factor, the only things destroyed were tree stumps) out of copper pipes.Tried making home-made napalm...

 

[billski]

We weren't. We used acetylene and leaf bags. Tried the trick of carefully breaking the glass of a lightbulb and filling it with gunpowder. Made pipe bombs (just for the noise factor, the only things destroyed were tree stumps) out of copper pipes.Tried making home-made napalm...

:flame:You do that today and Homeland Security will have you down in Gitmo in a flash!


Kind of a shame isn't it, that Homeland put the kebash on all that ka-boom stuff. Now that I think about it, I haven't heard even an M80 go off in years.....

 

[Marc]

I love home made napalm... the first time was accidentally actually... we had a basketball hoop underneath a pine tree and it got sap on the backboard. So I decided to get some gasoline to clean it off, and the only thing I had to get the gasoline out there was a polystyrene coffee cup. Well, the bottom disolved right out of that sucker before I even got to the garage door. That was the start of some very interesting times.

I really enjoyed writing my name on the driveway in it, and lighting it ablaze.

 

[Trekchick]

We made tennis ball canon's out of pop cans and potato canons out of sewer pipe. Being in the excavation business, my dad had tons of short end pieces of sewer pipe from jobs where he didn't need the full 10'.

I remember my mom saying, "Can we keep some potatoes for dinner?"

My dad had a real canon that we used to shoot off for holidays like independence day, memorial day and labor day. A corn cob can really fly when its coming out the end of a 2'bore canon!

 

[wa-loaf]

:flame:You do that today and Homeland Security will have you down in Gitmo in a flash!


Kind of a shame isn't it, that Homeland put the kebash on all that ka-boom stuff. Now that I think about it, I haven't heard even an M80 go off in years.....

I don't know about that. When I lived in Providence the kid across the street was always blowing up those 2 liter soda bottle bombs. But then that could have just been confused with the gunfire ...

 

[billski]

Any of you guys kiss and tell to your parents later in life?

 

[billski]

I don't know about that. When I lived in Providence the kid across the street was always blowing up those 2 liter soda bottle bombs. But then that could have just been confused with the gunfire ...

gotta love the anonymity of the city :???:


Just thinkin' about what a chairlift conversation starter this would be. Assuming you're not sitting next to a cop :roll:

 

[playoutside]

This is a great thread...so many ideas of crap we did are flying into my head...too much free time, too many neighborhood kids and too little supervision. Perfect for idiocy.

When we were not yet teens:
Burning stuff including ants with magnifying glass
Making big balloons from trash bags suspended over an outside bbq ... I think we thought we could fly if we made enough of them
Giant slingshots made from 2x4 and bicycle inner tubes ... we'd launch rotten apples and other crap from one backyard to hit the houses on the next street (they had no idea where this flying debris came from)

As teenagers we only became dumber and water was usually involved:
Best friend had a waterski boat and we spent hours playing around...we were not content to just ski or tube. We would body surf, great fun when your body would skim along, insane when the driver would launch you out of the wake during a tight turn. Also tried to tow most anything I thought could float...best was when I thought a snow disk would be great to skim along on the surface of the water...used a metal one and a tow rope...smashed my knuckles and watched the disk sink like a stone in 50ft of water!

Extra dumb was waterskiing in the dark with a group of drunk teenagers while skinny dipping. Fun, but real lucky we didn't lose anyone or drive over them.

 

[Trekchick]

We used to use real explosives and have access to gun powder(still do) when we were kids.
Today, kids are excited to have access to a coke bottle and mentos. :?: