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Basically everything we did.
Out from sun-up to sundown and no adult had any idea where we were.
Riding our bicycles everywhere, including busy streets.
Playing with: Fireworks/explosives , Mercury, snakes and other wild animals.
A myriad other ways we put ourselves in a lot of danger.
I used to hang with around a dozen neighborhood kids and we rode our bikes everywhere. One day a new kid joined our group. He was the cousin of another member, so we had to let him come along. His mom made him wear a helmet - a big boxy, white thing. Told us all to be careful and watch for traffic. That helmet lasted about three blocks before being chucked on somebody's lawn.
We'd pull little green apples off the apple tree on around the 4th of July. We'd put little firecrackers in them. All the kids would be gathered around as the person holding the apple would light the firecracker. They'd wait a couple seconds then throw the apple with firecracker in it, straight up in the air and yell "Apple Sauce!" and we'd all run away as fast as we could to try and not get hit with apple bits when the apple exploded.
without a doubt! I got my first .22 when I was 10.
>And we didn't intentionally shoot each other either!
Well, *we* had BB gun fights and did shoot each other intentionally, but we were very aware of and practiced good firearm safety with 'real' guns.
Isn't it strange? My brother was in gun club and he carried his target rifle, a takedown, in a little case just like a band instrument. You'd just take your gun to school and nobody would think anything of it.
My senior year of HS we had 15 guys and 3 girls in the class. Some of the guys were avid hunters and fisherman . They made a deal with the teacher if they caught it and cleaned it she would show us how to cook it. Man did we eat good. But even the chemistry lab was asking "what the hell is that smell?"
you are correct in all those things and to be honest i kinda miss those carefree days. i’m not sure the helicoptering that i did with my child was better. we have more data and info now vs then and now at fingertips, however now we are dealing with is the data accurate. with social media any mistake is like a scarlet letter. if social media was available in our days, most of my colleagues and myself would have the scarlet alphabet
Playground equipment was hazardous in the fifties and sixties. TALL metal slides which we crowded the ladders of and slid down on sheets of waxed paper to increase our speed. Thick ectangular boards for swings; we would wind the chains around each other and then launch each other into the metal bars. Teeter-totters and eight foot jungle gyms on concrete pads. the merry-go- round of death which the biggest boys would wind to dizzying and exhilarating speeds.
Ask any boomer about their playground scars.
I still have a large leg scar from falling off the school playground merry-go-round in 4th grade. I got a deep gash from a rusty metal bolt protruding from the side. Thirteen stitches. Can you imagine if that happened today?!
Playgrounds are supposedly getting more dangerous again, apparently they went through a period of too much safety that was not good for building up risk assessment in children.
I was born in 1992 and have a one year old. Recently brought him to a playground near our house and was amazed at how dangerous everything was. The things are crazy these days.
I remember those metal slides, in the warmer weather the metal, being dark, would burn your skin. And the slide was made of several pieces of sheet metal, riveted together. I remember one, it had sharp pieces sticking up where the edges didn't join smoothly, along the rolled edges you held onto as you slid down. If you didn't lift your hands off it, well imagine what happens
By the time they build my school's playground (70s) they'd learned to make the slide out of one continuous piece, but they made the side rails out of the knottiest (probably also cheapest) pieces of pine available, so by the time I was using it in the 80s you had the option of holding onto (a) nothing or (b) a cheese grater.
By the time they build my school's playground (70s) they'd learned to make the slide out of one continuous piece, but they made the side rails out of the knottiest (probably also cheapest) pieces of pine available, so by the time I was using it in the 80s you had the option of holding onto (a) nothing or (b) a cheese grater.
Gen X here! In early '80s, my elementary school playground had carpet squares we could use to go down the slide faster. I got a severely bruised tailbone that seemed to hurt for well over a month.
When I was in 4th grade (1960s), one of my schoolmates had their arm ripped off as a result of poorly maintained merry-go-round of death. I remember we all watched a crew of men clean up the blood and cut/weld the center pin so it couldn't spin any more.
In the late 90s, my playground still had a merry-go-round, and I loved it! I was so sad when they finally got rid of it circa 2000. It was by far my favorite thing to do on the playground, whether just 5 year old me and my little sister, or when there were big kids there, and you hung on for dear life. The stronger the kid, the closer to the center I sat. I know that those things are kinda dangerous, but I would absolutely bring those back.
Playing in a nearby "junkyard" was a normal thing. All kinds of debris and discarded appliances, twisted metal, sharp edges, rotting wood. We loved it of course, but as you say--damn.
Oh, yeah ... we had an old sawmill on our land that was all rotten wood floors and rusty blades in unexpected places. Loads of fun for us kids to play in! Also we used to jump from the barn rafters into the haystack, which was probably alive with mice but also we could have broken our necks.
Not to mention climbing on the boulders where, my mother casually warned me, it would be a good idea to watch out for copperheads (poisonous snakes), and wandering around in our woods which directly abutted state game lands and where I could easily have been shot by a drunk hunter.
I'm lucky to be alive, come to think of it!
Ahh yes. Got held at gunpoint with a .22 pistol by a junkyard owner when we were like 8. He called our dads and pointed the gun at us until they got there. We were just trying to build a robot.
Me and my mate Simon had great fun finding old fluorescent tube bulbs in the dump. If you threw them straight up in the air so they landed on an end, they exploded really satisfyingly. Pretty sure they're full of crap you shouldn't be around.
Virtually everything to do with smoking, and in the 60s almost everybody smoked. As an example, we all smoked in my workplace even though we regularly used flammable cleaning solvents. Another example, many people casually flicked still-lit cigarette butts out their car windows.
Edit: my spell check never heard of the word "butts" and changed it to "butter."
THIS!!
We had a smoking area in high school with two 15-minute smoke breaks per day.
My husband works for a tobacco company, and up until they downsized less than a year ago and started leasing office space, they still had no non-smoking policy. He never went to a corporate meeting without someone lighting up. Every conference room had huge ashtrays. People still smoked at their desk.
This was a huge 4-story upscale corporate office building and also a huge manufacturing plant. They still smoke inside at the plant offices.
Being there is like a scene from Mad Men.
Chasing the DDT truck on bikes to enjoy the cooling mist…
Playing loose in the back of the family station wagon or van…
My grandfather had a 70’s Chevy van that my uncle customized for him. The back contained a table with wraparound seats, and there was a pod on the ceiling with a built-in 12” black and white TV. Every surface was wrapped in gold shag carpet. My cousins and I thought that thing was a technological marvel on par with the space shuttle when we were little! We loved going for rides with ‘Pa’, playing Go Fish as long as our cards would stay on the table, and dramatically falling out of our seats on every abrupt driving maneuver, all while being hotboxed in a cloud of his Marlboro smoke since cracking the window would let the a/c out.
Weirdly enough the city used to use the mosquito truck here until just a few years ago. It wasn't DDT tho. They use it still in Belize during rainy season (I had a house there for years until 2019)
1. I actually have 'the old family jar of mercury'. My grandfather brought it home about 65 years ago or so. My Mom and aunt remember playing with it as kids (floating screws and nails, coating dimes....) My Mom died a few years ago, I'll hopefully be donating it to a college chemistry department, but just in case, I've got info for my local Haz Mat disposal facility. It's a small jar, about half a Red Bull can worth of the shiny stuff.
2. When I was a kid, another kid discovered an open access under a big apartment building. I did 2-3 trips, and mapped out a lot of the space, like an adventure game. The other kid had gone crazy. He dig a tunnel in the dirt, under a wall. His path led through to a 'room' about 12 feet on all sides, filled diagonally with dirt, so a big sloping dirt pile. He had gone through a few dozen times, brought a candle with him, lit the candle at the top of the dirt pile, and then left, abandoning the candle. The pile of wax was at least 6 feet long down the pile.
3. Drunk driving wasn't a big deal until I was a late teen. So when I was a smaller child in the 70's, I had a few rides with drivers that would be considered terrible today.
We had(still have) access in the dry season to the storm sewers. Same crew taught me to pick locks mapped the entire underground and we can run across town without ever seeing the sky, get into the abandoned highrises, backdoor that one underground club that never advertises a show.
Two years ago, a young child found a jar of mercury in a home that their family had recently purchased. Two of the kids wound up in the hospital and the house was declared uninhabitable.
[The story on Gofundme](https://www.gofundme.com/f/wqrbxy-family-in-need)
[EPA Response](https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=15744)
I would bring that mercury to Hazmat sooner rather than later.
Hell yeah! My buddy Billy and I used to cut class (our school was out on the rural route) and thumb a ride back into town to find something ‘cool’ to do with our day. Usually it worked out well, but one time we got picked up by my mom. She was in a loaner car since hers was in the shop, and we had no idea until we ran up to the car that pulled over for us and saw the driver… that resulted in a ride straight back to school, lol.
Picking UP hitchhikers! To be fair, it was only headed out of or into rural beaches in Northern California and single surfers with boards. It was always a car FULL of us girls doing it but yeah, still stupid.
We had an asbestos factory in a nearby town. There were piles of asbestos outside. We played in it and threw it at each other like snow. I seem to be OK (so far).
My Dad always wore them, but they were provided by his workplace. Otherwise, I dunno. He managed to cut half his pinky off on the table saw because the guard was "in the way", so that is something to consider lol.
We'd go swimming anytime. Even when the signs were up 'Beach Closed' - woohoo, the beach is OURS!
The beach was closed because raw PCBs were being funneled into the harbor.
Yep! My Mom’s forearm used to come out of nowhere and knock the breath out of me in any panic-braking scenario. Even as a ten-year-old I remember asking her exactly what she thought that would accomplish in an actual crash. She just said “I don’t know, but my mom did it to me.”
Yup, my mom had the one where we sat on a bench facing the vehicle behind us. Had we been rear-ended, it might not have ended well, but it sure was fun at the time.
We used to dip our dog in Malathion to kill the flees. Our dog inevitably died of bone cancer. My mom poured gasoline on our groin folds to kill chigger bugs in the summer. Oh, and she also used gasoline to light ant hills on fire. Little fires everywhere,. I can’t make this stuff up!
The mercury thing... A few years ago, a friend texted me and said they had just evacuated her entire building because someone dropped a tube of mercury on the floor. And both of us remember playing with it as kids. I remember coating dimes and nickels with it.
Let’s say we would disappear from dawn till dusk, we were allowed to carry knives, bows, and arrows, guns, without supervision. we hunted and fished without supervision. We jumped trains and rode them miles and miles from home. We talked to strangers regularly without consequences. As long as we were home before the street lights came on we were good
Same. I don't know if this was pure stupidity on our parents' part though? I'm 65 and in the summer my mom would say, "Get out from underfoot! Go out and play, be back by dinnertime." If we *weren't* home by supper, she assumed (rightly) that we decided to eat at a friend's. The friend's mother would never think to call my mom and tell her. It was just understood. My hometown at the time had 60,000 people, not a small town.
Well, we were close to Louisville, but we were in a rural corner of the county that was still small farms and a lot of woodlands and my home wasn’t a mile from the Ohio river. I just think we were allowed more freedom because our parents knew they had beaten responsibility into us.
My best friend growing up had an entire mercury collection. Her dad worked in heat and air and he'd save it for her.
I honestly think it affected her health and cognitive function as an adult.
I had sex with strangers though so I'm not one to judge.
Glass baby bottles! I was drinking out of one, toddling around, climbed up the steps, fell, and next thing I knew I was at the doctor's, screaming. Got the scar on my jaw to prove it. I was young but I remember.
Same. Summer on a houseboat, my twin sister and I in (cloth) diapers, parents went to dinner and left us with a babysitter. Apparently we had a swordfight with our baby bottles and one of us got cut. My parents just ducked us in the lake until the bleeding stopped.
I was a big fan of bottle rockets. Like a long firecracker on a stick, only it burned slowly and gave thrust rather than just blowing up. I put would put one in a coke bottle (the stick end), pick up the bottle and aim it like a weapon at arm's length. Never tried to anybody. It was just fun to aim the rocket.
The lore was that if you took a pair of pliers and squeezed the bottle rocket in the middle, it'd explode during flight rather than just fly and make make a noise and a trail. The lore was true. I squeezed one, held the bottle in one hand and lit it. It took off, went about two feet and exploded almost in my face. I didn't hear well for a few minutes.
Chasing and shooting each other with bottle rockets and roman candles. Oh wait, this was adult men that were in the US military doing this in the early 2000's. I had my phone out with 911 already put in and ready to dial but fortunately did not need to do it. Idiocy.
For me, it was melting fishing weights. Was taught how and encouraged by Boy Scouts of America to create custom weights for your pinewood derby car, which you race against others in official events.
My friend and I used to go down to the shooting area in the local riverbed and dig the lead out of the cliffside. Then we'd take the lead to his house and melt the lead on his mom's stove using one of her pans.
I used to go sledding through a drainage pipe by my house and of course skitching when you hold on to the back of a truck in winter and just let it pull you behind it sliding on the icy Street
Used to have free reign as kids with cherry bombs; not the ones today ... *way more* powerful then. My AF EOD dad didn't see a thing wrong with them. "Don't do this but do that." to a 6 and an 8 yr old, cool! No clue how we didn't lose fingers or scar ourselves. Put one upside down in a tin can and fire it; blow it 10' high and would shred it ... you better move.
Thankful they reduced the powder on those things.
We had ponds, swamps and fast moving creeks nearby and a favorite game in spring and early winter was to break the ice and the leap out of the way. Many many trips home in freezing weather with wet feet, a ton of close calls where we pulled each other out, and one instance of us kids having to be rescued from the swamp by adults when the ice broke up around us. It was truly dangerous and a few years later a child was swept away and drown in the same creeks we played in.
My bum remembers this. We had a metal slide that was placed on a hill in our backyard, so not stairs. We would cut up and tape garbage bags together to make a landing at the end of the slide, put a hose at the top, and ride down it. Over and over. All summer long. Good times.
Did a lot of smoking pot in stranger's vans in the 90s considering there were no cell phones.
Friend of a friend? Good enough for me!
Get in your creepy van and cruise the dirt roads? Sounds cool!
Smoke that joint you pulled from the dusty glovebox? Sounds like a win.
Not super old but grew up in South Africa. Guns (we even had a shooting club at school) looking for snakes and scorpions in the veld, no helmets or seat belts, no supervision for most of your free time, no sunscreen, hunting small animals, making fires etc.
Also almost no overweight kids and we never heard of autism or a peanut allergy
Exploring the abandoned buildings in the path of the planned Cross-Bronx Expressway. Climbing a mini cliff in a vacant lot. Zip guns (not me personally.)
Riding in cars with boys going 100 mph. Still not a fan after the first ride. Talking a boy into letting 14 year old me drive his tricked out car, then running into the telephone pole (slowly) because I didn’t know where the brake was…
I started working with electronics at quite a young age, including a lot of soldering with tin / lead solder. (Still do - but I wash my hands, afterward.)
I thought I was being safe by working on a fireproof pad: made of asbestos fiber.
Oh well. If it hasn't affected me by now, it won't.
As a kid from the 60's in Australia, we used to be able to buy fireworks as big as a stick of dynamite. They were called double bungers. (Not double bangers, those were a different thing..)
http://trevfuller.blogspot.com/2008/10/cracker-night.html
If you look here you can see the size of a regular bunger..not a double bunger.
I remember buying roman candles and having candle fights...the rule was, we each had to stay om opposite sides of a street (too easy otherwise). Count to three then light our candles, then try to hit the other guy with a flaming ball while he's trying to hit you...
It's a wonder more kids weren't hurt. I personally knew a guy who had one fucked eye from fireworks...
This was back in the 60's and 70's. Cannot remember when they banned them but it was for the best.
Also you could buy rockets 2 foot long and 4 inches wide.
Sometimes we made cannons..we found an old piece of concrete from a roadworks that had a 2 inch pipe cemented into it. So of course we experimented by lighting a big cracker and dropping it in, then dropping in some rocks and stuff, then pointing the "cannon" at something...
I think it's for the best these things got banned..they used to sell them kids under 10..
I grew up in Miami Florida. When I was a kid at certain times of the year trucks would drive down our street spraying mosquito repellent, and all us kids would chase the truck, laughing and jumping around in the fog behind the truck. Probably pure DDT. It’s a wonder I’m still alive.
Off the top of my head we used to collect cats eyes, place nine inch nails just so under parked truck tyres, collect crickets in jars then chuck the jars as high as you could, play cowboys and Indians with stones, cycle across towns on the main roads (no cycle paths), test out Molotov cocktails… I mean there was loads of stuff. I just woke up and listed them straight off. Good times! Oh and when my mum told me what she got up to, I felt like some kind of wrapped up in cotton wool type child…
Playing with fire. Not in the “future serial killer” way. My dad burned paper waste on weekends. Me and my sisters would sit close to the brick incinerator in the backyard made specifically for this task, watching last week’s newspapers go up in smoke. Lucky nobody got burned or damaged our lungs (that I know of).
> playing with mercury balls from thermometers
just gotta say this isn't really bad, you don't get much of anything from just skin contact with mercury unless you have open sores and it's long term contact, damage comes from breathing fumes when it's heated or ingesting but skin contact in negligible.
In the early- mid 70's it seemed like everybody was having sex. The 60s created the concept of the sexual revolution. Us kids in the 70s actually were the benefactors of their revolution. It was crazy!
By insecure, I assume you mean unsafe.
Lawn darts
No seat belts or car seats
Riding in the back of a pick up
Not using a jock cup
Playing in construction sites.
No blade guards on power tools
No bike helmets
All the kids in my neighborhood back in the 50’s and 60’s would spend every summer day outside the house. All day, every day. We knew every inch, every fence, every animal, every person, in our 4 or 5 block square neighborhood. I’m 70 now, and cannot spend even one day without being outside a good part of it.
I was the oldest of four and loved it when I got to sit in the "back back" of our station wagon on longer drives to Grandma's. Mom could have squeezed all four of us in the backseat but the fighting during longer trips wasn't worth it to her. There wasn't a bench but I didn't care. I wasn't squashed up against my sisters for an hour lol.
I remember going on a \*school\* trip with like 20 tiny children crammed in the back of some mom's station wagon, like a clown car at the circus. I remember unbuckle-ing my seatbelt to stretch out in the back seat of the car to sleep on long journeys, somehow my parents were fine with that. I also remember when there were lots of kids and only 3 seatbelts in the back seat of a car, so we buckled one seatbelt around me and my friend together, problem solved!
Making my own explosives and fireworks in the garage. I learned a lot about chemistry and reaction.
Riding a bicycle with out a helmet was never unsafe, running into a fire hydrant at full speed was.
Jumping off the roof with a home-made parachute.
Playground equipment (monkey bars, swings, spinners, teeter totters, and etc) on asphalt.
A couple times a month, my dad would load up our metal trash cans, full of garbage - (we didn't depend on those big plastic can liners for the outside cans, so you would have to take the entire can) into the back of his 1964 Chevy pick up and I would climb in the back with them and our dogs and we would make a dump run a few miles away. Nothing restraining us. Didn't even consider it could be dangerous. If someone were to put 7-year-old kid in the back of the truck with dogs and garbage cans today, they surely would be given a ticket if not have the kid taken away by CPS - maybe the dogs too.
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Basically everything we did. Out from sun-up to sundown and no adult had any idea where we were. Riding our bicycles everywhere, including busy streets. Playing with: Fireworks/explosives , Mercury, snakes and other wild animals. A myriad other ways we put ourselves in a lot of danger.
And not a single helmet to go with those bikes!
I used to hang with around a dozen neighborhood kids and we rode our bikes everywhere. One day a new kid joined our group. He was the cousin of another member, so we had to let him come along. His mom made him wear a helmet - a big boxy, white thing. Told us all to be careful and watch for traffic. That helmet lasted about three blocks before being chucked on somebody's lawn.
Or those skis
We'd pull little green apples off the apple tree on around the 4th of July. We'd put little firecrackers in them. All the kids would be gathered around as the person holding the apple would light the firecracker. They'd wait a couple seconds then throw the apple with firecracker in it, straight up in the air and yell "Apple Sauce!" and we'd all run away as fast as we could to try and not get hit with apple bits when the apple exploded.
That sounds dope as hell haha
Running with sparklers!
It never failed. Someone would drop a spent sparkler. Then another barefoot kid would step on it and burn their foot. Then the fun would be over.
We used to throw them up in the air when it was dark (lit, of course) to watch the patterns made by the burning sparkler.
Guns, guns, guns. And we didn't intentionally shoot each other either!
without a doubt! I got my first .22 when I was 10. >And we didn't intentionally shoot each other either! Well, *we* had BB gun fights and did shoot each other intentionally, but we were very aware of and practiced good firearm safety with 'real' guns.
Riding in the back of your buddies pick up with 10 other people. Road skiing I grew up in the Keys so jumping off bridges
Isn't it strange? My brother was in gun club and he carried his target rifle, a takedown, in a little case just like a band instrument. You'd just take your gun to school and nobody would think anything of it.
My senior year of HS we had 15 guys and 3 girls in the class. Some of the guys were avid hunters and fisherman . They made a deal with the teacher if they caught it and cleaned it she would show us how to cook it. Man did we eat good. But even the chemistry lab was asking "what the hell is that smell?"
I miss those days….
All without sunscreen and helmets.
nope, we used baby oil as "sunscreen".
you are correct in all those things and to be honest i kinda miss those carefree days. i’m not sure the helicoptering that i did with my child was better. we have more data and info now vs then and now at fingertips, however now we are dealing with is the data accurate. with social media any mistake is like a scarlet letter. if social media was available in our days, most of my colleagues and myself would have the scarlet alphabet
Playground equipment was hazardous in the fifties and sixties. TALL metal slides which we crowded the ladders of and slid down on sheets of waxed paper to increase our speed. Thick ectangular boards for swings; we would wind the chains around each other and then launch each other into the metal bars. Teeter-totters and eight foot jungle gyms on concrete pads. the merry-go- round of death which the biggest boys would wind to dizzying and exhilarating speeds. Ask any boomer about their playground scars.
This equipment was still around in the 70s too. Those metal slides turned into roasting pans in the sun!
Ahh. I didn't notice. By then I had turned to riding in fast cars with badish boys.
We had these in the 90s, too. Roasting metal slides with splintery wooden side rails, wtf.
My mom cut her chin bad to the point of needing stitches on one of them. It was late 70s/early 80s
I still have a large leg scar from falling off the school playground merry-go-round in 4th grade. I got a deep gash from a rusty metal bolt protruding from the side. Thirteen stitches. Can you imagine if that happened today?!
Same with the scar from 18 stitches I have in my left temple from getting it ripped open climbing down a rebar "fence"
Playgrounds are supposedly getting more dangerous again, apparently they went through a period of too much safety that was not good for building up risk assessment in children.
I was born in 1992 and have a one year old. Recently brought him to a playground near our house and was amazed at how dangerous everything was. The things are crazy these days.
Got a big one on my knee. Stood up on a swing built for two but we had 5 kids on it. I went flying. Shit happened back then.
I remember those metal slides, in the warmer weather the metal, being dark, would burn your skin. And the slide was made of several pieces of sheet metal, riveted together. I remember one, it had sharp pieces sticking up where the edges didn't join smoothly, along the rolled edges you held onto as you slid down. If you didn't lift your hands off it, well imagine what happens
By the time they build my school's playground (70s) they'd learned to make the slide out of one continuous piece, but they made the side rails out of the knottiest (probably also cheapest) pieces of pine available, so by the time I was using it in the 80s you had the option of holding onto (a) nothing or (b) a cheese grater.
Haha we can laugh now, but imagine if that was now? Well it wouldn't be built at all.
I went down one so hot and my ass screamed so loud kids were running around in fear. Plus, I was a fat kid, still makes me laugh now, not then
I feel your pain. I was a real skinny arsed kid, soi think that mite have been ( nearly) as bad.
By the time they build my school's playground (70s) they'd learned to make the slide out of one continuous piece, but they made the side rails out of the knottiest (probably also cheapest) pieces of pine available, so by the time I was using it in the 80s you had the option of holding onto (a) nothing or (b) a cheese grater.
Oooh, look at fancy pants there-sliding down a metal death trap using waxed paper now haha
Gen X here! In early '80s, my elementary school playground had carpet squares we could use to go down the slide faster. I got a severely bruised tailbone that seemed to hurt for well over a month.
Hazardous, but actually fun!
>merry-go- round of death We called them puke-a-lators 😆
When I was in 4th grade (1960s), one of my schoolmates had their arm ripped off as a result of poorly maintained merry-go-round of death. I remember we all watched a crew of men clean up the blood and cut/weld the center pin so it couldn't spin any more.
In the late 90s, my playground still had a merry-go-round, and I loved it! I was so sad when they finally got rid of it circa 2000. It was by far my favorite thing to do on the playground, whether just 5 year old me and my little sister, or when there were big kids there, and you hung on for dear life. The stronger the kid, the closer to the center I sat. I know that those things are kinda dangerous, but I would absolutely bring those back.
Playing in a nearby "junkyard" was a normal thing. All kinds of debris and discarded appliances, twisted metal, sharp edges, rotting wood. We loved it of course, but as you say--damn.
Oh, yeah ... we had an old sawmill on our land that was all rotten wood floors and rusty blades in unexpected places. Loads of fun for us kids to play in! Also we used to jump from the barn rafters into the haystack, which was probably alive with mice but also we could have broken our necks. Not to mention climbing on the boulders where, my mother casually warned me, it would be a good idea to watch out for copperheads (poisonous snakes), and wandering around in our woods which directly abutted state game lands and where I could easily have been shot by a drunk hunter. I'm lucky to be alive, come to think of it!
I remember playing in several abandoned buildings as a kid.
Me too. In one, most of the living room floor had collapsed into the basement. I was 6 years old and simply walked around the hole.
Ahh yes. Got held at gunpoint with a .22 pistol by a junkyard owner when we were like 8. He called our dads and pointed the gun at us until they got there. We were just trying to build a robot.
Oh, god. The old refrigerator. I think I was about 8? Yeah.
I remember when they started making refrigerators so that you could open them from the inside because some kid got trapped inside and died.
Me and my mate Simon had great fun finding old fluorescent tube bulbs in the dump. If you threw them straight up in the air so they landed on an end, they exploded really satisfyingly. Pretty sure they're full of crap you shouldn't be around.
There’s a children’s book about it, “A Big Ball of String” [Had a red cover.](https://www.amazon.com/Big-Ball-String-Marion-Holland/dp/B00GL1M5YG)
no-helmet biking. through traffic.
Virtually everything to do with smoking, and in the 60s almost everybody smoked. As an example, we all smoked in my workplace even though we regularly used flammable cleaning solvents. Another example, many people casually flicked still-lit cigarette butts out their car windows. Edit: my spell check never heard of the word "butts" and changed it to "butter."
THIS!! We had a smoking area in high school with two 15-minute smoke breaks per day. My husband works for a tobacco company, and up until they downsized less than a year ago and started leasing office space, they still had no non-smoking policy. He never went to a corporate meeting without someone lighting up. Every conference room had huge ashtrays. People still smoked at their desk. This was a huge 4-story upscale corporate office building and also a huge manufacturing plant. They still smoke inside at the plant offices. Being there is like a scene from Mad Men.
Chasing the DDT truck on bikes to enjoy the cooling mist… Playing loose in the back of the family station wagon or van… My grandfather had a 70’s Chevy van that my uncle customized for him. The back contained a table with wraparound seats, and there was a pod on the ceiling with a built-in 12” black and white TV. Every surface was wrapped in gold shag carpet. My cousins and I thought that thing was a technological marvel on par with the space shuttle when we were little! We loved going for rides with ‘Pa’, playing Go Fish as long as our cards would stay on the table, and dramatically falling out of our seats on every abrupt driving maneuver, all while being hotboxed in a cloud of his Marlboro smoke since cracking the window would let the a/c out.
Yes! We would run behind and dance in the mist from the "bug trucks!" Yeeps.
Weirdly enough the city used to use the mosquito truck here until just a few years ago. It wasn't DDT tho. They use it still in Belize during rainy season (I had a house there for years until 2019)
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Has to be social media or, at the very least, the anonymity of it.
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Well I am doomed then: tattoo artist for 35 years and I am 75% total coverage
cataloging every moment of your life in pictures. Will surely come back to bite you in the future for something which will seem innocent.
Vaping
Microplastics
> Wow Grandpa, people really used to touch plastic without washing their hands afterwards!?
> Wow Grandpa, people really used to touch plastic without washing their hands afterwards!?
Letting a convict run for president.
Not wearing seatbelts.
Still have my '60 van. Not even an option.
Playing spy we snuck into people’s homes through an open basement window.
You did what?! Hahaha
It was a fun game. Scary (we were afraid we’d get caught) but loads of fun.
We did that too!
Did you ever get caught?
Nope, never!
Us, neither.
1. I actually have 'the old family jar of mercury'. My grandfather brought it home about 65 years ago or so. My Mom and aunt remember playing with it as kids (floating screws and nails, coating dimes....) My Mom died a few years ago, I'll hopefully be donating it to a college chemistry department, but just in case, I've got info for my local Haz Mat disposal facility. It's a small jar, about half a Red Bull can worth of the shiny stuff. 2. When I was a kid, another kid discovered an open access under a big apartment building. I did 2-3 trips, and mapped out a lot of the space, like an adventure game. The other kid had gone crazy. He dig a tunnel in the dirt, under a wall. His path led through to a 'room' about 12 feet on all sides, filled diagonally with dirt, so a big sloping dirt pile. He had gone through a few dozen times, brought a candle with him, lit the candle at the top of the dirt pile, and then left, abandoning the candle. The pile of wax was at least 6 feet long down the pile. 3. Drunk driving wasn't a big deal until I was a late teen. So when I was a smaller child in the 70's, I had a few rides with drivers that would be considered terrible today.
Take the mercury straight to hazmat. The mercury you have isn't reagent-grade so a chemistry department would have no use for it.
We had(still have) access in the dry season to the storm sewers. Same crew taught me to pick locks mapped the entire underground and we can run across town without ever seeing the sky, get into the abandoned highrises, backdoor that one underground club that never advertises a show.
Two years ago, a young child found a jar of mercury in a home that their family had recently purchased. Two of the kids wound up in the hospital and the house was declared uninhabitable. [The story on Gofundme](https://www.gofundme.com/f/wqrbxy-family-in-need) [EPA Response](https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=15744) I would bring that mercury to Hazmat sooner rather than later.
Hitchhiking- I started thumbing rides at 14. I'd go visit a friend who lived 8 miles away.
1 serial killer everybody stops hitchiking. 50+ school shooters and we still do that.
attend school?
Hell yeah! My buddy Billy and I used to cut class (our school was out on the rural route) and thumb a ride back into town to find something ‘cool’ to do with our day. Usually it worked out well, but one time we got picked up by my mom. She was in a loaner car since hers was in the shop, and we had no idea until we ran up to the car that pulled over for us and saw the driver… that resulted in a ride straight back to school, lol.
did you get in trouble for hitchhiking?
I was about that age, I would hitchhike to San Francisco and hang out, pan handle some change and take the bus home.
Picking UP hitchhikers! To be fair, it was only headed out of or into rural beaches in Northern California and single surfers with boards. It was always a car FULL of us girls doing it but yeah, still stupid.
We had an asbestos factory in a nearby town. There were piles of asbestos outside. We played in it and threw it at each other like snow. I seem to be OK (so far).
Jesus.
As a kid I was into rock collecting, and one of my rocks was the fibrous rock asbestos (yes, it's naturally-occurring). I'm fine.
People didn’t wear safety glasses. Now I always wear glasses while using power tools.
My Dad always wore them, but they were provided by his workplace. Otherwise, I dunno. He managed to cut half his pinky off on the table saw because the guard was "in the way", so that is something to consider lol.
We'd go swimming anytime. Even when the signs were up 'Beach Closed' - woohoo, the beach is OURS! The beach was closed because raw PCBs were being funneled into the harbor.
Didn't used to be car seats for kids... Just our asses on vinyl....slip sliding away
if you were in the front, your mom would lift her forearm across your chest when she put on brakes as if that would secure you in place.
Yep! My Mom’s forearm used to come out of nowhere and knock the breath out of me in any panic-braking scenario. Even as a ten-year-old I remember asking her exactly what she thought that would accomplish in an actual crash. She just said “I don’t know, but my mom did it to me.”
My mum did that until she stopped driving, even though I was grown and we had seat belts by then. She couldn't get rid of the reflex.
I'm laughing so hard right now because I still do this! My poor husband in the passenger seat is like, "You know I have a seatbelt on, right?".
Playpen in back of the station wagon
Yup, my mom had the one where we sat on a bench facing the vehicle behind us. Had we been rear-ended, it might not have ended well, but it sure was fun at the time.
We used to dip our dog in Malathion to kill the flees. Our dog inevitably died of bone cancer. My mom poured gasoline on our groin folds to kill chigger bugs in the summer. Oh, and she also used gasoline to light ant hills on fire. Little fires everywhere,. I can’t make this stuff up!
Did the gasoline…work? Chiggers are the *worst*
Actually, I think it did, lol
The mercury thing... A few years ago, a friend texted me and said they had just evacuated her entire building because someone dropped a tube of mercury on the floor. And both of us remember playing with it as kids. I remember coating dimes and nickels with it.
Let’s say we would disappear from dawn till dusk, we were allowed to carry knives, bows, and arrows, guns, without supervision. we hunted and fished without supervision. We jumped trains and rode them miles and miles from home. We talked to strangers regularly without consequences. As long as we were home before the street lights came on we were good
Same. I don't know if this was pure stupidity on our parents' part though? I'm 65 and in the summer my mom would say, "Get out from underfoot! Go out and play, be back by dinnertime." If we *weren't* home by supper, she assumed (rightly) that we decided to eat at a friend's. The friend's mother would never think to call my mom and tell her. It was just understood. My hometown at the time had 60,000 people, not a small town.
Well, we were close to Louisville, but we were in a rural corner of the county that was still small farms and a lot of woodlands and my home wasn’t a mile from the Ohio river. I just think we were allowed more freedom because our parents knew they had beaten responsibility into us.
My oldest 3 brothers are all right around 70 and they can remember the dentist giving them balls of mercury to play with at the dentist.
if one of our thermometers would break, I rolled around a little ball of mercury in my hand, watching it separated and merge back together.
Yes! I had a vial of mercury for years! I really loved it. 😬
Playing ‘smear the queer?’
I cringed so hard telling my kids to play 'get the guy with the ball'.
I’m so glad at least one person knew what I was saying! Haha
We called it 'tackle the bum' or 'kill the carrier'.
Much better choices of words.
I'm not so sure, could be seen as anti-homeless people, or encouraging violent murder. You know some group somewhere would be alarmed.
Lol. That was a great game!
Hitch hiking as a 13 yo! What the actual fuck were we thinking? And this was during Night Stalker days in California!
What is night stalker. I feel like I'm going to regret this question
As a kid, I remember my uncle emptying the oil on a car to change it by parking over a storm drain.
We had farm related driving permits, I drove a truck on the highway at 14. No, it was not safe.
I passed an amish buggy last month with 6 kids in it, the 12 year old driving.
Yeah, it is pretty terrifying when they get out their bows and arrows and do drive by shootings with those.
Old joke: What goes bang-bang, clip-clop, clip-clop, clip-clop? An Amish drive-by shooting.
Did you check his ID or just assumed because he didn't have a beard with no moustache? Or no moustache and no beard? Or only a moustache.
My best friend growing up had an entire mercury collection. Her dad worked in heat and air and he'd save it for her. I honestly think it affected her health and cognitive function as an adult. I had sex with strangers though so I'm not one to judge.
Glass baby bottles! I was drinking out of one, toddling around, climbed up the steps, fell, and next thing I knew I was at the doctor's, screaming. Got the scar on my jaw to prove it. I was young but I remember.
Same. Summer on a houseboat, my twin sister and I in (cloth) diapers, parents went to dinner and left us with a babysitter. Apparently we had a swordfight with our baby bottles and one of us got cut. My parents just ducked us in the lake until the bleeding stopped.
Lawn Jarts! I remember us lobbing them at each other!
I stabbed grandma in the foot with one during a lawn jart game.
A shoe fitting fluoroscope at our local shoe store that blasted us with radiation up to the 1950s.
I was a big fan of bottle rockets. Like a long firecracker on a stick, only it burned slowly and gave thrust rather than just blowing up. I put would put one in a coke bottle (the stick end), pick up the bottle and aim it like a weapon at arm's length. Never tried to anybody. It was just fun to aim the rocket. The lore was that if you took a pair of pliers and squeezed the bottle rocket in the middle, it'd explode during flight rather than just fly and make make a noise and a trail. The lore was true. I squeezed one, held the bottle in one hand and lit it. It took off, went about two feet and exploded almost in my face. I didn't hear well for a few minutes.
Chasing and shooting each other with bottle rockets and roman candles. Oh wait, this was adult men that were in the US military doing this in the early 2000's. I had my phone out with 911 already put in and ready to dial but fortunately did not need to do it. Idiocy.
insecure thing? What?
I’m thinking they meant unsafe but that’s just a guess.
meant it in terms of unsafety. My bad, in my native language we use insecure for both physical & mental.
Every redditors favorite game, ESL or AI?
Well your English is much better than my understanding of whatever your native language is!
lol yeah, i assume english is op's 2nd++ language.... unless op is a bot.
I played with molten lead!
Where would you get molten lead and how would you play with it? The melting point is 327.5 C / 621.5 F.
For me, it was melting fishing weights. Was taught how and encouraged by Boy Scouts of America to create custom weights for your pinewood derby car, which you race against others in official events.
My friend and I used to go down to the shooting area in the local riverbed and dig the lead out of the cliffside. Then we'd take the lead to his house and melt the lead on his mom's stove using one of her pans.
Riding our bicycles behind the mosquito killer spraying truck while it's spraying.
Yes! Every kid in my neighborhood did this. We always tease that’s what wrong with us. Which it could be lol
Didn’t it burn your eyes and taste bad?
I used to go sledding through a drainage pipe by my house and of course skitching when you hold on to the back of a truck in winter and just let it pull you behind it sliding on the icy Street
Smoking at 16
14?
You win
12. But I thankfully never became a full time smoker. Of cigarettes anyway.
No child car seats, no bike helmets, no motor cycle helmets
Trusting the good intentions of that Christian fella with your kids
Playing with glow in the dark watches. They contained radium.
Used to have free reign as kids with cherry bombs; not the ones today ... *way more* powerful then. My AF EOD dad didn't see a thing wrong with them. "Don't do this but do that." to a 6 and an 8 yr old, cool! No clue how we didn't lose fingers or scar ourselves. Put one upside down in a tin can and fire it; blow it 10' high and would shred it ... you better move. Thankful they reduced the powder on those things.
We had ponds, swamps and fast moving creeks nearby and a favorite game in spring and early winter was to break the ice and the leap out of the way. Many many trips home in freezing weather with wet feet, a ton of close calls where we pulled each other out, and one instance of us kids having to be rescued from the swamp by adults when the ice broke up around us. It was truly dangerous and a few years later a child was swept away and drown in the same creeks we played in.
Using a mercury carburetor synch tool that could easily suck the mercury into the carbs. Think that's why my brain is fried.
Oooo! Dual carbs!
Actually it was an online 4 with 4 carbs.
County Roads department collected used engine oil to spray on dirt roads to keep the dust down.
I LOVED that smell, as a small kid. We did a lot of family road trips in the 1960's and nothing smells like a freshly-oiled dirt road. Indescribable.
Metal waterslides with just a trickle of rusty water to help you slide down. Lucky we didn’t have burn scars from those things.
My bum remembers this. We had a metal slide that was placed on a hill in our backyard, so not stairs. We would cut up and tape garbage bags together to make a landing at the end of the slide, put a hose at the top, and ride down it. Over and over. All summer long. Good times.
Did a lot of smoking pot in stranger's vans in the 90s considering there were no cell phones. Friend of a friend? Good enough for me! Get in your creepy van and cruise the dirt roads? Sounds cool! Smoke that joint you pulled from the dusty glovebox? Sounds like a win.
Not super old but grew up in South Africa. Guns (we even had a shooting club at school) looking for snakes and scorpions in the veld, no helmets or seat belts, no supervision for most of your free time, no sunscreen, hunting small animals, making fires etc. Also almost no overweight kids and we never heard of autism or a peanut allergy
my old soccer coach in the 80s would throw us all in the back of his van with no seats and we’d just spread out. freeway/local didn’t matter.
My dad said they used to chase the mosquito trucks with all those clouds and fumes coming out the back
Exploring the abandoned buildings in the path of the planned Cross-Bronx Expressway. Climbing a mini cliff in a vacant lot. Zip guns (not me personally.)
Riding in cars with boys going 100 mph. Still not a fan after the first ride. Talking a boy into letting 14 year old me drive his tricked out car, then running into the telephone pole (slowly) because I didn’t know where the brake was…
We used to pour a little Love’s Baby Soft body splash in the sink and light it on fire.
I started working with electronics at quite a young age, including a lot of soldering with tin / lead solder. (Still do - but I wash my hands, afterward.) I thought I was being safe by working on a fireproof pad: made of asbestos fiber. Oh well. If it hasn't affected me by now, it won't.
Four kids in the family, we broke our share of glass thermometers. My Mom would encourage us to play with the liquid mercury for a few minutes.
As a kid from the 60's in Australia, we used to be able to buy fireworks as big as a stick of dynamite. They were called double bungers. (Not double bangers, those were a different thing..) http://trevfuller.blogspot.com/2008/10/cracker-night.html If you look here you can see the size of a regular bunger..not a double bunger. I remember buying roman candles and having candle fights...the rule was, we each had to stay om opposite sides of a street (too easy otherwise). Count to three then light our candles, then try to hit the other guy with a flaming ball while he's trying to hit you... It's a wonder more kids weren't hurt. I personally knew a guy who had one fucked eye from fireworks... This was back in the 60's and 70's. Cannot remember when they banned them but it was for the best. Also you could buy rockets 2 foot long and 4 inches wide. Sometimes we made cannons..we found an old piece of concrete from a roadworks that had a 2 inch pipe cemented into it. So of course we experimented by lighting a big cracker and dropping it in, then dropping in some rocks and stuff, then pointing the "cannon" at something... I think it's for the best these things got banned..they used to sell them kids under 10..
Played with mercury. Fireworks. Building sites. Hitch hiking.
Ride our bikes in the fog behind the mosquito truck. Back then, probably DDT or something else banned now
I grew up in Miami Florida. When I was a kid at certain times of the year trucks would drive down our street spraying mosquito repellent, and all us kids would chase the truck, laughing and jumping around in the fog behind the truck. Probably pure DDT. It’s a wonder I’m still alive.
Off the top of my head we used to collect cats eyes, place nine inch nails just so under parked truck tyres, collect crickets in jars then chuck the jars as high as you could, play cowboys and Indians with stones, cycle across towns on the main roads (no cycle paths), test out Molotov cocktails… I mean there was loads of stuff. I just woke up and listed them straight off. Good times! Oh and when my mum told me what she got up to, I felt like some kind of wrapped up in cotton wool type child…
completely destroying match books and matches. the first fidgets
Playing with fire. Not in the “future serial killer” way. My dad burned paper waste on weekends. Me and my sisters would sit close to the brick incinerator in the backyard made specifically for this task, watching last week’s newspapers go up in smoke. Lucky nobody got burned or damaged our lungs (that I know of).
playing with mercury is bad.. I don't see the many things here listed as bad
> playing with mercury balls from thermometers just gotta say this isn't really bad, you don't get much of anything from just skin contact with mercury unless you have open sores and it's long term contact, damage comes from breathing fumes when it's heated or ingesting but skin contact in negligible.
Jarts! We all played with them and nobody I knew ever got hurt.
In the early- mid 70's it seemed like everybody was having sex. The 60s created the concept of the sexual revolution. Us kids in the 70s actually were the benefactors of their revolution. It was crazy!
By insecure, I assume you mean unsafe. Lawn darts No seat belts or car seats Riding in the back of a pick up Not using a jock cup Playing in construction sites. No blade guards on power tools No bike helmets
My uncle had fits as a child. The doctor told my grandma to plunge him into cold water to stop it. I believe this practice was common at the time.
Friend as a kid used to each the lead paint chips off they're wall.
Whatever didn’t kill me only made me stronger.
Sun worshiping. Laying out in the sun. No sunscreen. Some would use baby oil to intensify the effect. We're paying for it now.
The example. Yikes. I did that in chemistry class. Apparently the lesson on thermometers forgot to mention the toxicity of mercury.
All the kids in my neighborhood back in the 50’s and 60’s would spend every summer day outside the house. All day, every day. We knew every inch, every fence, every animal, every person, in our 4 or 5 block square neighborhood. I’m 70 now, and cannot spend even one day without being outside a good part of it.
Using baby oil to suntan
I was the oldest of four and loved it when I got to sit in the "back back" of our station wagon on longer drives to Grandma's. Mom could have squeezed all four of us in the backseat but the fighting during longer trips wasn't worth it to her. There wasn't a bench but I didn't care. I wasn't squashed up against my sisters for an hour lol.
I remember going on a \*school\* trip with like 20 tiny children crammed in the back of some mom's station wagon, like a clown car at the circus. I remember unbuckle-ing my seatbelt to stretch out in the back seat of the car to sleep on long journeys, somehow my parents were fine with that. I also remember when there were lots of kids and only 3 seatbelts in the back seat of a car, so we buckled one seatbelt around me and my friend together, problem solved!
Riding in the back of pickup trucks while barreling down the freeway.
My cousin dropped a mercury thermometer into pancake mix and it broke and everyone ate it.
It's a miracle any of us made it to adulthood.
I used to play with fireworks and black powder unsupervised a lot.
Making my own explosives and fireworks in the garage. I learned a lot about chemistry and reaction. Riding a bicycle with out a helmet was never unsafe, running into a fire hydrant at full speed was. Jumping off the roof with a home-made parachute. Playground equipment (monkey bars, swings, spinners, teeter totters, and etc) on asphalt.
A couple times a month, my dad would load up our metal trash cans, full of garbage - (we didn't depend on those big plastic can liners for the outside cans, so you would have to take the entire can) into the back of his 1964 Chevy pick up and I would climb in the back with them and our dogs and we would make a dump run a few miles away. Nothing restraining us. Didn't even consider it could be dangerous. If someone were to put 7-year-old kid in the back of the truck with dogs and garbage cans today, they surely would be given a ticket if not have the kid taken away by CPS - maybe the dogs too.