People over 35 should be dead

[Dan Gibson]

Oh yes! Back in those days cans were not aluminum. The new ones just won't work. Of course, it was better if one built the entire cannon themself, including emptying the cans

Forgive the ethnic slur, but does anybody remember Polish Cannons?

Three beer cans with the tops and bottoms cut off, duct-taped together. A tennis ball, a bottle of lighter fluid, and you've got a fun-filled day.

Could also be done with coke cans or tennisball cans but beer cans added that certain badass quality. Popular choices were Shlitz, Hamm's, or Blatz.

 

[Ruth Denmark]

Remember the good, old, dangerous, orange coloured FANTA??????

You get it in Egypt - just tastes wonderful.

 

[AevnsGrandpa]

I should jot all these memories down. This is great.

I remember spending the night with a friend while in high school who lived in the country on a fairly busy 2 lane highway. We got the bright idea to take a roll of toilet paper and soak it in gasoline and then unroll it down the center of the road on the lane marker and light it.

Well other than having a 100 foot flaming line on the road, we ran up a small hill to get away and hide and I about cut my head off by running into the anchor line that went from a telephone pole to the ground. Had a bruise on my neck on weeks!!!

(This same friend had a pool in his back yard where we skinny dipped on more than one occasion!! I certainly would not do that now a days!)

Jeff

 

[gfisher4792]

Just to add to the memory vault:

Going for hours of hiking though the woods around the neighborhood (which, of course, always crossing (trespassing) through people's yards and property;

Blowing up things (GI Joe's and gypsy moth caterpillars) with firecrackers of various sizes;

Playing 5 on 5 tackle football (for fun, with no parents or anyone else watching/coaching) and coming home mud soaked and sore;

Pixie sticks!

Countless number of bike and skateboard crashes that ended up with scars (some of which I still have, proud to day) - who doesn't have knee/elbow scars?

Sledding in our front yards, where the end of the sled run landed us in the middle of the road;

Huge snowball fights and forts!

 

[TCDiver1]

We used to run behind the mosquito-spraying truck to play in the thick white cloud (DDT?) i..

In the winter we would wait by stop signs for cars to slow down and grab their bumpers to see how long we could hold on and drag by our feet. Then came the requisite variations, two or three draggers at a time, throwing snowballs at the draggers to knock them off, etc.

We also used to wait for the snow plow truck to come by and jump in the snow wake it was pushing. Body surfing, midwestern style.

 

[outlawaggie]

Ski rope tied to a three wheeler, kneeboard, wet grass. Adds up to a great time. Still have the scars on my shoulder from my step-brother wanting to see if the kneeboard would slide over the driveway.

 

[Dan Gibson]

But not those little wimpy ones. The big ones about 18 inchees long and about a half in in diameter. You had to chew through plastic just to get your fix. We always seemed to have sore mouths from all the excessive sugar.

Pixie sticks!

 

[socaldiver]

Being an old fart, many of these activities I have experienced, but maybe in various other forms.

Growing up "in the country" was nice because we had the woods to play in, having bb gun fights, playing war with mudballs stuffed with rocks in the middle. Our ballfield was down in the "hollar" (hollow), there was an underground spring on the hillside that we would walk up to get a cool drink of water from during innings.

Playing the "poor boys" version of hockey (because we couldn't afford skates) called SHINNY. We played it in the streets using vines we cutdown that were somewhat resembling hockey sticks and tin cans for hockey pucks. Still have a couple of scars from getting hit between the eyes.

NO QUIET TIME for being bad, just getting the belt (or a shoe, cooking pan or anything else close by that could give the brunt of the punishment instead of hurting the hand).

Sad, I have been dead twice over and loving every second of it.

But what is really cool is when you get together with your siblings and reminisce, and your mom is there with her mouth gaping in "horror" because she was unaware of how crazy we were back then. Ahhh, somethings never change.

Do you remember going around collecting empty soft drink bottles, getting 5 or 6 and then going to the store and turning them in so you could buy a 16 oz bottle of RC Cola?

 

[The Kraken]

Hey, Socaldiver !!!
The drink bottles brought back a WONDERFUL memory.

Couple of friends of mine and I would go around and collect bottles and take them to the local grocery store for the redemption money.

Someone at the store wasnt' too bright, they'd take the crates and stack them up outside the back of the store on the loading dock.

We'd sneak around there a couple of nights later and liberate several crates and sell the bottles back to them the very next day.

 

[GrierHPharmD]

I grew up in the country too:

Midnight bike rides down long country roads (no helmet, no lights, no reflectors!)

Hiking all day just to see where this or that creek led. (Found a full-grown, recently dead horse in one - Nasty!)

Wading into quicksand to recover the skull of a goat that had drowned (made a nice, if smelly, addition to our clubhouse. That's why my wife doesn't let me decorate these days.)

Homemade muscadine wine -drinking it while it was still fermenting and getting wonderfully sick while camping.

Homemade fireworks (black powder in a sealed bit of plumbing pipe - nowadays they'd worry about such things! I'm lucky it didn't blow my fool head off.)

Napalm (gasoline and tide) - lots of fire that sticks to things!

Drano bombs (water, aluminum foil and drano) - elutes hydrogen gas and generates lots of pressure if done in a closed container (Thank God none of us smoked at that point!) Found out much later that the fallout killed grass...

Target practice with my buddy's father's 8mm Mauser, shooting at 50 gallon garbage cans on the neighbor's property, across a road...

Wandering through the high school in the middle of the night, just to say that we'd been there.

Modifying bottle rockets to make them multi-stage

Modifying bottle rockets with magnesium tape to make them self-lighting aerial flares

Good times with good friends. I guess I'd better take it easy now, since I've used up my share of luck...