quote:

Originally posted by flesheatingvirus:
While I was born in ‘83, that still took me back.

Same, and yes to all of that. Happy 40, btw.

quote:

Originally posted by sourdough44:
Don’t hold it against me, we would also ‘live off the land’ while camping at semi-remote lakes. We got dropped off, well below driving age, 3 of us.

Did that a couple times at my friend's hunting camp on summer break. A week of unsupervised roaming around dozens of acres, sleeping in tents on the edge of a creek that fed into a reservoir, stealing cheap light beer out of the spring next to the lodge, campfire food and staying up way too late, and walking around with a Remington Nylon 66 off the rack of loaner .22's in the lodge and running a couple bricks of ammo through it. Really, really good times.

If you stayed at your own house, you might get roped into unscheduled chores. Hanging out elsewhere doing anything else - or nothing at all - was always preferable to cleaning the garage.

I spent a ton of weekends getting chased by my Mother but she couldn't make me go in the house. I was tooooooo fast....

I graduated high school in 1988. I woke up just this morning thinking about how long ago that's been and how old I am now.

And I wouldn't change a thing. I loved being a kid in the 80s.

I was born in 68, so most of my childhood was spent in the 70's. Wow, those were the days. It was wild and free. During the summer, my parents didn't have any idea where I was from morning until evening. It's miraculous that I didn't break more bones or die. Good times, good times.

quote:

Originally posted by Nickelsig229:
I spent a ton of weekends getting chased by my Mother but she couldn't make me go in the house. I was tooooooo fast....

I wanted a Green Machine sooooooo bad - all I got was a stinkin Big Wheel!

The only water that tasted better than garden hose water was canteen water after a long military ruck march.....just saying.

quote:

Originally posted by Dzozer:
I wanted a Green Machine sooooooo bad - all I got was a stinkin Big Wheel!

Lucky - I didn't even have a Big Wheel. My cousin did, though. Man, those were good times.

We lived in the countryside just outside a little hick town. My brother and I would stomp through the woods for hours. Our mother would ring a big dinner bell when she wanted us home for lunch. We heard it miles away, and within an hour, we were home.

I didn't wear shoes all summer except for church. I could run full-tilt barefoot across our gravel driveway and not feel a thing. Played in our old barn, shot each other with BB guns (we had strict rules to not aim for the eyes), put firecrackers in rotten apples and threw those at each other, spent winter sledding all day. Went biking practically all day. Stopped at a small grocery store and bought the cheap knock-off sodas for 20 cents each. Bought apples to feed to the deer (a local had a pen with some whitetails in it). My dad said those years were the best of my life. I never believed him until about maybe 20 years later.

..Add in dirt clod fights after tilling. Bottle rocket fights - learned how to toss them high at the right point to have them shoot down on the others hiding behind coops and such.

And winter being pulled behind a truck on icy-snowy roads either on a tractor inner tube or sled. Rolling a giant snowball down a steep road to see how big we could make it - i think about 6' tall was about it.

Picking wild blackberries to sell for a bit of pocket money. So many different things growing up as a child in the 70's and teens for the 80's.

I was born in the mid 80s, but spent the 90s growing up in newly un-communist central Europe...which was basically like the US in the 50s. We lived in a little village on the outskirts of Prague, and my buddies and I roamed the whole thing, first on bikes but then eventually all over the city on public transit.

We found old trash dumps and abandoned buildings in the woods and made forts and rappelled down cliffs with old electrical wire. We'd catch rabbits, lizards, and snakes and bring them into the school. We found holes in the schoolyard fence and would sneak out for hours and play in the woods. We dammed up some creeks, jumped off of (not over) garages, and started countless fires (usually with matches we scavenged at the bus stop that had been dropped by smokers, because our parents wouldn't let us have them). We'd smash old coins or bottle tops on the train tracks, and go throw rocks off the big quarry south of town.

There were lots of little food stands where you could get pastries, fresh rolls, hot dogs in a bun (parek v rohliku), or fried cheese and french fries. There was also an ice cream place where you could get a cone for $0.03 a scoop. There were cherry trees in one of the public fields in town and we'd climb them in-season and eat until we were sick. In the winter we'd ride bikes on the ice just to see who would crash (and we did, a lot!), or play hockey on the pond in town when it froze over. It was a good time and place to be a kid !

quote:

Originally posted by 1s1k:
Most of that was going on in the 70’s.

And in the 60's. Minus the electronic stuff maybe. I loved "Smear the queer"!

Most of mine was in the 60's.

I was maybe 8-10 and my parents gave me a Chemistry Set (thinking it was for for educational purposes, no doubt) that had written on it, "No poisons or explosives can be made from ingredients" that I took as a challenge.
Poisons were not my interest.

On the other hand.............

Thinking back to what I got away with and was allowed to do at age 8 in the 80’s actually sort of horrifies me now that I have an 8-year-old going on 9 years old. I would never ever let him do any of that nowadays.

One thing that struck me was growing up. We all walked to a bus stop and waited there alone. Just us kids until the bus came. Go to a bus stop now and there’s more parents there than kids.

I was basically allowed to roam my entire neighborhood of a radius of about four blocks in each direction all day long until my stepmother rang a bell, that was the signal to head in for dinner, or to come in for the night.

Now I feel like I have to stay out in my backyard most of the time watching my kids, things have changed way too much.

My childhood neighborhood backed up to a state game forest. We left home after breakfast and came home for dinner. There was miles and miles of trails for our bicycles. There was some lowlands in it so we all caught painted turtles, and turned our childhood sandboxes into turtle habitat. In the winter, we hiked into the same area with shovels and hockey gear to play pond hockey.

born in 1959 and lived in very rural Nova Scotia growing up. Town of about 11,000. Dry town, one radio station, and a newspaper that published once a week.

Think small town, we were smaller.

We didn't have a television in the house until 1969, and that was a 2 week rental. So I spent most of my time outdoors - dawn to dusk and sometimes later.

My cousins lived about a half mile down the road, and other than neighbor hood kids, we were it - dirt road and all.

I wanted a bicycle so I worked for it, the farmer across the road had about 800 acres and would pay us to to hoist the bailed hay into the loft. For 8 hours I got $2. Mowed lawns with a gas mower in the summer, shoveled driveways and walks in the winter. Keep in mind that I was about 9 years old, and did this until we moved to the 'big town' in 1973.

I built forts in the woods, climbed trees (and fell out of a lot of them), and after I got my bike, distance was no object. Me and my cousins would bike from our place in Brookside and we would take off early morning, bike to the swimming hole in North River, and back home. No big deal.

We built go-carts, rode mini-bikes and otherwise had a great childhood. I could fell a tree by the time I was 9, limb it and clean up the pile. My dad gave me 25 cents for every tree I cut down and sawed up. If I pulled the stump I got another 25 cents.

I grew up fishing in a local creek, could build a fire, and do all sorts of woodcraft. I drank from the stream, knew what I could eat - berries and nuts from wherever. When I was 11, the big even was to go on a 2 day hike with my cousin (who was 12) up onto North Mountain, and camped out for two days.

No adults required.

I wouldn't change that for all the money in the world.

Remember BB gun wars and telling people not to pump more than 3 or 4 times? No one listened.

We used to rush each other and when we couldn't reload fast enough we would drop the guns and pull spray paint cans out with a lighter. Warfare went nuclear and moved on to flame thrower wars.

Haha If kids watched that stuff now they shit themselves.

And CLACKERS (60’s Toy) - Two glass balls on a string that you struck together.

I also remember taking a AC Spark Plug and using dad’s vice grips to unscrew the top off of it. Sometimes the shaft broke but if it did not you would take a shoe string and tie one end to the top of the unscrewed portion and the other end to the end where the spark was created. Then you would break off 5-7 white tips from white tip matches and drop them down into the inside of the spark plug where the top shaft was unscrewed. Put the top back down into the hole and give it a hearty swing striking the unscrewed top against a brick or concrete wall.

Sounded like a gun going off. Too many match tops and the glass portion of the spark plug would explode sending glass everywhere. When this happened you had to start all over with another spark plug. Guessing this is why I have such severe hearing loss now because we did this for several years as spark plugs were found.

The good old days…

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:

quote:

Originally posted by 1s1k:
Most of that was going on in the 70’s.

Same with the early-to-mid '90s.

I was doing this in the mid to late 70s:



Kids were doing this in the 80s, 90s, now. Sneaking into backyards to ride empty pools.

Dirt clog fights in lots where new houses were being built.

Some related fun articles:

50 Things Only People Who Lived in the 1970s Will Remember
https://bestlifeonline.com/1970s-nostalgia/

27 Things '60s Kids Did That Would Horrify Us Now
https://www.countryliving.com/...ould-horrify-us-now/

12 reasons kids from the '60s and '70s shouldn't be alive right now
https://www.metv.com/lists/12-...t-be-alive-right-now