quote:

Originally posted by Rinehart:
All kids carried a pocket knife when I was young. Things brought in for show and tell then would trigger a three police dept Swat response now... BB guns, cap guns, inert WWII grenades, swords, bayonets, bullets, etc.

It was common practice to ride the school bus with a 22LR if you shot in one of the shooting groups. People brought guns to school in cars for hunting after classes were over. I can remember several people standing around a car at lunch admiring a new shotgun.
Just imagine that now....

Exact same experience I had growing up. In High School most every pick up truck the seniors drove had a rifle in the rear window. Hell in grade school kids would bring in the P38 or Lugar for show and tell that their father or uncle brought back after the war. The teacher always asked "your gun isn't loaded is it?" I took my Benjamin pellet pistol for show and tell in grade school. None of this even raised an eyebrow.

1. Used "baling wire" to wire a kid's beltloops to his chair in English class - how was I to know that English teachers don't carry wire-cutters!

2. Used a short 2x4 board propped against the door in a basement classroom to lock a sadistic substitute teacher in his room - at 3:00 PM in the day. Some kind person let him out after about 30 minutes.

Used to put firecracker snappers under the chair legs of my friends in 5th grade before school started for the day.

Note: I went back and taught at that same school after graduating from college.

At 15 I was initially suspected of trying to blow up the cafeteria after placing a paper bag full of ashcans on the outside window sill while lighting one to toss where the golf team was practicing. I said I only put them there because I wasn’t stupid enough to do it while holding them all and got off with a one day suspension.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: P210,

Worked on an old Mauser in shop class for a friend. I also mooned several students during football games, that probably get me shot today.

I carried a Buck 110 folding knife on my belt in my senior year. I was a volunteer firefighter/first aid squad member in town. I told my teachers I needed to carry a knife and they were okay with it. If you tried that today the school I went to would go on lock down and SWAT would show up.

I was bookee in middle & high school. Did fairly well, since most of the kids had no idea how to bet. My best friend in middle school sold pages of playboys for $1.00 each.

Went to high school in Harford County, MD 1968 through 1972. Although I didn't do so myself, many kids brought long guns onto the bus and presumably kept them in their lockers.

As part of an approved demonstration, I stunk up the school with hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg gas) then some days later with sulfur dioxide. Today, they'd call out HazMat.

We cleaned pennies with mercury. We made aqua regia (a powerful mixture of two powerful acids) in chemistry lab, and when we were done, took it outside and threw it on the ground. It was far too powerful to pour down the sink. It would eat the dirt until it was used up.

I made a Jacobs ladder with two metal rods and a 50,000 volt transformer. When energized, a giant arc would jump between the metal rods. Very cool, actually. There's a photo of me doing this in the yearbook.

In 10th grade science class, for one of the "independent project" days, my lab partner and I were making a giant capacitor out of window panes and a roll of aluminum foil. Quite a few square feet of surface area, had we been allowed to finish it. The teacher was amused as we explained it. He asked how we would charge it. I told him (involved a whimshurst machine) and he got serious and said that would work nicely. Also we'd get an A for the project, but don't go any further. He told us discharging that capacitor would likely deafen everyone in the room and possibly blow out the windows and doors. And melt parts of the whimshurst machine.

Took a teachers early 70s VW Beetle and placed it between two parking curbs so she couldn't drive home. I had help from some of the other big guys to do this.

Carried a pocket knife always.

I shot a school bus with an IED...I got an old LAW tube, some bottle rockets and some M80s and basically created a homemade rocket launcher. It didn’t go straight, and most of the time the ignition was mistimed so the m80 would just blow up on the ground...on the last day of school my 7rh grade year, though, it worked perfectly and smudged the paint on a school bus....this was in 1986. Nowadays I’d be at Gitmo

This is really scary now that I think of it...

Back in the mid 60’s my Dad was Vice President of a small company, Cambridge Nuclear, that was involved in all types of research into the possible uses of various radioisotopes.

One day as I came home from school I was surprised to see him there with a person I hand never seen before. That gentleman was a doctor and showed us a short surgical video of the insertion of a nuclear powered pacemaker into a dog. I remembering almost throwing up as I had never seen a surgery before.

After the film he showed us the pacemaker and the small lead container that held the radioisotope.
I took that pacemaker and lead container to school (my Dad did make me promise not to open it...) for show and tell.

That doctor?
Michael DeBakey

Ok, I thought of a few more, but these were all of the harmless type, and directed at one particular teacher.

We had an English teacher from Wales...really white, pasty guy, who was really high strung and easy to get emotionally stirred up. He yelled at us a lot, but you could tell deep down he really liked us, and we liked him well enough, too...but he was just too much fun to pick on (he was actually an excellent teacher...I attribute a lot of my success in college to his writing and lit classes).

We were doing a unit on Shakespeare, and he had these buzzwords that he kept focusing on (farce, love, metaphor...stuff like that). He'd repeat them like 20 times a day. So we made up Bingo cards and kept them in our desk. We'd be sitting in class, he'd say something, and some random kid somewhere would yell "Bingo!". It took him three of four iterations before he figured out what we were doing .

He was also a very organized person...neat piles of papers and stuff on his desk in a particular, orderly fashion. One day he left the room, and a bunch of us turned his desk around. He came back in, didn't notice for a while, then did and blew up. He thought we'd re-arranged his piles, so he spent about 10 minutes in the middle of class re-organizing them, all the while cussing us from the front of the room. When he got done, he sat down in his chair and reached for a drawer. It of course was on the other side of the desk. This triggered another round of yelling. We felt like we'd gotten him pretty good at this point, and offered to help him move the desk back, but he was too mad and told us to sit there and shut up...while we watched him turn the desk around by himself, then re-rearrange everything into his piles, cussing us the whole time .

He did get us pretty good one time. Our classroom was on the second floor of a tiered part of the building, with windows that opened out onto the roof of the first story. One day when he left the classroom to go get something, we all went out the window onto the roof. We figured he'd flip out when he came back and couldn't find us, but he simply walked over and locked the window. The Art teacher in the class next door wasn't really impressed when we all came piling through her window to get back into the building .

Mid 90's timeframe...

Hacked into local telephone exchange and deleted records/charges for a few phone calls I made and didn't want the folks finding

Vodka filled water bottles for a bit of the "hair of the dog" episodes

Always had a folding knife on me, and even in the few fights I found myself in, it never got pulled

Using school resources (shop class) to rebuild my engine while I was 'grounded'. Ended up with a few tickets in that car after that

Carnal knowledge of my GF on school grounds, during school hours.

Nothing I did is school that would have gotten me disciplined, but one day the high school was suddenly evacuated, fire department, police, showed up. Went inside and a few minutes came out.

One fireman was surrounded by several others, all with their hands supporting/holding on to another one. That one had a test tube in his hands. The test tube was tied to a loop of string which was around his neck. They all loaded up, VERY CAREFULLY, and drove off.

We found out about an hour later that the test tube was filled with nitro-glycerin! One of the students had made in in the chemistry lab.

The nitro was taken to the bridge across the Clearwater river and lowered carefully into the river.

Nothing happened to the kid as the recipe was in the chemistry book!

I remember a time when we made "gun cotton" and made a lot of noise with it, but we were in our 50's and knew what we were doing.

I imagine some of the folks in this day and age would suffer major heart attacks if they knew what was in school text books back then.

My dad was USAAF in WWII. We had a box of inert .50 BMG rounds in a storage room in the basement. I took a tracer round (again, inert) to grade school one day. A nun caught me with it. All she did was take it away. I assume that after she got over the shock of seeing a 5 1/2” round, she could discern that it was empty. I never heard another word about it.

Sunday before the start of the sixth grade year. My best friend at the time and I ended up behind the school. We noticed there was no one around and one of us pitched a rock through the window.
Each set of windows had 15 individual panels of glass, about the size of a sheet of paper.
We spent hours pitching rocks through the glass.
Around to the front. Continued on. Went to the first day of school the following day and the first half of the day was recess while they cleaned up all the glass.
We never said a word.

In high school I didn’t do much. We smoked a lot of pot. Ditched a lot of school.

There was a day we ditched and met up with a couple other kids. One had a pot dealer fir a dad. We went to some old gravel pits and sat atop a broken old dredge smoking a shitty pipe playing a game called black eye. Take a hit and if you exhaled before the pipe was back in your hand, you got a black eye.
I was so stoned that day that I went home and was busted fir ditching. Parents knew I was baked and sent me to my room. Woke up the next morning and I swear I think I was still stoned.
I chopped a lot of firewood to earn my belongings back after that bullshit.

In a junior year communication class my demonstration speach was how to field strip and reassembled grandpas Colt 1911A1 while wearing a blindfold. Anouther time for metal working shop class, a classmate and I were out at the city dump assembling black powder pipe bombs and blowing up old cars and appliances to determine and observe behaviour of various metals, welds , bolts ect. The Sherriff came by and asked us what we were doing. He gave us some ideas , then told us to be careful. Southwest North Dakota late 1970s.

When I drove to School it was usually a Truck , it had some sort of long gun and a Walking stick that could double as a self protection stick in the gun rack in the Back window. And I always had my Schrade Muskrat Skinner on me.

I was in high school when shotguns in trucks was ending unfortunately. There was a tradition by some that the first day of squirrel season someone would hang a freshly killed squirrel in the senior hall. Naturally it had to be hung from the ceiling so we had to lift someone as it was too tall so we’d have some human pyramid moment. Then the janitor would have to find a step ladder in order to retrieve the kill.

The captain of the cheerleaders drove a POS Geo Metro. We learned the locks didn’t work. Someone hit a raccoon coming to school one day so they stopped and grabbed it and brought it along. We fastened it to the cheerleaders steering wheel with a cigarette in its mouth. We also moved the car a couple of times. She hated it but she also liked the attention.

We made pipe bombs in chemistry class and detonated them across the road from the school. My friend’s mom was the teacher and didn’t care.

I always carried a pocket knife. Most of the guys did. Our principal would occasionally check in to see what knives we were carrying and try to trade some.

One day we were standing in the hall and one of the new assistant football coaches walked by us. The starting running back was with us and called him a fag. Without missing a beat the coach replied “hey lover” and kept walking. It was priceless. Needless to say the coach would probably be out of a job today.

In 5th grade one teacher who’d been there for years would use a small still to make moonshine. Everyone knew he did it and no one cared because he was a great teacher. Everyone got a teaspoon of moonshine to sample. It was almost like a right of passage as he always did it on the last full day of school. The next year was middle school at a different location.

 
Shooting spitwads through a straw. No expulsion, but worse, out in the hall for a paddling.

Although I never did much that was questionable, my dad apparently was quite mischievous. He once related that he'd caught a skunk and stuffed it into the piano in the school auditorium. It got annoyed when the piano was played and they had to air out the school for several days. . . . He wasn't caught, I understand. Today, he'd probably have been incarcerated for months.

flashguy