Danger Jarts:
Some people played “lawn darts” with the little circle you’re supposed to throw the jart into. Well that’s for sissies. We played with each other as the target. Simple game. Get the person to move, you get a point. Get hit, you win. Well, we only had one winner. Kenny Wilson. Lawn dart thru the foot. He was declared the winner… and we never played it again
Wet tennis ball:
Take a tennis ball. Throw it up in the air and call someone’s name. If they miss the ball you throw the ball at them from about 30 feet away with them lined up against a wall. OK that became too easy. We incorporated a hose into the game. you could spray the person all you want while the ball is in the air. This added two twists to the game. 1) Harder to catch the ball. 2) the ball now weighs more and hurts significantly more when you got hit. Oh, and I mention we had two minor/major-league-quality pitchers in our family. Yeah one could throw in the low/mid 90s and the other in the high 80s…OUCH!!
Most “activities” involved throwing somethin at each other! Small apples on the end of a whippy stick (increased the velocity exponentially) which magnified the YOOOCCCHHH!!! factor. Clods of dirt “dirt bombs” - made a neat cloud of dust when they hit their target - me or one of my 3 brothers !! Also, anything that would fit in a pea-shooter - different kinds of beans, elderberries (green & ripe), reeds with sewing needles embedded in them, and of course, the immortal spitball! Frozen snowballs! And if all else failed - rocks!!! The funny thing is that we normally didn’t get hurt by the objects being thrown, but by falling out of or off of or into something else! LOL!!!
“Most “activities” involved throwing somethin at each other! Small apples on the end of a whippy stick”
I often use this phrase to try and explain to new fly casters the casting “stroke” and “feel” you are trying to achieve. If you brought the whippy stick forward to fast the apple would come off behind you, stop the whippy stick down in front of you and the apple would slam into the ground in front of you, but, if the whippy stick is stopped above your head, the apple would achieve the greatest distance. To be successful with flinging the apple the greatest distance, you needed to feel the whippy stick loaded throughout the entire casting stroke which required timing and feel.
B-B gun battles. Weren’t allowed to aim for the head, but that didn’t stop most of us. And no one got their eye shot out either. It is a wonder that we made it to adulthood with some of the things we got in to. Our parents caused the most damage to us kids when we got our “butts beat” after they found out what we did.
When I was growing up in South Africa we had mud clod fights all the time. I have a scar on the back of my head from a brick that was thrown after a fight was over…got to play doctor with his sisters after that.
Then we used to make bow and arrows and have bow and arrow fights in the bush. How none of us ever got killed, or even injured, I’ll never know.
We also used to play a game we called ‘jacks.’ we would stand with our feet together and then take turns trying to get a knife to stick into the ground with the intent that wherever the knife stuck, you had to spread your feet out to that spot.
Then there were the BB gun fights after I immigrated here…
Car tag…we’d race around in our cars and have to get within 10 feet or so of whomever you were trying to catch, flash you lights or honk you horn and they were then it. They gave you 10 seconds to run, and then they’d chase after you. We did this on the lake roads around my grandmother house in Minnesota. Another one of those, “how none of us ever got hurt” one’s.
I think I’m going to stop there…no, no, one more.
Years ago, we went on a family trip. We stopped at a gas station to fill up and use the restroom. There was a jackalope on the wall, and my brother was absolutely awe-struck. The attendant made up some amazing story, and from then on all my brother wanted to do was shoot a jackalope.
Fast forward a few years…I was rabbit hunting a place called James A. Reed in Lee’s Summit, MO. There was some snow on the ground, so a friend and I were taking turns jumping on brush piles to chase the rabbits out. We managed to get a few rabbits, but didn’t like having to take turns, so I asked my friend to play along, raced home, burst into the house and yelled for my brother to grab his hunting clothes! I yelled that I shot at and wounded a jackalope at James A. Reed and needed his help tracking it. We never had to jump on another brush pile all season.
I won’t even try to describe the look I got when he finally learned that they don’t exist. I think he was somewhere in his late teens, early twenties when he finally learned the truth!
Ahhh…throwing stuff. We had our share of dirt clod wars from the farm field behind the house, and ice chunk fights in the winter. I recall being maybe 4 years old and taking a brutal hit to the ear from a noxious smelling projectile of creek mud launched by my older cousin.
And then summers spent working in corn fields…we would take rocks of all sizes on our shovels, and chuck them at the next guy walking 6-10 rows over. Got real good at catching even tiny high-speed projectiles on the head of a steel shovel.
BB-gun fights were the best. Nope, no eyes shot out, but some pretty close calls. Hookie-bobbing behind cars in the winter; wait for a car to pass on slick roads and run out to catch the rear bumper and ride for as far as we could - it was rough to hit a dry patch, for sure
Veteran of hundreds of BB gun, dirt clod fights and peashooter/slingshot battles.
When we got bored, we played darts.
You took turns holding the dart board.:mrgreen:
We did “fishing crackers”. Take a spinning reel and tie on a sinker about a foot above the end of the line. Then tie on a fire cracker to the end. Get your buddy to light it, then cast it into the pond. If you time it right, it will blow up under water. Cool! The only problem was that we were new to the spinning reels, and didn’t always cast so well. I can still see my best friend’s face after a bad cast attempt with his arms up in the air holding the rod, while the line revolved slowly around him, bringing the firecracker closer and closer while he yelled. The sinker ended up just below his shoulder, and the firecracker somewhere south of there. POP! and it was time for another game.
Inverted tricycles that looked like modern day Big Wheels. Race them down a steep dirt road to a dead-end barracade. As you can probably guess, Trikes don’t have brakes. Had to Flintstone stop or crash.
Bulldogging calves off our ponies (calves don’t have horns). Oh, and playing catch the bad guy with ropes running at breakneck speed on horses.
“Playing” war with acetylene gas (Carbide powder and water in a pipe) powered mortars shooting potatoes, bb guns, dirt clods for grenades and the inevitable hand to hand combat when we charged. Aw, the good ol’ days.
Hide & Seek played with flashlights on warm, dark summer’s nights. We had a resident older kid who would join in by pretending to be the Wolf-Man, complete with full moon howling and transformations into Larry Talbot, the Lon Chaney, Jr. alter-ego. He was never IT but instead would hide in bushes or backyards and try to scare the living $#!+ out of us while we were trying NOT to be found.
We also played Hide the Belt in the dark which was a favorite in Scouts and among the teenage crowd I hung around with after Scouts. The trick to this game was not to let on you found the belt and lure some unsuspecting player as close to you as possible, then whip out the belt and beat him silly on the run back to “base”. :twisted:
Hopping cars in the snow, (or “Hookie-bobbing” as kglissmeyer calls it) was an Olympic sport in my neighborhood. Every kid in town made sure the boots he wore in winter had relatively smooth soles which usually meant leather construction type boots. Your feet may have got cold & wet but MAN did you slide! Back in those days cars also had “proper” bumpers that were ideal for grabbing on to. A VW Beetle was a PRIME target. One we latched on we’d go as far as we could, sometimes several miles before bailing and attempting to get a “hop” back to the staging area. We also routinely let go prior to hitting a local RR crossing about two miles away. That crossing would knock you silly for sure!
In dry weather we hopped on the back of tractor trailers or other trucks that were stopped at traffic lights, sometimes riding around for many miles while other motorists honked their horns in an attempt to alert the driver. How we never fell off and got killed is beyond me.
Fortunately dirt bombs and other intentional projectiles never caused any serious damage in the course of battle although I have a buddy who lost his eyesight in one eye after being hit squarely by a crab-apple that flew off of a “whippy stick”. It was a total freak accident caused when another friend of ours tried to smash that apple on the ground.
Sadly our mother’s warnings about “putting someones eye out” and a little common sense didn’t prevent that disaster.
Another game.
We used to play tag.
Seems pretty boring, right?
Well, we played tag with dirt bikes…at night. Tag your front tire to the back tire of someone else. We played in the woods and and speeds were slow…we weren’t THAT dumb…well that depends on your perspective I guess.
The old soda can cannons (old style cans). Take off the top and bottom - tape them together - bottom can leave the top and bottom on and use the old v cut can opener and put a series of holes around the top, tape onto the rest. Put a small hole in the side of the bottom can and squirt lighter fluid (Zippo) into it. Shake the heck out of it and put a match to the hole BOOM!!! really loud.
Then the stupids hit!!! Instead of taping the cans together we soldered them together then duct taped around them - Made a new mixture of Lighter Fluid, gas and kerosene. Sprayed some in shook it up (we actually had some smarts we had heavy coats on) lit it and BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!!! Blew the whole thing apart and we were REAL lucky we didn’t get sliced up.
Luckily I’m still here
Laughed about it then but now it was a really STUPID thing to do.
Back when we were kids we had the old bananna style bikes with wide handle bars. Tied some really heavy duty rubber bands together and put them on the handle bars. Ammo??? Old cableing with the outside cut off and the rubber coated pieces inside cut into small pieces and bent into little U shapes. Launched them at each other like slingshots OUCH!!! REALLY STUPDID!!!
Yet one more game. This one is safe but pretty clever.
We lived in a ranch-style house that was shaped like an L. The front of the house had one big cement slab. We played what we called “roof ball”. You served the ball some 20 feet from the roof and when the ball came down the other guy(s) had 2 hits to get the ball back up on the roof. If the ball hit the ground, a point was awarded to the server or the serve changed hands.The ball was just one of those ~12" cheap plastic balls that weighed little/nothing.There was an out-of-bounds at the 2 ends of the rooves. It turned into quite the game. The ball was light enough that it did no damage to the windows or the house(well maybe Mom’s flowers). A hit that went over the house was a 2-point penalty and you had to go get the ball. It was very tiring and athletic. We had tons of fun with it. So much so that I would really like to re-create it by making a roof ball court some day.
Didn’t have a boring childhood but it all seems so boring in comparison to what I did in the helicopters with real live souls aboard, thousands of pounds of high explosives, highly flamable jet fuel and so on.
My child hood consisted of a broken home, fighting over who got “The Kids” and dealing with enough parental stupidity of that sort that I have very few fond memories of those days.
Made the same “Can Cannon” but the bottom can we didnt cut the top off, just made a couple extra pop top holes. 4 or 5 cans with the top and bottom cut off all taped together finished it off. Added charcoal lighter fluid thru the little door in the bottom can but also added a tennis ball down the ‘muzzle’. Lit the lighter fluid and shot the tennis ball out like a real cannon ball. After awhile we soaked the tennis ball with lighter fluid and had a flaming projectile…until we started catching the lawn on fire when it landed.
Later in life when we had better access to fireworks and a little more science in our heads, we made bottom rocket launchers out of 3/4" PCV pipe and fittings that resembled a Styer Aug. Put rocket stick in ‘muzzle’ with fuse over lip keeping it from sliding down the barrel. One of us who hold the launcher and another would light. Once lit you could aim the rocket.
Another little game I just thought of that we did quite often. It was called “Streach”. Two guys would face off about 6 feet apart and, using our hunting knives, we would start throwing the knives as close to the other persons feet as we could. Where the knife stuck, the person opposite you had to move his foot, leaving the other foot in place. This went on a little bit at a time until one of us would not be able to move his foot out and touch the knife without falling down. Only knives that stuck in the ground counted. Bounces happened some time and and we got hit in the leg every now an then. You never played this game while wearing tennis shoes since it was only proper that you tried to stick the knife as close to the other persons foot as possible. Whoever devisied that game, I have no idea. We use to do a lot of things with knives back then. And I still have all my toes and fingers.
Dave,
Are we RELATED? I remember dirt bombs…We threw em at cars to see how close we could come to hitting ‘em & that really made some folks MAD…especially when we were too close. We went “high tech” & used slingshots for the small apples. Pea shooters & frozen snowballs with rocks in ‘em were fun, as well as throwin’ over ripe tomatoes & snappin’ the girl’s rears with strips of “whitewall” (readily available in Akron when we were kids & the rubber industry boomed). We also made “racers” out of boards, crates, trike wheels, & about a thousand nails to hold the axles in place. We ran those babies downhill on Honadle Ave (yeah, we were driving 'em!) My brother & I also burned every doll house our little Sister Katie ever owned…poured gas on 'em & had a nice bonfire. We also used to nail small bullheads to the porch rails 'til they died so we didn’t get stuck cleaning them. Dad was sorta “ouchie” when he saw that. He never would let us have BB guns. He said we could kill ourselves easy enough WITHOUT 'em!
Somehow, we survived our childhood…& there was MUCH more. Those are some fun memories.
Mikey
The bullly boy of the neighborhood that we gals gave wide measure to used to play “mumbly peg” with his dog, trying to stick his knife as close as possible to the dog’s paw, till he nailed him. Fun for him, but not the dog.
