Originally Posted By alexbook ...was sometimes considered "slow" and sometimes "gifted" but rarely "normal."
Originally Posted By chickendumpling loved nothing more than to lay down on the grass on a warm summer day and daydream as I watched the big white puffy clouds in the beautiful blue sky pass by.....
Originally Posted By chickendumpling liked to play marbles. (okay - this does not mean I am inviting jokes about me losing my marbles. Yuk, yuk, yuk - very funny.)
Originally Posted By chickendumpling and tetherball. used to collect up all the bottles and cans we could get from our neighbors and my cousin and I would go the the liquor store across the main road and cash 'em in and buy bubble gum cards and candy.
Originally Posted By tapdancemom No laughing at you from me, I used to play marbles and tetherball. Hopscotch was big too with my neighborhood gang. We had kool-aid stands and put on pageants in the backyard and stayed out as late as we could on summer nights. Playing outside was much preferred to staying inside watching tv.
Originally Posted By tapdancemom I remember many Saturdays walking downtown with my sisters and friends to watch a movie, Disney more often then not. We usually got a big Charm sucker or a box of Dots.
Originally Posted By chickendumpling played Hot Wheels all day long with my best friend Brian. Man that was fun. His dad gave us a patch of the "vegetable garden" and we made the best danged Hot Wheels city in the whole world. We had bridges and rivers and lakes and skyscrapers and jump boards and volcanoes and about a bizillion other things. We had bigger, better, higher, more radical track angles than anybody. LOL! (Of course I'm sure we didn't but it was the *bestest* and most *awesomest* to us.
Originally Posted By chickendumpling (and vegetable garden is in quotes because we lived in the city and it was really just a overly shaded area of the backyard where nothin' would grow and not a vegetable garden at all but that's what we called it because we were cityfied and anything not in concrete was a "garden" to us. LOL.)
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan ... used to build jump ramps for our bikes out of cinder blocks and pieces of plywood. For an additional thrill, and as an ode to Evil Kneivel, we would lie down at the end of the jump ramp in rows, to see how many kids each bike could clear. (Evil used cars and busses for this purpose.) Amazingly, no one ever got hurt doing that. I can still remember not being able to see the oncoming bike, but hearing the tires on the pavement getting closer and closer, the sudden loud "ker-PLUNK!" sound as the bike hit the rickety ramp, and the moment of silence and rushing air as the bike flew overhead, inches above our faces, seemingly in slow motion. Being the first body in line was scary because if the ramp failed, you'd be the first hit by the bike and debris. Being the last in line was scariest of all, because no one was sure exactly how many kids were too many, and by the time the bike was flying over you it was already decending. One time, we kept incresing the angle of the ramp by adding more blocks or bits of 2X4, whatever we could find. My friend Ricky hit the ramp at great speed, and we watched as his bike flipped backward and left him floating through the air, is mouth shaped like a large letter O. He landed bottom first, skidding on his rump for several feet. He jumped up, ran around screaming in agony, hands on his butt, "It burns!!! I need WATER!!!" And, being 4th and 5th graders, we naturally sprang right into action in assisting our wounded friend by falling down on the street and laughing hysterically and pointing at him. We did this stuff all the time, and no parent ever noticed or tried to put a stop to it. Kids and adults really did live in two different worlds back then.
Originally Posted By tapdancemom chickendumpling and Kar2oonMan - awesome times and friends, our neighborhood was too...we went in more for tree forts and lots of sports and the occasional back yard talent show...we stayed out all day, had a blast and didn't come in except for meals and bedtime, ah those were the days.
Originally Posted By mele When I was a kid in Alaska we would run around the island like little wild animals, playing in old buildings and lookouts from WWII, poking jellyfish, saving dolphins (okay, that happened once), riding our bikes down to the fishing boats to see what weird fish they caught. Once they caught a GIGANTIC shark. It was hanging upside down and was full of bullet holes. We used to slide down the hills on flattened cardboard boxes. We would try to climb to the top of the highest mountain, play in the hot springs, bounce around on the tundra, build igloos out of the snow, sword fight with the enormous icicles. There were these plants called, putschki, that would burn your skin if any of it's "juice" got on you but we still played with it all the time. We picked wild iris, salmonberries, ladyslippers, blueberries, fireweed and these weird cottonball type flowers that grew in the bogs. We also dodged huge bald eagles as they swooped down within a few feet of our heads. In the summer it would stay light until midnight and we would be allowed to stay up late. We had to wait till 1 am to watch fireworks on Indpendence Day. One year the people setting off the fireworks from the barge in the bay were so drunk that they set the barge on fire. A bunch of drunk people jumped into their skiffs and went out to help them. We had bonfires on the beach and got to dig for razor clams. When we held the clams we would squeeze them at someone to make them "pee". Before the bridge was built we used to have to take a boat to get to school. When I was a toddler I would leave the house on my own and walk down to City Hall where my aunt worked. She would let me eat sugar cubes. We had a Betamax and only a few movies or tv shows. My brother and I watched "Murder By Death" and "Love At First Bite" and one episode of the Rockford Files approximately 1,000 times. I had a favorite pair of bellbottomed pants that I wanted to wear every single day. Wow, I didn't realize how much fun I had back then.
Originally Posted By Big Thunder 2oony brought back some cool memories We did the bike ramp thing too, my buddy Marty was best at it, no other kid around could top him. He'd get bookin down the street from about 8 houses away, a slight incline up my driveway, then to the ramp we had on the grass, we had an up ramp as well as a landing ramp, when Marty would fly, he'd either clear the entire landing ramp, or when he was going for record distances he preferred moving it out of the way all together. As for lining kids up, we sorta had a pecking order, if you weren't in our lil circle, you got put towards the end, or if you were someone's lil brother or someone we didn't care much about, again towards the outside.
Originally Posted By Big Thunder speaking of bikes, the other thing we sometimes did ... we'd ride our bikes to the laundromat on the corner, sometimes at night it would be almost empty, and since Mr McDaniels who owned the place lived upstairs and was rarely down inside, we did stuff for fun like ride in the big dryers on low heat settings to see how long someone could last in there. Back then, prior to the dirt bike phenomenon, our bikes had slick tires on the back. [Schwinn Sting Ray circa 1970] With hardly any patrons inside the laundromat we'd hold drag races. They had two "lanes" that was separated by rows of washers. The cool thing was they had slippery linoleum floors. So, with a racer on a bike in each lane, we'd emulate drag racing, we'd take some laundry soap and a lil water, pour in on the floor and each racer would peddle like mad, back tires would have no traction at all, the point was to make the wheels spin, like a long burn out like dragsters do. The game was to see who could get the end first without slipping entirely into a wreck, once we'd hit dry floor it was easy. Inevitably we'd get busted [which in reality was part of the fun] Mr McDaniels would come down yelling and chase us down the alley. Later we'd ride bake by and see him mopping and we'd bang on the window and ride off again as he's chase us yelling & cussing. Races! That was another popular activity of ours, we lived near 3 different race tracks, we'd sneak into Irwindale drag strip, Speedway 605, and Speedway flat track. I thought those crazy riders on Jawa bikes sliding around a dirt track were awesome
Originally Posted By chickendumpling (I love this thread. Thank you guys for sharing all you have here.)
Originally Posted By Kar2oonMan Where I grew up in South San Francisco, there was a BF Goodrich tire store that would sell (or just give us, i can't remember) old inner tubes. They had holes or were funky shapes when inflated and some were huge truck tire tubes. Everyone had these little patch kits in their dad's garage workshop, and we'd patch the leaks in the tubes that way, then go to the Standard (now Chevron) station to fill them with air. You could stack the various tubes up starting with the largest up to the smallest to create a somewhat conical-shaped tower, then you'd climb inside, or have a game of King of the Mountain trying to be the first to scramble to the top before the whole thing collapsed. You could also scrunch insde one of the larger tubes, using the metal valve stem as a handle, and have a friend roll you down the block.
Originally Posted By MrsB Sunday evenings, watching Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom" and Disney's movie of the week.
