Ever build a fort?

[rolomac]

Was just looking at some pictures from the late 30s and early 40s that showed a number of shots of young kids playing like I remember - improvising toys from pieces of wood - digging in dirt piles - all kinds of dirty and wholesome stuff. Contrast that with the way I see my grandkids play - on their xbox or their tablet or their iPhone. Got me thinking about building a fort - over 60 years ago. That was always a great thing for me and my buddies. Tree forts were lots of fun (don't remember anybody every falling out) and cave forts were neat too. Our favorite was sneaking off to the river (strictly forbidden by parents), crossing river channels, watching out for poison ivy and snakes and quicksand, and building great forts using driftwood and rocks. Anybody else have experience building forts?

rolomac

 

[the ringo kid]

Ive built forts made out of discarded Christmas trees. Also had one or two made ot of bits of tossed plywood and lumber. Really looked terrible to the trained eye, but to us kids--it looked better than Fort Apache.

 

[Onomea]

Heck yeah! Built an underground fort, on the side of a hill, with some German buddies, in Frankfurt in the late 1950s. Had a trap door entrance and a battery powered overhead light. (And a very precious Playboy magazine in a secret niche.)

 

[diamonback68]

I practically lived in forts most days of my kid life. Made them out of cardboard boxes, beehive boxes, hay bales (the best), pallets, snow drifts and scrap wood you name it. Gave us that sense of secret security.

 

[Ranger514]

Me and my friends built ourselves a plywood shack that covered our "mine." It looked more like an outhouse than a fort, but we were proud of ourselves.

 

[Milton]

yep.we built forts from pine trees cut and stacked up and reinforced with smaller sticks and branches.We defended our fort with BB guns as the enemy hid in tall grass and shot back at us! great fun for a boy!We rested after a series of week long battles only to find some girls had destroyed our fort as we rested at home.I can just imagine what would be said today about long range BB gun battles with 8 to 10 boys firing at each other!

 

[Ματθιας]

We had a vacant lot on the corner where all the neighbor kids would play. One summer while playing war, we decided to build/dig a bunker. Our neighborhood was full of vets and my dad let me use his E-tool, one had a US marked shovel - we thought that was the coolest - a couple of kids had field manuals and we tried to build them as close as possible to the pictures - at least as close as a bunch of kids could.

On the corner of the field was a gas station with an old WW2 vet as an owner, Mr. Turner. He kept an eye on us and made sure our construction wouldn't collapse and hurt any of us. He even gave us some pointers on how to defend the position.

We spent many hours fighting off imaginary enemies and sometimes having bottle rocket wars. Most of the time we just went out there just to get out of the house and just talk.

I miss those carefree, good times.

 

[LoboGunLeather]

As a young boy building a fort was something always going on. In the back yard, in the woods, down by the river, up in a tree.

As a young man I participated in building bunkers, trenches, aircraft revetments, artillery positions and so forth while on the all expenses paid vacation to sunny Southeast Asia. Must have filled a million sandbags, or so it seemed at the time. Interlocking fields of fire, anti-personnel mines, trip flares, all the fun stuff.

If I had it all to do over again I'd just stick with my old buddies and never leave the fort in the woods except to go home for supper.

 

[Coaltminer]

Of course! There was a huge, old dying, oak tree on a tobacco field road near the Farmington River in Simsbury, CT. You could peel off huge pieces of bark, like 4ft.x3ft. It was tepee style, bottom piece of the bark set out a couple ft. from the tree base, top leaning against the trunk. As kids, we thought we'd done something big! A couple of years later, it didn't look so hot to us anymore.

 

[ACP230]

I have built forts in two hemispheres.
Mostly in the southern one as I kind of aged out of it after
coming back north.

Help start a log deer blind on a friend's property outside
of Ontonagon once. We didn't finish it. His kids may have used
what we did make for a fort.

 

[jack the toad]

I was so poor as a kid (1955 model) that instead of playing x-box, we built forts, tree houses, tunnels, etc.
And wouldn't trade those experiences for all the vid games in the world. Back then, pinball was the extent of my electronic amusement.

 

[kenv1950]

Yup, all of the above, wouldn't trade those days for anything. Still have a scar above my right eyebrow when i got shot with a BB gun... You know what mom said, you'll shoot your eye out with that thing, almost did

 

[Wyatt p. Tato]

The word fort has a military connotation, it is no longer allowed in today's pc world.

My personal fort experience exposed me to knives, zippo lighters, tobacco products, various magazines, the idea that farting could be funny and a good amount of male bonding as females were not allowed.

No wonder the world is falling apart.

 

[shouldazagged]

Not since about 1948, when I was eleven. Very little frivolity--it wasn't long after WWII and we were engaged in the serious business of fending off banzai charges and hordes of Waffen SS.

I do seem to remember one kid who could fart "Turkey In The Straw". but we made him stay outside and shot at him with cap guns.

 

[Stevens]

We built several some in trees, my Dad had access to used wooden shipping crates so we had lots of good building material. For battles we used to make "rifles" that would shoot bottle caps propelled by a rubber strap cut from a bycicle tire .

 

[Evil Dog]

then there was the occasional Blanket Fort set up in the den.

 

[S42N8]

Snow forts! Took 2-3 kids to manhandle the really big slabs of snow the snowplow tossed up, but worth it. By February, we'd have the softball outfield pretty well built up, and the recess snowball fights were brisk. Thankfully, we didn't lose anybody in the April meltdowns.

 

[Engineer1911]

Built a tree fort in 2nd grade that was 12 feet off the ground -- tool shed was 8' high and I was 4' above the tool shed. Built lots of snow forts cause I lived on a corner and got the "best" snow plow piles. Don't think my grandfather shared that opinion.

 

[shaggist]

We built one when I was in the 4th grade(1952) out of red clay, so we could have BB gun battles. It hardened almost as much as fired brick, so the BBs just bounced or ricocheted off. Every time a thunderstorm came by, it got a little lower and, by the end of the summer, it had basically melted away. Thankfully, no one lost an eye, but we didn't have safety goggles and there were no areas of skin forbidden at which to shoot. I miss the simpler times of my youth, when I could be gone all day and Mom wouldn't worry about where I was, what we were doing, or who I was with, until dark started coming and I wasn't home yet. She trusted me and I was worthy of her trust.

 

[Iggy]

Neighbor ranch kids and I built to forts out of hay bales at the opposite ends of the hay mow in the barn.. Then we had a rotten egg fight.

It was pretty much a tie..We was all losers when we got home.