Stuff we used to do back then that you couldn't do now

[sheepdawg]

Cajunlawyer's thread about lye got me to thinking about stuff we used to think was pretty harmless but now the P.C. nannies in government have made illegal or damn near. Remember how when you were little and someone busted open a mercury thermometer. We used to roll the stuff around in our hands, it was pretty darn neat back then. Now you'd have the E.P.A. come to your house and declare it a danger zone, rope it off, cover it in plastic, people in orange biohazard suits would be out there trying to reclaim every bit of it and dispose of it in the proper P.C. way. No doubt you'd get a bill from them for thousands of dollars too.

I know I've also inhaled a lot of leaded gasoline fumes, no telling how much got in me when trying to siphon some out of a gas tank.

I went to the number one rated high school in the State of Tennessee when it came to asbestos contamination.

I've sprayed a bunch of lacquer and oil based paint without a respirator, heck back when I was a whippersnapper respirators were for wimps.

As far as painting, when you were on a ladder on the side of a house and you got to the hill we'd just get a couple of concrete blocks and put them under a leg of it to even things off, need an extra three feet on your 40 footer, back your pickup to the house and put your ladder in the back of it. O.S.H.A would be having a field day with some of the stuff we did to paint a house back then.

No telling what they used to spray crops with back in the 60s but I never thought twice about walking through a recently sprayed cotton patch.

I'm pretty amazed that I've lived this long without the government telling me what is safe and what isn't and that I still have some memory left though my wife is telling me that I am starting to get a little squirrelly.

 

[Old TexMex]

Is it still o.k. for govt. employees to jump 10 feet out of an outdated helicopter?

 

[eb07]

Running around the neighborhood with BB guns having one pump gunfights. The swat team would show up and shoot somebody now.

 

[Frank237]

I can recall going to the Edison Police range...which was a sand pit off of Woodbridge Avenue in 1958 when I was eight yrs old. Shot my Uncles S&W HE in .32 S&W. Shot at BOTTLES on the sand bank. NO ear or eye protection.

Then took several of the empty cases with me to school to give my buddies. We all had them sitting on our desks.

Few weeks later one of the cops who reloaded for the Dept gave me half a dozen dummy rds. .38 case with a 158 RN lead, but no primer. Same deal.....gave them to my buddies and we had them in school.

 

[Wrangler Rich]

Riding in the back of a pick-up
Playing lawn darts
No seat belts
Motorcycle riding without a helmet
Digging a hole and dumping trash in the hole
Do they let you have an outhouse now?

 

[vt_shooter]

Having fun with M-80 firecrackers. BB gun fights. Still remember one BB gun fight I was in, a kid named Randy from a distance of about 50 feet away, who for just a second would reveal himself from behind a tree to shoot, hit my same knuckle on my same hand twice in a row about a minute apart. Hurt like heck. Yeah, could have been an eye and I should feel lucky it was only a knuckle, but boy was I mad at the time at his uncanny luck / my bad luck. Just as well kids don't do that stuff any more - too much luck involved in escaping childhood unscathed. Oh yeah, and coating silver dimes in mercury. We did it all.

 

[Chuck24]

Taking your rifle to school and leaving it in the principles office so you could go shooting after school.

 

[Tom S.]

In junior high, I had a speech class. We had to give a speech on any topic we wanted. I took the rifle my dad used to shoot in the Camp Perry National Matches, a Model 70 to school, along with a round to show what it looked like. Got an A on the speech. Kept the gun in my locker before and after the class, and did clear it with both the speech teacher and the principle before hand. Neither one had an issue with it. I carried it to and from school in one of the old style soft rifle cases, which given the distance (10 miles, up hill both ways in 3 feet of snow ) was fairly tiring. Can you imagine some kid wanting to do that today?

Cherry bombs and M-80's were also an integral part of my adolescence. Neither of which are available today. With a wrist rocket, and someone to light it for you, you could shoot a cherry bomb pretty far.

We also played baseball and touch football in the street. The percentage of kids who played ball back then had to be close to 100%. Do you think it's anywhere near that today?

Daredevils that we were, we rode in cars without seat belts, collapsible steering columns, air bags or padded dashboards. We rode bicycles without helmets. During the summer, we stayed out playing until 11 at night. We'd share a drink with a friend, drinking out of the same bottle. In the Winter, we'd "hop
cars", which meant grabbing the rear bumper and get pulled along, sliding on the snow until we fell off or the drive stopped.

It's a wonder we survived.

 

[Rustyt1953]

Hit from the men's tees.

 

[Jinglebob]

A lot of kids in the 50's, myself included, had a Gilbert Chemistry Set. It contained chemicals like highly flammable potassium permanganate and ammonium nitrate. The fact that we survived into their adult years is amazing.

 

[SweetMK]

Rock carbide, a gallon paint can with a hole in the bottom,,,
add spit,,, and a match!!

EASILY louder than a commercial firework report,,,

AND, I still have some hearing!!

 

[Sevens]

Being just 43, I figured I would never be able to come up with anything that makes the cut. Then again...

It was 1991 and I had a college speech class. With a button shirt, a skinny tie AND my awful mullet hair style, the Prof videotaped my speech to the class.

I brought four handguns... a 1911, a Taurus PT99, my S&W 686 and 17-6 and proceeded to give a fantastic speech on the differences between semi-autos and revolvers.

Part of the task was reviewing my performance on the videotape later. Tough to watch... I got an "A"... I shaved my awful mullet off on the following weekend and eventually dropped out of college.

 

[pharmer]

I guess today they would be described as "IED's." I always called them "superbangs." UFO's were neat also: Thin dry cleaner bag, loaded with fluffed cotton wadding. Light the bottom and it shoots up bright red into the sky. The cops got multiple phone calls of "sightings" before the advent of "911." I better stop there. Joe

 

[JJEH]

Riding in the back of a pick-up

Hey, I let my kids do that. I did it as a kid and I don't want my kids to miss out on that

So far no one has pulled me over yet

 

[Bkreutz]

Is it still o.k. for govt. employees to jump 10 feet out of an outdated helicopter?

I believe so.

 

[shouldazagged]

Used to drink from a spring, shoot mistletoe out of trees and have horse apple fights in a pasture a block and a half from our house in a good-sized city. It's now Bellarmine University.

Drove with no seat belts on foggy nights on narrow, sometimes winding highways with no side line marking to show where the shoulder began.

Hung out with a kid who, so help me, cooked nitroglycerin and mercuric fulminate in his parents' basement garage. We blew some stuff up. Not a lot, and I'm not saying what even though it was sixty-plus years ago.

A friend of my brother got hold of about a two-inch cube of pure sodium and dropped it down a sewer. Blew some manhole covers off, and those things are heavy.

Is there a theme there?

BB guns, of course. Probably the least of our transgressions.

 

[garddogg56]

I remember in elemetary school on the first day of Deer season we could bring our hunting rifle to school for show and tellthose were the daysoh ya we could carry a pocket knife and play mimbly peg at recess

 

[DWalt]

Fireworks, mainly. Not what passes for the fireworks sold in the USA today (where allowed), but the stuff that would blow off your hand. 3" firecrackers, M80s, and Cherry Bombs. Also real rockets, about a foot long which would go WAY up there and explode. Even the small 1-1/2" braided fuse paper firecrackers back then were very powerful and loud. Great for launching tin cans skyward. All fireworks (except for sparklers) were illegal in Ohio, even back then, but they were not difficult to find in quantity (I think most came in from Kentucky, across the river), and no one tried very hard to enforce the Ohio fireworks laws anyway. The last time I saw any fireworks like that was over 20 years ago, being sold on an Indian reservation in Washington State. I bought about $200 worth and stayed up all night on the 4th of July shooting them. I guess Indian reservations could do that then, maybe they still can.

 

[Triathloncoach]

Sit on my Dad's lap and steer the car while he smoked a cigarette.

 

[RJJ 1971]

BB gun wars...
Remember my friends step dad violated a "cease fire" during one BB gun war. We ended up pegging him down while on top of a rail road car and my buddy sniped him. Till this day, I have still never seen anyone fall off a rail car quite like that day.
I remember going back to my buddy's house probably 3 hours later and seeing his mom digging a BB out his step dads back with a fork. His step dad was holding an ice pack on his neck and head at the same time.
Just remember his step dad saying... No way was that a 3 pump shot