Stupid things you did as a kid

[handejector]

Jumping off the roof of a garage at age 12 because I wanted to simulate how the paratroopers did it - sans parachute.

Smarter kids use their mom's umbrella as a parachute, I'm told.

Mom's get REAL mad when their favorite umbrella is turned into a funnel, I'm told.

I never did anything stupid as a kid.
(thass my story, an I'm stickin to it )

 

[Jst1mr]

Ditto to so many of these...and then there was: aerosol cans and burning barrels, diving off the RR trestle into the river just as the train came, lying next to the tracks where the train cars moved real slow and rolling to the other side under the train, riding ice floes down the river in the spring, seeing who would crawl out to touch the open water when the river was half frozen over....man, I am so glad my kid had better sense than me...at least I think he did!

 

[Lee in Quartzsite]

Ahhh, the memories. Played Cowboys and Indians with BB guns and Bow and Arrows, shot arrows straight up, then tried to figure out which way to run to avoid getting hit, crammed empty CO2 cylinders full of gun powder or match heads to make really cool rockets, collected old thermometers from the neighborhood, broke them open and played with the mercury...even brought it to school for Show and Tell, rode railroad cars down at the rail yard while they were being "Humped", rode in the back of a pickup truck sitting on the tailgate with my cousins while my Uncle drove real fast down a bumpy dirt road on the way to A&W Rootbeer on Saturday nights...and that's just for starters. Give me time and I will think of a few more........

 

[klondike]

A few years back, I met a nice older man who as it turned out, used to be the County Sheriff when i was a kid. We talked for a while about how society had changed in 50 years. He lamented that the worst that he used to see was an occasional fist fight at a tavern and now the county SWAT team was called out almost every night.
I laughed and said that the worst that thing that I had done was to throw a smoke bomb in Judge T****'s open window one night. Suddenly the old Sheriff stopped smiling and focused on my face and asked. "Whatever happened to you boys?" I froze , realizing that my big mouth had really got me into trouble. He smiled and relaxed, telling me that it no longer mattered as the Judge had died and a long time had passed. He told me that the Judge had called him to his chambers, spitting nails that someone had ruined their new carpeting and that the Sheriff was to put two deputies on finding the dirty little ***'s until they were arrested. He had to report on the investigation every week for months until some other pressing business took the deputies off the case. He said that it was a good thing that we were not caught because Judge T would have sent us to the state reform school and, that the statute had run out.
Dumb things that you do. I had no intention of doing real harm. I did not forsee that smoke bomb dropping inside the house. I was lucky that it did not start a fire. I probably should not even post this now as some of Judge T's kids still live in the county and ....may be on the forum.

 

[wbraswell]

Put 2 pick-up-sticks down the barrel of my new Daisy BB gun. Jammed so bad I had to send it off. Shooting out street lights with BB gun. BB gun fights, I got shot in the lip. My uncle told me(after I was an adult) that he would put a .22 shell in the hole of a yardstick and slap a rock with it. Riding my bike with no hands, paid for that a time or two. Getting over eager hammering nails in boards, and hitting your head with the claws.

 

[radar1972]

Anyone remember what we called Mumbledipeg, a game with a knife and your hand?

Yep, dropped one and it went right through my bare toe!!

 

[CW Spook]

Fused an M80 with a cigarette and put it on the window ledge of city hall while mayor's court was going on. Court broke up early and the mayor, the Chief of Police and a state trooper were standing out on the sidewalk visiting when the M80 went off behind them. Scared the heck out of 'em. The chief eventually became county sheriff of the neighboring county and I actually told him about it after I figured the statute of limitations had run its course.

 

[duppie]

Grow up.........

 

[rwsmith]

The first thing that comes to mind...

The first thing that comes to mind out of many was playing with a butane torch and rubber balloons. They made great fireballs until one went Hindenburg on me and I could have been really burned.

 

[Dominus_Lex]

Assuming they do not need to be dangerous or unhealthy to be dumb, I take a favorite from my father in law. I the late 40's as a high school student in Chicago, he along with some buddy's choose to skip school. They where promptly pick up by the police and taken to the station for being truant, when taken before whomever they took "little thugs" (his word not mine) they where asked why they did not have to be in school, and my FIL answered "we are Jewish, and today is a holiday... so we get the day off". In reply one of the officers announced that in fact it was a Jewish holiday, as he knew a family down the street from him, that was Jewish and in fact they where having a big get togather.

The powers that be pointed out that the boys really should be with their families for a holiday but they where free to head home.... As he headed to the door one of the police officers asked him did he know him, and what was his name again. My FIL answered truthfully Richard A. Kaiser, but we never use the A. because it stands for Adolph.....

 

[kozmic]

I'm not too keen on revealing too much about my juvenal misdeeds into the perpetuity of the internet here. I will say that I've had to stop mid-sentence more times over the years than I can remember when talking to my kids about my youthful antics.

Like; "When I was your age we used to....um, never mind". Or; "I remember we once hopped.....um, I forgot was I was saying". Or even; "You know, if you mix the two of those together you can...oh wait, I was thinking of something else"!

Between my kid's inquisitively mischievous stares and my wife's "I will rip your face off" glares I was always able to catch myself before completely revealing any of the incriminating behavior of my past.

I can't share many of the escapades of my youth with my kids (for a few more years anyway) and probably shouldn't share them here either! Nothing outrageous but perhaps best left unspoken and unrecorded.

 

[jaykellogg]

Got married.

 

[Coldshooter]

The components were a home O2 cylinder 3 lbs of FFF BP some waterproof fuse and a handy railroad bridge to toss it from. I never knew there were so many carp in that section of river till we saw them floating on their sides. It may have been a vision caused by the explosion but I always remember looking down and seeing the river bed as the water rushed back. That was about 50 years ago.

 

[Poodle Soup]

Freshman year of high school we pulled the spring out of a stapler and used it to launch a paper airplane. Almost took out the study hall attendants eye.

Fights with fireworks... .revolutionary war style. Stand in a line facing another group of friends standing in a line and shoot bottle rockets and roman candles at each other. On friend, if not for his glasses, would have lost an eye. Whistling bottle rocket hit his glasses and blew up on impact. Left bruises and scratches on his face.

Pro tip- spent roman candles make excellent bottle rocket tubes. And cigars are better than punks.

 

[joeintexas]

Ah the stories of M80s and cherry bombs bring back painful memories. My cousin and I blew up my grandma's washtub, put 4 or 5 cherry bombs under it and ran like crazy, blew the darn thing clear over the house and the bottom was gone! Would get inside old truck tires and roll down hill until we hit something that stopped us. How did we ever make it to adulthood is beyond me.

 

[mg357]

I said my first cuss word at age 7 My mother was 30 feet away and unfortunately she heard it.

 

[mjr]

I'm not too keen on revealing too much about my juvenal misdeeds into the perpetuity of the internet here.

Yep. Even 50+ years after the fact, there's a few things I'll just keep to myself. Just thinking about a couple of them makes me flinch even now.

On a milder note, like others here I "manufactured" my own crude black powder. It's hard to believe a 12- or 13-year-old could walk into a drug store and buy a jar of potassium nitrate and a bag of "flowers of sulfur" off the shelf, no questions asked.

I still have a small scar on my left arm from when, on a whim, I put a .22LR on a vise in the garage and hit it with a large ball-peen hammer. The noise was gratifying, the bullet embedded in the garage wall, and the case flattened out like a sheet of paper.

So I tried it again, and half an inch of brass case embedded itself in my arm, right at the base of the bicep. I pulled it out with pliers, let the wound bleed awhile to clean itself out a bit, and told no one about it. Fortunately no infection developed.

Good times! Sort of.

 

[REM 3200]

Stupid things I did as a kid?

I don't think the Mods and board rules will let me have a post that long. Some thing about to much bandwidth.

As a friend says,"Did you ever get hurt doing some thing smart?"

 

[foxeye]

Used to make hand grenades from baby food jars, water and rocks of calcium carbide. Shake and hold and make a wild ***ed guess how long it would take to build up pressure and then toss it. Tossing into a fire was always neat as it made for a huge black mushroom cloud. Sometimesw wee would add a fuse and just light it and run. Or like when I was in the military we would take a condom an fill it with Oxygen from the welding tank. Tie a sting to it and manuver it over a zippo lighter that was lit and setting on the ground. Use to make a nice bomb. That was all pretty harmless until we decided to also add in some acetylene to the oxygen in that condom and float it across a buring zippo. I knocked all the lights out of the motor pool, knocked everyone on their butts or backs, singed hair and eyebrows, and ws loud enough and big eough the unit though there wsa incomming rockets or mortars and called an alert. Lucky no schrapnel but lots of falling debri like florescent light bulbs etc.

 

[shouldazagged]

I had a friend who was a terribly twisted genius with a chemistry lab in his basement. In addition to good-quality nitroglycerin (don't ask!) he made mercuric fulminate, the explosive in blasting caps at the time. He would load it into gelatine capsules with a couple of BB's for weight and we'd shoot them from one of the old Wham-O Sportsman slingshots. They'd explode on contact with a hell of a bang. We were a mobile artillery force, spreading alarm and confusion among the populace.

We were also crazy as the proverbial outhouse rodent.

Worse in some ways were the telephone gags. By age fourteen I had an extremely deep bass voice--sounded about thirty on the phone--so I always played the "official".

I really don't think I want to say any more. Except that it still amazes me that I grew up to be a law-abiding citizen, without a prison record.