+1

even better with BMX or MX, helmet at the least though

When I was a kid we played in rotating seasons, baseball all spring and summer, football all fall, hockey all winter.

The occasional squash/tomato fight in the farmers fields after harvest, brawl, bicycle race, sleigh riding or hiking day in the woods added spice

I look around and don't see any of that these days. What a shame:confused:

wow you just brought back my awesome memory of a PLUM fight we had as kids. PITS and all. no one ever gave eye protection a thought back then.

only thing mom was mad about what the stains in a good white shirt i happened to be wearing.

and hockey reminds me off falling thru the frozen creek every winter too. that always ended in having to stay in the rest of the day:(

They still have tomato fights in Spain. :D

Dragging little brother on a "big wheel" behind my minbike. Shooting arrows straight up in the yard then running for cover. Making pipe bombs. Making wood ramps for the bicycles. BB gun fights with the neighbors. Jumping bicycles into the pond. Sneaking out with the parents car at 13. Re-filling the neighbor kids dad's liquor bottles with water. Shooting about anything that moved with a BB gun. Riding Honda 50 to friends houses miles away all summer long. Getting washed off with the hose before being allowed into even the garage after playing in the mud. Snow skiing, sledding and tubing behind 3 wheelers, minibikes and horses. Jumping off of neighbors barn into leaf piles. Climbing trees. Building tree houses. Fishing. Horse**** fights. Tonka toys on the dirt pile.

Man, life as a kid was good!

there was a kid here that got stuck in a tree like 70 ft up and panicked. they called out the fire dept. TV helicopter covered the whole rescue. kid gets out of the tree and mom gives him a big hug on TV...
bet he got a major "time out" when he got inside;)

"you get stuck in that tree, you better get yourself down!"
heard that a few times:D

One of my fondest memories as a kid was living in an apartment complex (bunch of two-story townhomes about 4 to a building or so). When I was about 6 or 7, they started doing site preparation for a bunch of new buildings so there was essentially a huge vacant lot with a bunch of humongous piles of dirt, holes, trenches and occasionally large bulldozers and other construction equipment. This was right next to a patch of woods with a small creek. No fence. Pure paradise for kids. We'd literally get about 20-30 of us of all ages - boys, girls, whatever on opposite sides of the construction site lobbing dirt clods at each other. It was awesome. When they'd land they'd kind of blow up and make a cloud of dust or dirt so it looked like a grenade or something. Occasionally someone would (accidentally?) throw a rock but most often it was just fun.

Add to it the messing around in the woods, the stream and of course catching (often large) snakes and bringing them home. It was great stuff. Mom's worst nightmares.

Now you can't get within 50 feet of a construction site as an ADULT without proper badging, hardhats, etc.

As I recall the worst anyone ever got hurt was one kid got a black eye and another one got a cut on his head from a rock.

Hell at 40, this still sounds like fun:D

Sounds like you grew up in my neighborhood there, Tim. I'll add walking down the road as 10-12 year olds with real guns (.22's or shotguns) in our hands and having the cops just wave. "Hooky-bobbing" wherein one hides behind a hedge and runs out to grab the rear bumper of a passing car to get pulled along in the snow. Jumping bicycles off my uncle's barn roof into that leaf pile. Driving said uncle's tractor into town with half a dozen siblings and cousins on board (oldest being maybe 12) to re-supply for the family get-together because all of our parents were too drunk to make the trip. "Pig rodeos" at my German Opa's farm with my German cousins (boy would he get mad; his pigs were big and mean) and being forced to strip down naked - boys and girls - to get hosed down before we were even allowed back in the barn, much less the house. Having my best buddy's older brother flip me the key to his '68 Shovelhead and being challenged "if you can start it, you skinny little *****, you can ride it" (I was about 14) and dissappearing for the whole afternoon with no more "riding gear" than jeans and a tee shirt (he would've killed me when I got back, but he had a limp and I could run like hell in those days; and yes, we are still good friends). Shooting each other with "Polish cannons" made from PVC and launching tennis balls. Doing our level best (and succeeding all too often) to leave a "Voit tattoo" on our buddies' backs during our free-ranging recess combination tag/dodgeball games. Etc. etc....

Yeah, we had some injuries. Yeah, some even made the boys cry. The very worst even required "proffesional attention" beyond what the oldest kid there could manage. The very worst even required emergency room visits, and explanations from all involved. But we all survived; imagine that.

Yeah Jeff, sounds kind of like the same good times. We lived about 6-7 miles from the nearest small town which is now basically becoming a suburb of the nearest city, Toledo Ohio. In the 70's and early 80's as kids, we pretty much were on our own after school and during the summers by the age of around 10-12. I had good parents who made sure we kept up in school, but they let us have our fun! I distinctly remember riding my dirt bike 50 mph down the road standing on the seat riding a fifth gear wheely past my dad in the driveway wearing nothing but tennis shoes and cutoffs. He just smiled and gave me a thumbs up as I proudly rode by doing my best Evil Knievel imitation. :eek: :D

Smear the Queer, Kill the Man with the Ball, etc... and dodgeball were great fun when I was growing up. Hell I didn't even like American Football but I enjoyed that game.

I've not read "The War against Boys" but I think I will. My son is two now and I'm worried about the sissification of man in general, he'll have it worse with all the "Don't gender label him" folks talking in his ears...

how about a game of lawn darts?

Yeah we used to play semi chicken with lawn darts. My cousin was not able to adequately predict trajectory/landing.

We had an obsession with ramps big ramps, huge ramps. We would build them in the vacant lot with wood "borrowed" from construction sites. I remember jumping my bike so high and so far, I was a hero to the other kids, when I landed my spokes shot right through my tube and tire. Antoher kids frame cracked from the landing.

We would climb up saplings 3 at a time. One guy would lash himself to the sapling with a belt. We would all then lean back and forth and get the sapling to bend to the ground, then the 2 of us not lashed would let go and watch in hysterics as the last one would swing around like a rag doll.

When I was 5-8 years old and lived near Queens NY. We would have rock fights against the kids on the next block. I literally got my bell rung when a bog rock struck my head and I had a ringing sound in my ears for a few minutes later.

We once captured one of the kids on the next block and toutured him, forcing him to strip naked and stand in a bog puddle in my back yard. (I have no clue where my mom was, she was in the house but never looked outside to see what we were doing) We knew we were in big trouble when out captor escaped sans clothes running throught my yard naked and throught the neighborhood home. His mom came back with him naken raising all kinds of hell. I got grounded for that one, but that was the end of it, no lawyers or cops or family services.

When I moved out on the Island to the "country" then the fun really started. Same as above, Spring Summer, Baseball all the time, maybe some basketball but we were not really into it. Football and Hockey in the Fall and Winter. Hell, Hockey all year long we lived for hockey.

We had a Apple fight one summer (Neighborhood was old apple orched so there were lots of leftover trees) it escelated to a full on raid the neighborhood gardens veggie fight. I remember a friend pointing to the air and screaming "Squash!!" on top of his lungs. We all got into a LOT of trouble, we ruined a lot of gardens.

Its kind of cool, my neighborhood here in Florida is very quiet and my son runs off on the weekend a lot with his friends to go to the park and play. It makes me smile as I remember my childhood.

It's because of the fear of being sued.

Pathetic.

oh, all the good times with bike and snow ramps. we spent an entire summer builing a platform and 4 foot kicker for my neighbors back yard. he liked on a hill and had patio steps that went down into his backyard. so when it would snow we packed in the stairs real tight and set up our 6 foot platform/lead in ramp on top of the stairs, then hit the kicker at the bottom. You would end up 10 feet in the air, and land right on ur as*.

that and the glory days of fireworks. i still light them off all the time but the best times were when i was 10 and my dad finally gave me a lighter and let me do them myself

Ah yeah, the good ol' days. Playing by the river, riding bikes, minibikes, motorcycles, horses, shooting BB guns, pellet guns, rifles, shotguns, throwing rocks, walnuts, darts, rat traps, seeing how high we could jump out of a tree without breaking something, staying the hell away from that crazy portagee Louie, fishing, hunting,

It looks like the sotries here from most of us are very similar.

Burnin' - Does every neighborhood have one crazy neighbor or what?

Thats funny, we had a crazy lady in our neighborhood in by the City and a crazy man out on the Island.

The crazy lady would dump hot water on the sidewalk in an effort to stop us from riding our sleds there.

How times have changed... In Palm Bay Florida in 1987 a neighborhood crazy snapped when some kids were tormenting him, he got in his car drove to the local grocery store and started shooting eveyone. I think when the smoke settled there were 6 dead.
#3 on this list:
http://www.cchr.org/index.cfm/7818


I wonder what our kids will look back at when they grow up and reminisce about?

How cool it was to have 1/2 the neighborhood on X-Box live and how Billy had the most kills ever when they were playing Halo or Counterstrike?

Ah, the requiset crazy old man of the neighborhood. We all lived in fear of an old guy that no one ever saw, but all the older kids said was crazy. Certain doom if ever caught in his yard, according to them. Well, me and my buddy were caught shooting sparrows in his yard with our pump-up air rifles. He hollared that he knew exactly who we were, and he was calling the cops and our parents if we didn't surrender. Well, several hours and several dozen cookies later, we were much better shots. He sat us down at his picknic table and gave us a shooting lesson as he stuffed us full of his wife's cookies. We were sworn to secrecy by the time we left. Turns out most of the neighborhood kids, particularly the older ones, had been "sworn to secrecy". Once we all figured it out, we spent a lot of time at his place. Just a friendly old grandpa whose own grandkids lived too far away.

There was a crazy old man in our neighborhood I became friends with too, and he hated my friends. I was about the only kid at 10-12 years old farting around with small engines, building a mini bike etc... When I would ride my bike past crazy Mr. Wilsons house I saw a lot of bicycle and lawnmower stuff. I could not resist, I walked down his driveway and introduced myself. I was as polite as I could be. He was kind of rude to me at first but warmed up and we became buddies. I would hang out in his garage all the time sometimes helping him.

I saved my paper route money to buy parts from him for my mini bike, he sold them to me very cheap, I never could have built it without him and his parts. If I came around with some of my friends he was mean again, he really didn't like kids but, for whatever reason, he liked me.