Aaahhhhh Youth

[Shaun @ Tru6]

Taking a cue from the lead paint thread, what defined youth?

67 - 76, lived out in the country in CT, couldn't see your nearest neighbor.
Tonka Trucks, GI Joe, running forever through the woods with 4 dogs chasing a rabbit, Legos, Scooby Doo, jumping off huge swingsets, kickball, fishing in LI Sound, blowing up dogfish (little sharks) with firecrackers, crabbing, Michelle Rhiebold, Lisa Perusi, Sue Cummings.

76 - 82, suburban MN. dirt bikes, Atari, hunting, camping on a sandbar on the St. Croix river every weekend with half the block, WWII models, assistant trainer for the football team, kick the can, Roseanne Silva.

[CJFusco]

I also grew up in CT. When we moved into our neighborhood when I was 5, there were only 3 other houses on the street, and our back yard had woods going back for almost a mile. By the time I moved out, there were houses within 50 feet of where our back yard ended (it wasn't a problem because our back yard was about the 2/3 the size of a football field). CT is almost completely developed now, except for the Litchfield Hills and the "quiet corner"

But yes, my childhood was spent running and biking through the woods; I remember playing "Star Wars" with yellow wiffle ball bats at the age of 9 and making ramps for our mountain bikes at 12. It's too bad that many of today's kids spend all day playing computer games - video games, for us, were just for rainy days.

[oldE]

Early 60s. Jumping on the bikes and being gone all day with no one worrying. (All the mothers were in contact anyway and knew where we were and what we were up to.) Hours in the swimming hole. Lying on an inner tube next to the riverbank under the raspberry canes, picking and eating raspberries.

Les

[Rick Lee]

Even in congested NJ we were throwing rocks into the river to scatter the snakes before jumping on the rope and swinging into the water. In TX I was shooting the pellet gun with Dad in the backyard and shooting the big guns at the range with him from about age five. Fishing every day in our johnboat in the pond behind the house, shooting cans with bb guns, burning trash, blowing up everything with firecrackers, riding bicycles everywhere, for hours and hours with NO helmet. Those days are long gone.

[peppy]

My mother used to kick us out of the house after breakfast, she would call us in for lunch (we had better hear her) and then it was back outside. Want a drink, there was an outside spigot, had to go to the bathroom go outside (girls we allowed inside to go). They were the best of times.

[legion]

In SoCal, we would dissapear for hours into the flood control district land behind our house. It was like a park between Baseline and and Canyon View in La Verne.

In Naperville, my subdivision (Brookwood Trace) was still very much under construction. All of the top soil had been scraped up and put into two huge (like 75' tall) piles. They were sled hills in the winter and BMX bike courses in the summer. There was also forest in the subdivision. We would raid the scrap piles from the houses under construction and build forts...

[Tobra]

Rode the bicycle everywhere, BB gun battles at the gravel pits down at the end of Arden way by the river. The put me in the house for punishment.

[Superman]

On the edge of a small logging town. My back yard was endless and uninhabited. Bikes and BB guns. It is very hard to catch a fish with your hands, but you can sometimes hook them by the gills. BB guns don't kill gophers or tree squirrels but can stun the heck out of a chipmunk and a lucky shot can kill a small bird. Many many similar wisdoms were learned, too many to list here but......

Here's one in keeping with the danger theme. The country road ran about three miles or so up the hill. Windy and narrow and fairly steep with woods on both sides. Between the time of a fresh snow and two days later when the truck would spread sand or gravel on it, it was an unbeatable sled course except for one thing. The cars. The solution was elegant. Sled at night.

[Dan in Pasadena]

No problem with reminiscing as long as you know what it is. Classic "old people" rant is worrying about the "moral decline of our youth", "things were always better in the old days". Well, yes and no...maybe, but they're over, we ain't (unfortunately) going back.

Having said that, born end of 1954. Childhood in little suburban Whitter, CA. birthplace of Richard Nixon. For me, childhood was about 1961 or 62 to 1972. Coming in summer nights when the street lights came on...but begging and getting let go again to play hide-and-seek (and check out one of the neighbor's hot young wives that was a bar maid at a local dive). We were peeping toms, I admit it. Collecting "polliwogs" in the local drainage ditch before they were concreted. I HATE to think of the $hit and junk I was wading through with skinned knees. The muck we reached into with bare hands to catch crawdads, wiped our hands off on our dirty shorts and reached into a lunch sack for a snack - eek! My street was a long downhill cul-de-sac crossing a through-street. We'd race our bicycles down the hill and across the intersection to the cul-de-sac on the other side. We should have been killed multiple times; never even a close call, no one standing lookout, we'd just haul azz down the hill and hope for the best! Incredibly stupid.

[Nostril Cheese]

I used to tie a shovel to my BMX bike and go find an empty field. Then I'd build jumps

[HardDrive]

Riding BMX bikes, building forts in the woods, getting cornholed by Father McMurray...normal kids stuff.

[Uber-fanatic]

Sledding has been mentioned a few times...having grown up in upstate NY, in the boondocks between Rochester & Buffalo, had my share of snow (hence the reason I moved to LA in '89). Two best hills in town had the requisite dangers necessary for true sledding nirvana...one was a cemetery, providing the headstone obstacle coarse; the other was a couple story severe drop with long runoff that ended in substantial creek...if you had a really good run, it unfortunately meant a quick trip home before hypothermia set it...man, what a great time that was!

[Porsche-O-Phile]

When I think of "youth" I think of being a kid up to about age 11 (1970s) hunting in the forests & swamps behind the complex where we lived trying to find snakes - preferably large or poisonous ones.

Also there was a little stream back there we used to have fun trying to dam up & re-route. Maybe I should have been a civil engineer.

And when they were building new units all the neighborhood kids would sneak into the construction site after hours and whip dirt clods and rocks from the excavation at each other. Somehow nobody ever got hurt. That was fun.

[Rick Lee]

Who's got that email that went around comparing 1957 to 2007? It was hilarious, sad and true.

[Seric]

Originally Posted by HardDrive

Riding BMX bikes, building forts in the woods, getting cornholed by Father McMurray...normal kids stuff.

You too?

I thought I was the only one *sob*