Kidhood. Adolescence?Best times? Favorite times? Photos?

[MurphOnMillerAve]

OK, I confess, at my age , I get nostalgic and like remembering my childhood and adolescence, with the population of interesting and good folk present and the occasions that were very notable, becoming lasting memories, decades later. What are some of your favorite and most memorable times from your youth?

Here are photos of a very favorite time, when I was out in the backyards (my friends and I played right through several yards, all in a row) playing football. I liked the tackling and rolling around part the best. There was something very enjoyable about getting dirty and smelling that grass once you were knocked flat.
Murph

[rogruth]

Murph,

I don't have pictures but I do have memories and I think many of them have been seen on MTJ in the past.
I'll wait until something really pushes me. Maybe. Who knows? You know it probably won't be long.

[v8vega]

I grew up in southern Oregon , our house was right at the edge of the forest in a rural area. Unknown how many miles of wild forest right behind us. Neighbor hood boys and me hiked in the forest all the time, we probably saw things no one else has ever seen or very few. There was a creek we played in too. We watched the loggers too. Back in those days they thought there was so many trees there was no thought to conservation. If they drove over 100 small trees with the bulldozer to get one big tree out so be it.

[MurphOnMillerAve]

There was just something wonderful (and I do believe I knew it at the time ) about growing up in that mill town suburban enclave of like-towns, wherein everybody knew each other and cared about each other. For real.
Did I ever tell ya that my mother had an arrangement with all the neighbors ( discovered only many years later by me) that whenever I would put down one of my noise-making instruments, they all had carte blanche to swipe them and discard/destroy them. No questions asked.
It reminds be of an inscription I saw stenciled on a boy's bedroom wall, seen in "National Geographic" magazine: Boy (n) : a noise with dirt on it. That sure summarizes my
boyhood.

[up148]

Yeah, and how many stupid things we did growing up that could have caused injury or death. My parents would have killed me if they knew only a fraction of the crap we did.

When I was 11-12 I had a friend who who took the broken engine off his doodlebug (remember those) to try and fix it and after pulling the cylinder off the block we decided to shoot the piston out the end of it like a canon, using a cherry bomb (it was around the 4th of July). We pointed it straight up in the air, blocking the cylinder with some bricks and fired it off. Went off with a loud bank, but we could see nothing in the sky and no piston to be found.....so assumed it must have disintegrated. While we're all standing around laughing and thinking of more stupid things to do, we hear a thud. Turned around and the piston is lying on the lawn about 15 feet from us in a 2-3" depression. It took maybe 10-15 seconds to come back to earth.

But, oh no, once wasn't stupid enough, so we tried it again. Only this time the cylinder slipped off the bricks and we shot the piston through his garage door. Luckily his parents were at work so there was no car in the garage. Yeahs, those were the good old days. Duh......

BH

[MurphOnMillerAve]

Yeah, and how many stupid things we did growing up that could have caused injury or death. My parents would have killed me if they knew only a fraction of the crap we did.

When I was 11-12 I had a friend who who took the broken engine off his doodlebug (remember those) to try and fix it and after pulling the cylinder off the block we decided to shoot the piston out the end of it like a canon, using a cherry bomb (it was around the 4th of July). We pointed it straight up in the air, blocking the cylinder with some bricks and fired it off. Went off with a loud bank, but we could see nothing in the sky and no piston to be found.....so assumed it must have disintegrated. While we're all standing around laughing and thinking of more stupid things to do, we hear a thud. Turned around and the piston is lying on the lawn about 15 feet from us in a 2-3" depression. It took maybe 10-15 seconds to come back to earth.

But, oh no, once wasn't stupid enough, so we tried it again. Only this time the cylinder slipped off the bricks and we shot the piston through his garage door. Luckily his parents were at work so there was no car in the garage. Yeahs, those were the good old days. Duh......

BH

I dunno, BH, ya seem like you were a perfectly normal kid for our neighborhood. That's a good adventure right there that you had.

However, my early-adolescence friends and I pro'ly came close to the (dubious) quality of your escapade. Ya see, also on one Fourth of July, my friends and I got a bit frisky with our firecrackers, too, esp. with one we had not seen firsthand previously. I think it was called (this was in the Pennsylvania 50's) an "ashcan," but I am not sure at all. It had the reputation of being referred to as being a "quarter stick of dynamite," but we all doubted that (to this day.) Well, I had the idea of trying to exploded one of them under an upturned empty metal garbage-can. KAAAAAABBBOOOOOON , indeed! Great percussion and great action - the can took-off straight upwards, about as high as the Poplar trees that bordered my yard. WOWoWOWeee! It scared the pimple-feeding candy-bars nearly right out of us, so that meant, of course, we just had to try it again. Right away. And we did. Another successful launch!!!!!!!!! However, the second can split apart upon landing. Then, my mother came out of the house to announce we'd shoot our eyes out or lose some other valuable part. So we desisted. But what a legend that 4th became in da'hood. She also took the destroyed can out of my allowance.

Murph
P.S.Now that I look back, I'm surprised one of us didn't think of sitting on the upturned can for the prospective ride. T'anksGod we didn't, huh.

[Mitch]

Growin' up on the Allegheny River hills, one of our favorite outings was to take Dad's hatchet, head out to the river hill, find a likely looking wild grape vine growing high up into the trees on the hill, cut it off, and swing out over the hill. At times, you could be 40 feet in the air, as the hills are quite steep. And sometimes, just when you were out there in space, the whole vine would come down outta' the tree, and you'd roll another 50 feet after you hit the ground. But we'd just get up, find another vine and do it again.
Another favorite was the carbide cannon. As a kid, many miners still had their carbide lamps that attached to their hardhats, and you could buy a pound of calcium carbide at the Freeport Hardware for a quarter. You take a one quart empty paint can, and with a nail, smack a single nail hole through the middle of the bottom of the can, put in 15 or 20 "rocks" of carbide and a little bit of water, seal the lid on the can and hold a finger over the nail hole as the pressure built up. (Acetylene gas). Hold the can out with two hands at arms length, and your buddy strikes a match under the nail hole. The explosion launches the can lid into the air, and it sails back down kinda like a UFO. Well, if a 1 quart can was good, a 1 gallon can must be much better. 1/4 pound of carbide, a pretty good shot of water, and plug that nail hole. I told my pal to hurry up and light it; the can was gettin' hot. The recoil from the explosion blew the can outta my hands into the dirt, never did find the lid, and the fireball blew off my eyebrows and lashes and some of the hair on the front of my head, along with all the hair off my arms. Ah, the good ol' days.

[rogruth]

Murph and Mitch,

Those activities were happening in my hometown in the 1940s, Ohio Valley near Wheeling.
I have live in other areas where nobody ever heard of these things. We had FUN!

[MurphOnMillerAve]

The best part for me was making friends. No time is wasted that makes people friends.

[E7]

You guys would enjoy stories by the late American humorist, Jean Shepherd, best known for "A Christmas Story" which was a compilation of some of his short stories.

https://search.yahoo.com/yhs/search;_yl ... mp=yhs-003

[Seaboard Air Line Fan]

Running around the neighborhood playing army, riding bicycles (behind the mosquito truck spraying DDT or whatever that was), playing baseball, not having a care in the world, being outside at all hours without the fear of somebody doing you harm.

I would not want to be a kid today, some of the things we did back in the 50's would get you arrested or shot now.

BobD

[rogruth]

BobD,
Some of the things we did could have gotten you arrested back then.

[up148]

Some of the things we did could have gotten you arrested back then.

Yes, but unless it was really, really bad, about the worst you would get might be the loco police officer scolding you or maybe taking you home to your parents. I was lucky enough to avoid the latter, but sure know about the former.

Was a train nut back then too, and always walking the tracks whenever we could and anticipating what kind of a train was coming when we'd seen a headlight a few miles up the road. When I was about 10, we waited in the weeds by the side of the track and threw "Mr. Softy" ice cream cones (knew better than to throw rocks) at the headlights of a passing SF freight. Engineer blew the horn and we ran home and hid, fully expecting the engineer to stop the train and come knocking on our door.

BH

[MurphOnMillerAve]

Crawling in and out and under and atop parked freight cars was part of my early adolescence , too. On one such occasion - the final one - a dear friend and I and one other friend climbed aboard an empty coal hopper in a dead-end RR yard at the bottom of a steep-sided U-shaped valley between Kennywood Park and Duquesne Place, Pennsylvania.

He slid down to one of the slightly opened hatches at the bottom and decided to open it farther and crawl-slide out through the dubious opening . Right at that moment , the whole parked line of cars got slammed into by a locomotive, far down the line. Roger, the slider's name, got his legs out quickly enough. Then he tried very hard to scramble up the rusty inside to our waiting and begging hands. He tried for three increasingly worried scrambles upward. The train began to depart.

One of us held the ankles of the other, enabling us to reach Roger's pleadings arms. Whoosssssh! He was OUT!!!! And we ran likehell outta there, not stopping until we reached the very top of that steep valley.

We never went back.

[rogruth]

That sounds like something I might have done in my youth but I am not that Roger.