I can remember playing in the sandbox all day long - just good ol dirt, full of every bacteria going I'm sure. Making mud pies with insects in them and trying to get my little brother to eat it :p Climbing trees, riding my bike around the block by myself and without a helmet before I even got rid of my training wheels.

I am so glad I posted this thread. It has been a delight to me to read all the things you all have said.

I hope to see a lot more postings. :)

We were pretty resilient, weren't we?

I remember walking the railroad tracks to get many places. We knew the train schedules, the comings and goings of them. One day we got quite the surprise when we were in the middle of a very long trestle and no time to go back, nor forward. We climbed down the beams and held on for dear life as the train roared and rumbled over us. I was so scared that day I refused to cross any trestle for a long time afterwards.

We also used to put pennies and nickles on the rails and go search for the flattened thing after the train passed.

What a life!

LOL

We used to climb up on the town water tower :eek:

We would drive as fast as possible and go over "thrill hill" - basically a one lane road with a steep hill that was peaked on top so when you went fast over it in a car, you "lost" your stomach. If we had ever met anyone coming up the other side - well that would have been the end of us all.

I rode bikes everyday and motorcycles too - no helmet

Of course, no seatbelts

I swam in the farm pond and the stock tank

I ran around the farm with all the animals, farm equipment, etc. completely unsupervised

I left the house in the morning and came home in the evening.

hmm all i can say is i was really adventurous, my friends at school and i would swing really high on the school swings, we would pump each other which is basically where one girl sits on the swing normally and the other stands on it and and makes it go really high. We would do swing competitions, flip off of them, some have fallen off them while they were in the air but i never fell luckily lol i was pretty much a monkey, always climbing on my walls, learning gymnastics and flips on my own, jumping off high cliffs in Puerto Rico into shallow rivers full of rocks. i dunno we were pretty adventurous lol

I wanna know what you guys did all day! Did you just leave your house and do whatever came into your heads? Or did you plan stuff? Or...what?

What was it like? :)

I don't remember ever having a "plan" for a summer day. We would just take off and go where ever we felt like. We used to get my older brother to drive us to a farm that had a swimming pool (actually a gravel filled hole). It was a dairy farm and we would buy our milk from them straight from the cow. No pasteurization for us. It was half cream and delicious!
It took me FOREVER to get used to store-bought milk when we moved away!

We didn't even have seatbelts....had never heard of them. I rode bikes barefoot without a helmet. I walked by myself to a little grocery store with a nickle for candy. I also played with the mercury in thermometers. Went barefoot everyplace....even to the stores. Ate stuff out of my grandma's garden without washing it.:eek: When I got older I used to take the car out on country roads and drag race. We swam in strip pits. We went into vacant houses at night to scare each other. We played tag with our cars in hayfields. And 60 years later I am still here.

What a fun thread!! When I was a teen, we used to drive to local rivers and lakes and run out to the middle of bridges and jump the bridges or cliffs to the water below. The rush was getting out half way across the bridge before the cops showed up and of course the jump itself. In fact, at 20, my last jump ever, I jumped a bridge and hit a shallow patch you couldnt see. I had to be rescued by a fire boat then transported by ambulance and was in a wheelchair for two months. Now I hear news stories all the time of local teens being killed there from jumping thaqt bridge because you cannot see the land and rocks below. It looks deep and in the middle of the river you would think its deep! I think of my nephew now entering his teens and just cringe at the thought of him doing crazy things!!!

We played in that mosquito truck spray....probably straight DDT.

Your day started like this...you got up...your mother said...it's pretty. go outside and play. You were allowed to come back for lunch...but she probably really preferred that you didn't. You just had to go in when the street lights came on. If someone had kidnapped you back then...they would've had a 10-12 hour head start before your parents ever worried...and that worry started out as MAD....cause you were late

Then you did whatever....played kick the can, hide and go seek, rover red rover....or made up games, we built forts, dug tunnels, swam in the cathole, played in a farmer's field of corn (he probably loved that), rode bikes, rode skateboards, rode rollar skates...rode anything with wheels and some without. There wasn't anything to do INSIDE....cept your mother watching as the world turns....:rolleyes: The fun was OUTSIDE.

One time C had a cookout for her birthday....we taught the kids...hide and go seek. They had NEVER played this game before...and talked about how fun it was for years.

I am only 26 but I did some daring things when I was a kid. I used to climb to the very top of trees to hide from my parents when in trouble. I would climb so high that the top of the tree would start tipping to one side. We used to hook a sled to the back of our fourwheeler and get pulled around our yard around trees and all. I have swam with sharks and barracudas in the ocean in Belize and absolutely love bungee jumping. My older brother and I used to get on top of our bunk beds and jump off to the floor below. And on the same fourwheeler in the summer we would see how high we could jump it without helmets on. I learned how to ride a 2 wheel bike without training wheels and without a helmet and never wore seatbelts growing up. But for the sake of people that don't wear one, the seatbelt saved my and my sisters' lives and I always wear one now and so do all 3 of my kids.

OMG...this is so funny. Yes, we played with the mercury from thermometers. I can say that we're not brain damaged, but all three of us kids are still alive. I was a deprived child and never had a bike but my brother did. One day he let me borrow it but told me if I got a flat tire he would kill me. Guess what, I got a flat. HaHa brother, that's what you get for having a bike and I didn't. Not fair as is life sometimes. We also roamed all over my Grandparents ranch with no supervision. We'd go into the bull pens, put my little sister on the back of baby calves and she's fall off into a ditch of water or on a cow pile, play in the fields being irrigated in 12 inches of mud (e-coli???), ride across the top of the barn on the hay rakes then drop down to the loose hay. The list goes on. In grade school we'd walk three blocks down to the mall and spend the afternoon there. I think the mall was one of the first in the nation and it's still there but is now covered. Our parents would drop us off at the movie theater and for 25 cents we got to see a double feature plus cartoons. We thought that was so cool of mom and dad but now I realize they were just getting rid of us.:D

I guess since the statute of limitations has run on some of this stuff it's ok to tell....

Naw, I won't tell you the bad bad stuff....

At 10 climbed a huuuuuggge water tower out in the country and was too scared to come down, had to wait until someone missed me.

Well when I was 13 we pushed the neighbor's Cadillac out of the driveway and half way down the street so they couldn't hear us crank it...and drove around all night...

Water skied behind boats going as fast as 60 miles per hour...just trying to sling one another up in the marsh....


Drinking and driving in boats and in cars... Every car was a party.

I won't tell you anymore...all that was before 16.

I'm an angel now, that God let me live through those terrible teen years.

Oh I thought it best not to share the incriminating years. ;)

I love these stories! Keep them coming...I was an only child, so I didn't have partners in crime, and I'm 26, so I didn't get to experience the "good ol' days" that everyone writes about...I had a bike helmet and didn't drive until I'd been through drivers' ed when I was 15. Boo.

I did eat all kinds of fruits and veggies straight out of the garden without washing them, and I walked barefoot anywhere I could-usually only within 5 blocks of my house. I dyed my hair pink with red Kool-Aid, then ran off to a friend's house so she wouldn't find out....When I did come home it was raining, so I came in and it had run down my face and I scared my mom so bad she thought I was bleeding.