Favorite childhood toy.

[BajaGringo]

I remember when I was a kid they had cap guns and you could buy the rolls of caps. We would carefully cut out the caps until we had several hundred and stuff them into the empty barrel of an old pen. We would make a fuse out of paper towel by tightly rolling a thin strip and dipping it into cooking oil.

Oh what fun...

 

[Katie H]

Omigosh, Baja. I'd forgotten about cap guns. Even though I'm a girl, I grew up in a neighborhood where I was one of the only two girls where there were lots of boys.

One of our favorite things to do was to separate the cap "circles" as you did and pound the thunder out of them on a piece of cinder block with a hammer.

I can't tell you how many times my daddy yelled at me for not being able to find his hammer. I still remember the smell of those escapades.

 

[Uncle Bob]

MMMmmmmmmm Loved the smell of the caps...

 

[BajaGringo]

Today parents would be horrified if their 7 or 8 year olds could walk into a store and buy cap guns, model glue or spray paint. All things that we cuold and did buy as kids.

Amazing

 

[AMSeccia]

Holy cow, I can almost SMELL the cap gun! Sad thing was I never could get more caps (no $$). That one brought back memories. I'm not sure all parents would freak about cap guns. Afterall, paintball guns are very popular, so are those foam pellet guns.

Boy things sure are different, aren't they? I never thought I'd hear myself say that.

 

[AMSeccia]

Leaves work the best.....
So I've heard.

Oh my ... another flashback! I remember doing this with Dentyne wrappers (wierd!)

 

[GB]

MMMmmmmmmm Loved the smell of the caps...

We used to say they smelled like "dinner"

I remember popping them by scraping our thumb nails across them. Good times!

 

[Claire]

Mom used to joke that I wore my dolls out. I just loved them, from baby dolls of my early years to the earliest Barbies.

I hated games, but loved color crayons and pencils and paints.

My all time favorite doll was what I called my "hair permanent doll"; a large doll with long hair who came with a beauty parlor chair, hair curlers, etc.

I have a history of bad luck with toys, especially dolls. All of my Christmas presents were stollen from me at a refueling stop in the Azores when I was 3. Then my two old dolls were stollen from my storage area when I was in my twenties.

BOoo Hooo.

 

[Chief Longwind Of The North]

We used to say they smelled like "dinner"

I remember popping them by scraping our thumb nails across them. Good times!

We did that too. Occasionally though, if you did it wrong, the powder could get trapped under a thumbnail and give you a good burn.

I used to tape a strip accross my bb-catcher bullseye and shoot them with my bb gun from about 20 yards away. Maybe that's how I got to be a pretty good shot with rifles.

You don't want to know what we did with firecrackers. I never told my kids about those adventures and shenanigans. Think of dark summer nights, with arrows flying staight up, fircrackers with lit fuses tied to the arrow shafts, and not knowing where that arrow would land. Hey, we were kids, indistructable and immortal.

Seeeeeeya; Goodweed of the North

 

[abjcooking]

trampoline
balance beam
basket ball arcade game
kinda like life size leggos, but they were tubes and slates that fit together. I liked to make a house out of it and make the roof into a slide.

 

[elaine l]

We used to hit the caps with rocks.

Loved Barbie, Midge, Ken and the whole gang.
Baby dolls, Jane West doll, dolls, dolls, dolls.

 

[buckytom]

We did that too. Occasionally though, if you did it wrong, the powder could get trapped under a thumbnail and give you a good burn.

I used to tape a strip accross my bb-catcher bullseye and shoot them with my bb gun from about 20 yards away. Maybe that's how I got to be a pretty good shot with rifles.

You don't want to know what we did with firecrackers. I never told my kids about those adventures and shenanigans. Think of dark summer nights, with arrows flying staight up, fircrackers with lit fuses tied to the arrow shafts, and not knowing where that arrow would land. Hey, we were kids, indistructable and immortal.

Seeeeeeya; Goodweed of the North

ok, this is getting kinda weird, i admit it.

we used to do all of those things.

i remember those under-the-nail burns from scraping caps. what about finding the few un-exploded firecrackers from a spent pack on the morning of july 5th, with really short fuses? how many of those went off in your hand and gave you "fred flinstone fingers"?
my mom never had to wake me up early that day, and she never knew why.

ozzy practiced a lot with the bb guns. he put a bb between my toes once, right through the top of my sneaker. he was trying to wing my foot after i sat sat down in front of him in his room, and put my feet up blocking the tv. i remember feeling something hot between my big toe and (whaddya call the index toe? it's not like you point with it...) the next one. i thought i had a bug in my sock, so i freaked out hopping around. he thought he really hurt my foot because he pumped the bb gun so many times.

and what about "percussive bat hunting"? in a large field surrounded by woods, using a wrist rocket to launch larger ordinance into the sky (cherry bombs, m-80's, etc.) and watch the bats dive on it. if you had nerve and waited long enough on the fuse, it would detonate about 40 or 50 feet overhead, just as a bat dove in. the stunned bats would drop to the ground, and we'd run up to it with flashlights and sticks, poking away and examining der fledermaus until it woke up and arose "like a bat outta he11" through our circle. we screamed and ran, and then started over.

ahhhh, good times.

 

[Maverick2272]

First a bicycle, then a moped. We lived 12 miles outside of town, it was the only way to get into town to play. Got a 22 carbine when I was 14 and a shotgun when I was 15, used em to hunt. Never played with guns or treated them with disrespect.
Dad's gun powder, that was another story. Me and a friend really got into making home made RPG's and bombs. Blew up a cement silo (it was old to begin with) by the time we were thru (don't tell Homeland Insecurity!). My friend even took a chunk out of his leg when his RPG jammed and went off. Made the Des Moines Register, and he blamed it all on McGuyver!
I think I used up all my Karma and luck just getting out of childhood alive...

 

[Saphellae]

I played Monopoly against my stuffed animals.

I always won.

 

[Chief Longwind Of The North]

...and what about "percussive bat hunting"? in a large field surrounded by woods, using a wrist rocket to launch larger ordinance into the sky (cherry bombs, m-80's, etc.) and watch the bats dive on it. if you had nerve and waited long enough on the fuse, it would detonate about 40 or 50 feet overhead, just as a bat dove in. the stunned bats would drop to the ground, and we'd run up to it with flashlights and sticks, poking away and examining der fledermaus until it woke up and arose "like a bat outta he11" through our circle. we screamed and ran, and then started over.

ahhhh, good times.

Never did the bats. There weren't enough of them flying in the night skies in the gravel pits. Now if I'd gone over to the cemetary at night, there were lot of bugs winging through the air. I would have had a better chance.

But we did shoot at the cliff swallows that made their nests at the top of the gravel pits. We'd stomp on the ground above the pits and they'd come out dive-bombing us. It was uncanny the way they could just dodge the bb's at will.

We did have to hide, tuck, and run in the cemetary though for lighting off M-80's at night. My partner in crime was the son of the cemetary caretaker. His Dad came out with a truck and spotlight looking for "the maniac shooting up tombstones with a shotgun". A busy-body neighbor had called him and told him that story. We didn't get caught. Those headstones made great places to duck behind when the spotlight came too close. We headed for the woods, made a quick trip westward for a half-mile to the next road, and then walked back to the house as if we were just walking back from town, a 5-mile walk that we made frequently in the summer. Hitch-hiking wasn't so dangerous back then.

BT, we've got to hook up by phone and exchange stories, or open another thread for those youthful adventures. I'm still amazed at how close our lives mirror each other, and with both of us even having the same birthday. It's like you're my other half, just as mischiveious, and hair brained. But I got the looks. Sorry 'bout that bro.

Seeeeeeeya; Goodweed of the North