Shooting off fireworks -- heavy-duty ones, that is --on the beach in Texas. Dad did the big ones, but we all participated. We thought we were being quite safe by virtue of the fact we followed the directions and didn't do 'bright ideas' like dropping them into trash cans or tying them to small animals. As an adult I live in the North, where many people have a trepidation about fireworks that seems very overblown. Most people do have all 10 fingers, though, so.

There were these wildflowers that used to grow on our front lawn in the spring and summer at my childhood home in San Jose, CA; the flowers were yellow with long, slender stems. The neighborhood kids would pick the flowers and suck the juices out of the stems, since the fluid was half-sweet-half-bitter and perfectly satisfying after a long day of jumping off the second story of the tree house and trying to land on each other to cushion our fall.

Looking back, those flowers were probably full of the weedkiller my parents used to spray in an attempt to get rid of them.

Also, I imagine jumping off at 6-foot treehouse and using our friends as makeshift mattresses wasn't very safe, either.

My mom had a little ball of mercury in a jar. Sometimes my brother and I would take it out of the jar and push it around on the kitchen table.

My dad worked for the phone company in NYC. He was always bringing home mercury (from broken relays) for me to play with. I lost count of the number of blobs I lost down in the basement. But that's only part of my story.

In Cub Scouts, my Pinewood Derby racer was weighted with mercury. We drilled holes in the car, filled them with mercury and capped them with Plastic Wood. It was easier to work with than those lead pieces the other kids had.

It turns out that piling a dozen kids in the back of a pick up is considered unsafe these days. (Kids these days don't know how bad they have it.)

I used to run at full speed along the top of a tall wall that separated our property from a big, deep creek on the other side. Why this never made my parents (or me, for that matter) nervous is beyond me.

I built a spud gun in high school. The first version blew the rear cap off when I fired it one. The combustion chamber was a piece of elbow pipe, so the cap missed my head by a couple of inches.

My parents had no problem with it until the police took notice.

Jumping off the roof of someone else's garage onto their trampoline when they weren't home -- never did find out whose property we spent all those afternoons on.

Pickups! When I was between five and ten years old, one of my greatest pleasures was to ride in the back of my grandfather's pickup, standing up, grasping the roll bar and looking over the cab.

Eating hotdogs cut into coins. Eating yogurt (as a toddler). Actually, probably everything I at before the age of five would make someone panic now.

Backyard wrestling. With a ratty, rolled-out sleeping bag for a mat. Mimicking all the moves we saw on TV: suplexes, body slams, pile drivers. Just like the pros -- only we did it for real. And it hurt. But no broken bones!

Oh tons of stuff. Swimming unsupervised in deep deep waterholes, riding our bikes on country back roads where trucks would go past at 110km/h, only a metre away, the jump off the roof onto trampoline thing that sonofslim mentioned. Lots more.

Why is eating yogurt as a toddler bad?

I typed "yogurt", I meant "honey" (the problem is botchulism, actually, honey isn't pasteurized or something like that).

On our pilgrimage to Medina, my dad (who was waiting for my mom outside the grand mosque) asked me to go inside and see what was taking her so long. I, like the dutiful son I am, went inside and found her almost immediately, by noticing her abaya from the back. My dad, now worrying at what he’d done (I was only five or six at the time), panicked at the thought of me being lost in a sea of black burqas, searching for my mom, and him not being able to do anything about it since men aren’t allowed to enter that part of the structure. Long story short, I came out a few minutes later, after my mother had finished saying her prayers (she had the sense to not let me go back outside, in case my father had moved from his initial place), which he had—he was making rounds of the mosque—and had hailed down a police van by the time we’d stepped outside.

I used to go off all kinds of places on my own in the school holidays when I was 8, 9 years old and no questions were ever asked by my parents about where I went or what I did. Usually I'd just walk for about three miles to this place where there was a park with swings, and where some kids from my school went. I'd hang around the fringes all day, hoping that people who saw us might think I was with friends. Then, when it was dark and the park gates were about to be locked, I'd walk three miles home again. I did that every week day during the summer holidays one year. These days kids don't seem to walk anywhere, and certainly not alone.

the flowers were yellow with long, slender stems.

Yumm, honeysuckle! I'd forgotten about that. The ones we used to gather around were wild (aka un-pesticided) though.

Pinewood Derby racer

We used to put two nails in the street and run some fishing line between them. Then we'd hollow out a hole in the back of the derby cars and add a couple of eyelet screws to the bottom. A model-rocket engine would go in the hole and the fishing line was fed through the eyelets. Rocket powered race cars on the streets! Once the fishing line broke and the car went flying into the windshield of an actual car coming up the street. It swerved, but didn't crash. We ran.

(Kids these days don't know how bad they have it.)

Exactly. How I sometimes wish my boys would just go off with their friends somewhere and get into stuff, instead of just just sitting around the house/tv/videogame all the time. Go on, I want to worry about where you are sometimes. (I'm sure this will change during teenage years.) (On preview, like essexjan said.)

How about making ramps? We were forever taking pieces of plywood and planks from building projects and making bike and skateboard 'jumps' out of them. I cringe at the memory of some of the more spectacular wipeouts, which would surely kill me today.

We would run in the the cloud of DDT sprayed by the anti-mosquito-fogging truck to keep them from biting us.

The list is huge. Highlights include:
Match rockets
Playing with mercury
Playing with the chemistry set
Loading up match heads in .22 shells, crimping them shut and hitting them with a hammer until they exploded
Making a bobsled run with banked corners
Playing with a bow and arrow unsupervised

The way merry-go-rounds and see-saws have disappeared from the playgrounds leads me to think those must've been pretty dangerous. Sure got my share of bruises, scrapes, and vertigo from them, but I was a clumsy kid (besides, vertigo was part of the fun). My daughter tells me swings and monkey bars might be the next to go.

There used to be these roundabouts in playgrounds in the UK, shaped like a spiderweb, with rings of increasing size, three or four, on a sort of hub, out to the largest one, which was probably around 4ft diameter. The ride was raised about 3ft off the ground. The idea was to spin the wheel very, very fast and not fall off. If you were a wuss (as I was) you sat in one of the inner rings, but the brave kids sat on the outer ones and tried not to be flung onto the concrete by centrifugal force.

i grew up on a farm so we played daily (unsupervised) with thousand pound hooved animals of uncertain temperament. the neighbours had hogs and cattle; we had horses. i rode horses unsupervised from about age six; mom was a single working mom and i was a latchkey kid. i had all sorts of adventures cos i was stubborn enough to do things like saddle up and go out on the craziest semiferal nutcase in the barn instead of my placid pony. which was expressly verboten but what was mom gonna do about it from fifty miles away in the age before cellphones?

amateur ballistics experiments, check. including but not limited to: spudguns, fireworks, homebrew rocket launchers, hillbilly flamethrowers (WD-40 can & a match), gasoline, pipe bombs, blowing up aerosol cans in the trash pile¹ and the list goes on.

no parental supervision; soon's we'd get up on a weekend/holiday day we'd disappear over the horizon for hours with our only limiter being 'be back by dark/for dinner!' we'd ride minibikes (leetle tiny motorcycles that'd do about fifty mph) in flip flops, shorts and no helmets. we did tons and tons of stupid shit that nobody ever raised an eyebrow at.

probably the most notably dumb was what we called our 'mountain dew plunge' which involved riding hellbent for leather down a steep ravine trail on our crappy department store / handmedown bikes. right before you'd go off a ledge into rocks, there was a tarzan vine (grapevine) that you'd grab and swing out over the creek. the bike would tumble off the ledge and you'd plunge into the swimming hole. in theory. this worked okay until the tarzan vine finally gave way and brought down half the tree on my best friend's little brother, who broke his wrist in the fall and was damn lucky not to break his neck. did we learn from this? no, of course not. two weeks later we were out there swinging off a rope instead.

¹i'm sure you can just imagine what a handful of bored pyromaniacal twelve-year-olds, a litre of gasoline, a few cans of hairspray and some rudimentary bunker material (shipping pallets) can get up to when told to 'go burn trash'.

Walking in the woods alone.

Riding in the back of pickup trucks.

Bicycling alone on the road near my house when I was young.

Riding in cars with no seat belts (this was before they were mandatory; I'm showing my age.

The playground babyification actually pisses me off a little.
people wonder why kids are overweight nowadays? I know increased fat consumption is part of it, but it's not as if kid's diets where terribly good for quite awhile. I know ice cream, soda, candy etc where a major staple during certain parts of my childhood and yet until I was ~26 I've been thin as a rail.

I'm not sure I did anything safe in my childhood. We jumped off balconies and rode bikes without helmets in traffic and also had the "be back by dinner!" form of parental supervision. I spent hours alone in the woods wherever we lived and one time when we lived on the beach I hopped in a canoe and started paddling out into Long Island Sound. I got to an island probably about 3 or 4 miles out and stayed there for the rest of the day and then paddled back. I was 11. Nobody had missed me. They didn't miss me the day I climbed the cliffs, either, and my St. Christopher medal fell off into the rocks & surf below and I looked down and thought "Holy shit, you know what, I could actually die right now." But I didn't. And I survived rolling inside a tractor trailer tire we found in the marsh down a steep hill into traffic, and riding a skateboard down a steep hill into traffic and sledding down, you guessed it, and into - traffic. And skating literally on thin ice and swimming naked and unsupervised and all those sorts of things. I just had to be home by dinner, was all, and usually I was.

So I've let my kids do all those things much to the horror and chagrin of many other parents and I'm lucky and my kids have been fine, although some of the stories my son tells when he thinks I'm not really paying attention are utterly hair raising and they involve steep hills and traffic. My kids ride the city buses by themselves and take themselves where they want to go and hang out outside and ride bikes and go camping and pet strange dogs and so on and so forth and I think, although I might be wrong, that that is called life, and yeah, it's dangerous, and the dangerous parts are often the most fun. And I still go hiking alone and sailing alone and swimming alone and I'm still here.

Oh and hey, my 5th grade science teacher passed a ball of mercury around the class! We all got to play with it!

My mom let us play with the ball of mercury once when the thermometer broke. She cautioned us about it, but it was so cool.

people wonder why kids are overweight nowadays?

It's because of all the anitsmoking programs at school.

Ha, sorry, missed the first comment, JanetLand!

Good god, I think that I did every one of those things mentioned above. Our parents had no idea where we were, what we were doing, or who we were with. It's sort of amazing that I made it to adulthood with all my digits, limbs, eyes and most of my brain cells and still able to father a child. Over the years I burnt myself, shocked myself, almost poisoned myself, almost drowned falling through thin ice, got hit by a car, wrecked sleds, ripped the back of my scalp open falling against the corner of a TV set, wrecked bicycles, wrecked skateboards, got black eyes and busted lips in fights, put a rusty nail through my foot (twice), broke my finger, and the kicker: had to have my balls sown back into the sack after falling out of a tree onto a post. Ouch.

And I was the quiet nerdy book reading kid on the block! Some of my friends were really crazy.

When my older brothers were little, shoe stores used x-ray machines to measure foot size. An x-ray machine of some sort was also used to kill ringworm. One of my brothers, who's a doctor in his sixties now, blames these early exposures to x-ray for a bout of thyroid cancer he had as an adult (he's fine now, luckily).

My sledding technique was pretty dangerous, I guess: aim for trees. Also, jumping off the roof of the garage.

I'd like to say that this is the most entertaining thread that I've read in a long time. I'm laughing hysterically at this stuff.

Racing down a very steep hill (that had traffic at the bottom) while perched on a Tonka truck.

Riding a red wagon down the middle of a steep street.

Naughty Nook! This was punishment, not play. On the innumerable long car trips we took as a family in our big GM van, when one of the five kids misbehaved egregiously, my parents required us to spend time in Naughty Nook, the name we gave to the space between the driver and passenger seats, just in front of the mid-dash engine cover. The misbehaving child sat crosslegged or arms wrapped around knees on the hot, grooved rubber flooring next to the throbbing engine, under the watchful eye of both parents. The floor was gritty and the whole area smelled like hot electrical tape.

This was before seatbelt laws, of course.

In that same van, my parents opted not to install the third row of seat, instead building a platform with removable wooden panels. Underneath the panels was storage for luggage and tools, and because the panels were padded with foam rubber and covered with oh-so-fab sky blue terry cloth, it was a large expanse for sleeping or lolling about reading. Sometimes all five kids would be crammed back there playing or reading or giving each other wet willies. When the driver slammed on the brake, all five kids went crashing around like eggs in a shipping crate.

Folding ourselves into the center of a truck tire and letting the other kids push us down a hill, bouncing and dizzy.

And I was the quiet nerdy book reading kid on the block!

yea me too octothorpe. not to mention ima girl [NOT SEXIST] (not to mention that IME gender's pretty much irrelevant as far as serious hellraising is concerned.)

some of the more hair-raising stunts i could relate were the thoroughly UNsanctioned acts of older bored teenagers; things like car-surfing, vandalism, destruction of US postal property (read: mailboxes) 'school spirit' related pranks, smoking/drinking/huffing any and every possibly-buzz-inducing substance under the sun up to and including jimpson weed (that's not just dumb but bloody dangerous too) and things of a more, err, sexual nature, but mainly those were things the 'bad' kids did and we only heard about or discussed in idle passing.

i did, however, build a spudgun capable of shooting a potato thru a stop sign at a 50-metre range. i worked summers as a veterinarian's assistant and thus had access to ether with which to charge the thing. word: that sonofabitch had a kick like a missouri mule and a double-charge would pretty much land you on your arse. after the stop sign episode left a palm-sized haematoma on my sternum from the breech i pretty much abandoned amateur ballistics for 'safer' pursuits such as skateboarding and olympic-level equestrian sports.

ether and related hijinks were also primarily responsible for the 15-metre wide SCUD crater in the backyard and associated aftermath (the forty foot mushroom cloud fireball meant the county showed up thinking someone's house had exploded) which precipitated 'closure until further review' of my best friend's parent's bonfire pit.

My sisters and I rode down the stairs in potato chip boxes. Stuffed ourselves into those little orange and yellow plastic cars and went flying down hills. Build big futon towers up to the ceiling, would climb to the top and make the tower fall down with us on top.

not to mention ima girl

yup, so are a lot of the people posting. I didn't know we got special kudos for doing cool and dangerous stuff just because of our girly bits.

Oh right: "[not sexist]"

The sail powered bicycle I was hot to patent at 8 nearly claimed some lives. As a 10 year old, I occasionally had access to liquid oxygen, a thermos bottle at a time, and that made for impressive results in various circumstances. At 13, I started to learn to weld, and became capable of building destructive equipment, long before I could really engineer it. By 15, I was overhauling cars with my dad and other men, and since gas was 22 cents a gallon, most of my interest in experimentation, for the next few years, was focused on making cars go fast. Some of those guys knew a thing or three about small blocks. At 16 1/2, with a driver's license only 6 months old, I got ticketed for doing 122 mph on the Kansas state turnpike, outside Topeka, where the limit was 80. On bias ply tires, in a car with no seat belts. That ticket stub added significantly to the car's value for a while, and set me on a long course of minor criminal behavior.

At George's memorial his six nieces and nephews all gave their recollections of their uncle, most of which involved them running loose at the farm when they were young, sometimes aided and abetted by George (for example, lifting three or four kids at a time in the bucket of his backhoe so they could reach the fruit at the very top of the tallest tree that overhung a precipice, or letting them race his dirt bikes).

Each story ended "... and Uncle George said 'whatever you do, don't tell your mom'"

JanetLand, my father used to run behind the mosquito truck as a kid too. I've done many of the things above. I've sat in beds of pickup trucks, I've swung from very high vines into somewhat shallow creeks. I've waded very far in the Atlantic ocean after the lifeguards went home for the day. I roamed the neighborhood and woods for hours unsupervised as a young kid.

Is woods-roaming considered unsafe these days? We usually got a "don't come back until dusk" lecture. ("and if you need a drink, use the hose!")

Yeah, at least all of the above, I think. The possession of any quantity of mercury in a little jar gave kids a few extra cool points and we all begged to be able to roll it around in our palms.

I remember riding around the neighbourhood in trailers and the back of utes (aka pick-ups) when people were on errands to fetch/dump stuff.

My friends and I used to walk out on a sewer pipe that bridged a deep gully and see who could jump off closest to the middle - it was about 50' deep in the middle and the only thing to break our fall was the undergrowth.

At one point I was in a marching band as a teenager and we used to get driven around in an old army truck. A friend and I that lived across the road used to see who would jump off the back first as it was slowing down to drop us off - we stopped after he got a big dose of brave one night and jumped before the brakes had even been applied (~50kph).

Making sleds from offcut timber and 5-gallon kerosene tins and sliding down grassy hills on them (I have a scar on my knee where I got 9 stitches doing that), Also, scavenging old pram chassis and wheels to make trolleys that we would ride down suicidally steep hills with no brakes and limited steering.

We used to get a box of matches and a couple of bolts to make bombs - if you screw a nut onto a bolt just enough for the thread to catch, then fill up the cavity inside the nut with shaved match heads, then screw another bolt on until it just starts to get tight, you can throw it on the ground end-first and it will explode with enough force to blow the bolts apart.

Going out onto the harbour in Auckland in canoes made from sheets of corrugated iron stolen from building sites and sealed with chewing gum, using paddles made of scraps of wood (no lifejackets, of course, nobody knew we were there, of course).

Setting fire to anything we could think of - usually with the assistance of liberal amounts of petrol.

Stealing various chemicals from the school science labs and mixing them up just to see what would happen. We also made friends with a kid who was a "lab monitor" (he got to stay in the lab at lunchtimes) and we would attach a long piece of rubber hose to the gas taps, put a finger over one end, then fill it with gas to as much pressure as we could hold. Then one person would blow in the end of the hose, while someone else held a match under the other end and tried to get someone with the resultant flame.

Being told by our mothers "get out of the house and I don't want to see you back here until dinner time!" is the thing that I most wish I could let my kids do, but can't.

Once in a while I wish my oldest brother was a member here. He'd scare alla y'all and I'm sure I don't know half the stories.

When I was a kid, we would ... [get ready for this] ... ride bikes bareheaded!!!!

You could look it up.

I did a few of the things above, but I was pretty nerdy.

One thing I did do, though, was use a railroad trestle as a shortcut to school. If I was taking the streets I had to go down to the river level, then up a block-long bridge that had to rise up to the bluff and cross over a different railroad track. So I preferred the level route.

I wasn't the only one but I know unlike others I made a habit of it, mainly because I didn't have an older brother with a car etc.

You couldn't ride your bike across, obviously, but you could walk it along the service walkway, except the walkway had gaps where the ladders down to the stone piers were, so you had to go on the tracks anyway. I did try riding over the railroad ties but it was just too bumpy, you lost too much momentum with each gap, and every once in a while your wheel would catch the gap and go /wham/ off 90 degrees to the right and you had to be ready to land your feet except your feet could also hit a gap and ... I didn't do that much.

Amazingly, I only encountered a train once or twice. That Chicago & Northwestern line was on the verge of closure, but today it's part of a successful regional line that has about five times as much traffic as there ever was when I was a kid, so I wouldn't be so lucky today. Plus they wouldn't just blare the horn at you, they'd call the cops and maybe Homeland Security.

The piece de resistance, though, is that the box trestle underneath had these flat supports that are about six inches wide and maybe twelve feet long, all in X's. A few times, when I was with friends, and a few more times alone, we would walk just on those X supports. It was possible to take the interior of the trestle all the way across the river holding onto something safe. But it was also possible to walk out into the middle of these X supports, standing right over the rolling water beneath a dam on the river, and that's when one of your friends behind you would jump on the support and make the middle of the X bounce like a timpani.

Good times.

Oh yeah, did the mercury thing, did the match head thing. Used to load those big kitchen matches into the BB gun and shoot them at the house. They'd make a nice Pop!. The worst thing was probably melting lead in a kitchen spoon over an alcohol lamp and dripping it into molds or into water. 40 years later, I'm probably still a superfund site.

"Walking in the woods alone" ??? Isn't that good for you?

My best friend's little brother (age 6) was the victim of this: the neighbor kids found some sort of bullet around their house (who knows...) and dropped a cinderblock on it. It shot the kid in the knee. He still has a scar.

"Walking in the woods alone" ??? Isn't that good for you?

Yeah, that was my thought!

Hmm.. I once kinda clonked a neighbor kid on the head with a brick. But it was totally on accident - he was climbing up the tree beneath me when I dropped it.

Other hard-won bits of general kid wisdom:

CO2 cartridges are most useful when filled with match heads and lit (what a bore, emptying the gas cartriges in the BB gun first...) Spud Guns work best when you freeze the potatoes first (thaw them a bit for a good seal on the bore) and engine starting fluid is preferred over aquanet as propellant. Gasoline poured on snow and lit makes for better snowballs. Keep your eyes open when exploring abandoned houses, the older kids sometimes leave the Playboys there. Firecrackers are fun, but building a little house out of Legos and blowing it up with firecrackers is more fun. Some types of Roman Candles have an M-80 in the bottom. If you are going to mix warm water and dry ice in a glass soda bottle, you must screw the top on really fast, and then throw it really far. If you've been microwaving the shit out of an egg and it won't explode, be sure you are not barechested when you open the microwave and touch the egg to see why it hasn't gone off yet. If you find a kilo of black powder in an old barn, you should consider lighting off a small amount first, just to verify that it is in fact "still good". A glass container is not the ideal vessel for testing black powder to see if it is "still good". If you are going to clean the rails of your Lionel electric train with steel wool, be sure you disconnect the juice first. If you forget to disconnect the electric train before cleaning the tracks, try not to do so on highly meltable shag carpeting. Despite looking promising, there is nothing fun that can be done with those tear-drop shaped paper "whippersnappers" once disassembled. The prior observation is decidedly not true for model rocket engines. Golf balls can be cut open with a hacksaw, but stop before you get to the liquid stuff in the center. Wear safety goggles when hacksawing things apart. Giant tinkertoys are cool because you can put an acorn down the tube and then whip it at someone, which stings like a mother. Skiing behind the car is fun before the plows come. Sledding behind the snowmobile is fun, but only if Jude isn't the one driving the snowmobile. Skateboarding behind the three-wheeler is not fun. Don't try to learn to waterski behind a 14' Donzi with a big-block Olds engine powering it.

And the single most important thing a kid can learn:

The fuse is still lit, even if it looks like it went out.

The fuse is still lit, even if it looks like it went out.
Yeah, I hear you on that one - I copped a rocket to the face once by ignoring that little piece of wisdom.

Ah, yes, hangfires. Dad waited until I was middle-aged to tell me what it was like clearing those in 155mm howitzers when he was in France. Hair-raising stuff.

Reversed the poles on a toy-train transformer, put the leads on the base and primer of a 12-ga shotgun shell in a bucket (hole knocked in bottom of bucket for wires) hanging out of window. I set off seven, maybe eight shells that way before I got caught. Dad was laughing too hard to spank me.

I have no early childhood experiences to relate. However, when I was 15, I got a job at a restaurant and often got rides home from a friend who also worked there. He was 19. One night he looked at me and said, "You want to drive the Javelin?" and I, conspicuously sans driver's license or learner's permit, enthusiastically accepted. For those of you familiar with San Jose, I was on the stretch of Tully Road near Oak Hill Cemetery headed east, and I pushed it to the redline. It was easily going 115 miles per hour (he had modified the engine.)

Therein, lies the tale of my juvenile recklessness.

I've ridden in the back of my uncle's pickup doing 80 up and down the Pennsylvania hills. (hanging on for dear life). I used to leave the house in the morning, too, and go hiking, exploring, riding my bike, at least one town over. I've walked from the mall to home, some (whatdayathink, Miko?) 15 miles. And no one has mentioned eating raw cookie and cake batter...we loved that! (Gasp! Raw eggs!) I was a pretty cautious kid, mostly, though.

My mom had a little ball of mercury in a jar. Sometimes my brother and I would take it out of the jar and push it around on the kitchen table.

My brother and I did this too!!

Set meaningless fires.

When I was a little kid, there was this German family who made all the kids put on seat-belts whenever we rode in their car. Many cars on the road didn't even have seat-belts then (mid 70's) and no one used them anyway, so all the kids thought this was very peculiar. I thought: ah! So Germans are the people who kill Jews and wear seat-belts.

My parents had a Spitfire, and one day the door opened when my mom peeled around a corner and I fell out of the car onto the street.
(No seat-belt.)