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Post by knobtwister on Mar 2, 2010 11:40:10 GMT -5
I started learning to read when I was 4-5. Having 2 older brothers helped that along. I went to a really small school for the forth grade and literally read every book in the library which was a 10x3 ft bookcase.
Where we lived was so hilly I never even learned to ride a bike. There were no 3 speed bikes around, so you would zoom down a hill and then push it up yhe other side. Easier just walking.
I wasn't very athletic when I was young and found out why when I went to get a learners permit at age 14. The guy with the vision tester asked if I ever had an eye test. "No" He asked my mom if my grades were OK. "All As" she said. So I got glasses and it was a different world.
We got a 21 inch Sears B&W when I was nine. I must have driven the guy installing it nuts asking him questions. We got 2 channels. I did the crystal radio thing and later a short wave. Had a friend that did picks and deliveries at a TV shop so I went to work with him and have been mostly in electronics since.
Well there's a senior moment, I just prattled on about nothing for 15 mins.
I'm 59 and my real senior moments have been coming on in the last year or so. I'll be typing along and will want to use a simple word like "find" and I'll have no idea how to spell it or even where to start. It happens a couple of times a day. Pretty frustrating.
Don
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Post by Marshall on Mar 2, 2010 11:42:23 GMT -5
I remember holding a metal Band-aid box in my hand when the fire-cracker inside went off.
The can was round afterwards. (The bottom got blown off). My hand tingled a bunch.
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 2, 2010 11:54:50 GMT -5
Blowing things up...that reminds me of the exploding arrowhead....
When I was about eleven, living in the outskirts of Houston, I had a bow and arrow. I shot at targets in the backyard and also hunted small game in the undeveloped areas nearby. You need a blunt tip for small game. My older brother at one point suggested using an empty thirty-thirty cartridge as a blunt tip. It slid onto the arrow and fit perfectly. The empty cartridge affected the arrow's weight and accuracy but basically it worked and I got some game with it.
It occurred to my brother and I that you could make an exploding arrowhead by slightly varying this approach. He removed the bullet from a thirty-thirty cartridge but left the powder in. We slid the arrow in where the bullet had been. We taped a BB onto the firing cap. Ought to work, we thought.
I really wanted to try it. My brother suspected my parents would not be impressed. He said he was neutral and if I did it I was on my own, but he kind of egged me on. So we went to the backyard and I fired the arrow at a brick wall.
It worked. I was a little stunned by how loud the noise was. The arrow was shattered. My father came out of the house with storm clouds in his face. He chewed us both out. I think he knew my brother had been more than a little complicit and my brother got the greater tongue lashing, since he was older and supposedly more mature.
We didn't really get punished, though. I think my father admired the creativity.
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Post by Marshall on Mar 2, 2010 11:58:40 GMT -5
Wernher Von Cornflake
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Post by TKennedy on Mar 2, 2010 13:09:29 GMT -5
This has been a most enjoyable thread for me. When I was about 11 I'd become a pretty decent model builder and my parents gave me a giant kit of the Robert E Lee steamboat for Christmas. It was about three feet long and turned out quite well. They used to show it off to their friends and brag about what a precocious kid they had. Next summer we loaded it with about four cherry bombs and several M80s fused together, lit the fuse, and floated it out in a garden pond the neighbors had. I don't know what was more impressive, the explosion or the reaming out I got from my parents.
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Post by Hobson on Mar 2, 2010 13:14:01 GMT -5
Treehouses, forts built from scrap lumber around a hole, playing softball with any of the kids who were around and going home to get your brother or sister if there was an odd number, running through the alleys and playing kick the can. Making up games. You might wonder about dolls and dress up. Not for me. I wasn't very girly.
There were few books in the house, but I started walking to the library on my own when I was seven and I always checked out a stack of them. We had two television stations and our TVs were black and white until I was in college. Oh, and I bought my first guitar at age 13 and would spend hours singing and playing with two friends.
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Dub
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I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
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Post by Dub on Mar 2, 2010 15:39:15 GMT -5
Oh BOY! One of my favorite games. We read a great deal in our house growing up too. Lots of fairy tales, A Child's Garden of Verses, lots of books, weekly trips to the local branch library. Other recollections: - Radio. We listened to a lot of radio. Gunsmoke, Melody Ranch (Gene Autry), Sgt. Preston, Inner Sanctum, Can You Top This?, Fibber McGhee & Molly, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Amos and Andy, Buzz Cory and the SPACE PATROL, Smilin' Ed McConnel, Big John and Sparky, and on and on.
- Crystal sets too. I loved making them and tuning in. Foxhole radio sets too. Basically crystal sets that used a Gillette Blue Blade for a rectifier and a bent safety pin for a cat whisker.
- Always playing outside and all over the neighborhood.
- Bicycling everywhere. For many miles through town and miles out of town to the state park where we'd play by the river all day. Our mothers had no idea whether we were alive or dead for many hours at a time. Going to the local fire station to get our bikes inspected and receive a new license and getting to go through the fire house and see all the cool fireman stuff.
- Records, when I was little, were operas or symphonies or else my dad'd collection of Harry Lauder records. Mom played the piano while we all stood around to sing Steven Foster songs or anything from The Little Golden Book.
- Dreaming was a major activity. Dreaming we were space men or cowboys or just imagining strange things based on the actual information we'd managed to accumulate. Grabbing appliance boxes to be used as space craft or ships or maybe a stagecoach.
- Scooters made of orange crates and boards with clamp-on rollerskates underneath. Coaster cars a la Soapbox Derby.
- Dub
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2010 16:07:52 GMT -5
Wow, y'all are old! I remember those days too. I was 8 years old when we got our first TV. Wasn't much point in haveng one before that 'cause there weren't any stations within range. It was a huge, hukling thing, A Hoffman with a semi-round picture tube. I was (still am) an avid reader. My parents always had lots of books and magazines around the house and encouraged me and my siblings to read. National Geographic, Reader's Digest and Look were my favorites. As I got a little older, I read a lot of Steinbeck, Hemingway, etc., interspersed with lighter stuff like the Hardy Boys and science fiction. One of my fondest memories was when my parents gave me a Zenith transistor radio, complete with an earphone, for my birthday. I spent many a summer night listening to the St.Louis Cardinals baseball games. I would climb out of my bedroom window and lay on the roof of the back porch on an old blanket 'til my Mom would tell me to get inside and go to bed. Those were indeed good times, and I miss them. Tom
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Post by Supertramp78 on Mar 2, 2010 16:16:09 GMT -5
I consider my childhood to be Houston in the summer. That's where all the fun was. Gullys and box turtles, tadpols and crawdads, crawling through the drainage ditches under the roads, buolding skate boards out of boards and busted up roller skates. Then I turned seven and we moved to Dallas and all that stopped. Firewords were hard to get. There were no gullys. No ditches. The prairie is rather boring. I did find some horned toads for a few years until they all left. All that other stuff wa replaced with school, four square, tether ball, chess, bike riding for miles and miles and when inside, I would watch a daily cooking show and old movies. Lots and lots of old movies.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2010 16:19:08 GMT -5
Oh yeah, there was music too.
Both of my parents were music lovers. My mom loved classical music, listening to Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin and many others while she ironed our clothes. My dad's tastes were more for jazz, folk, country and old-timey stuff. Nat King Cole, The Kingston Trio, and Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads" are some that I remember. To their everlasting credit, as I gravitated toward the popoular music of the '60s, they never once were critical of my musical choices.
There was, as early as I can remember, a piano in the house. Neither of my parents played, but all of my siblings and myself were given piano lessons starting at age 6. I bailed on the piano lessons as soon as I discovered the guitar, but really wish I had stuck with the piano too.
Tom
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Post by theevan on Mar 2, 2010 17:01:33 GMT -5
My dad was a huge classical and opera guy. He was so obsessed with Wagnerian opera that he took years of German from our next-door neighbors (expat Jewish Germans) so he could dispense with the libretto translation. The den was his sanctuary, with tubes glowing and music pouring forth. He also played the clarinet, always playing the von Weber clarinet concerto and the famous Mozart concerto. Darn good player, I think. I was almost completely unaware of other genres.
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Post by theevan on Mar 2, 2010 17:02:18 GMT -5
This has been a most enjoyable thread for me. When I was about 11 I'd become a pretty decent model builder and my parents gave me a giant kit of the Robert E Lee steamboat for Christmas. It was about three feet long and turned out quite well. They used to show it off to their friends and brag about what a precocious kid they had. Next summer we loaded it with about four cherry bombs and several M80s fused together, lit the fuse, and floated it out in a garden pond the neighbors had. I don't know what was more impressive, the explosion or the reaming out I got from my parents. I about fell over when I read that! LOL ;D
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 2, 2010 19:53:25 GMT -5
I was impressed too, TKennedy. We mostly did our explosives work with TNT bombs rather than cherry bombs, though, and we never wrecked anything we'd invested time and effort in. We did unimaginative things such as putting an empty tin can over a TNT bomb and observing how high in the air it went. Pales by comparison, I know.
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Post by Jawbone on Mar 2, 2010 20:07:43 GMT -5
Don't remember ever reading a book until Uncle Sam made me. I had to go to college or Vietnam.
Like most of the others here I played outside full time when not in school. Building tree forts was my specialty, and fishing or shootin' frogs with a sling shot in Baldies Pond was where I could be found on an off day. Got my driving permit at age 15 1/2 and that was all she wrote. You could get a motorcycle with a permit.
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Post by Jawbone on Mar 2, 2010 20:13:44 GMT -5
Oh, wait, I did read a book, actually several. I got a microscope for a present and got hooked looking at protozoa. Found them in ponds and such. So, I read about these little creatures and read and read. Drew pictures of them, looked them up in the reference books, measured them, froze them, and boiled them. I remember when the microscope slide (some had a little well in them) would dry up and I cooked a universe of these little guys. Oh well, there's another universe in another drop of water.
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Post by TKennedy on Mar 2, 2010 20:17:54 GMT -5
I was impressed too, TKennedy. We mostly did our explosives work with TNT bombs rather than cherry bombs, though, and we never wrecked anything we'd invested time and effort in. We did unimaginative things such as putting an empty tin can over a TNT bomb and observing how high in the air it went. Pales by comparison, I know. The voice in my head told me not to do it but all the kids had been bugging me and I gave in. I did feel bad when all that was left of all that work were pieces smaller than your little finger. I really did get into serious trouble at home. Then I built the USS Franklin D Roosevelt and felt better. I remember when Sputnik went up and everyone was making rockets. We had all made gunpowder with our Gilbert Chemistry Sets but somewhere I read that Potassium Nitrate and sugar was better. It was--in spades! Needles to say a small flashlight full of that stuff didn't perform like the rocket it was supposed to be. How'd you guys make TNT?
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Post by Jawbone on Mar 2, 2010 20:25:44 GMT -5
Oh yeah, gun powder. It was 70% Potassium Nitrate, 15% sulfur and 15% charcoal. Never really blew up, it just kinda sizzled. And my three door Gilbert lab cost a whopping $9.99.
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Tamarack
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Post by Tamarack on Mar 2, 2010 20:29:46 GMT -5
No great stories to add. My baby boomer childhood was similar -- roaming the known universe on our bikes, digging in the dirt, playing with projectiles, etc. Ernie Harwell broadcasting Detroit Tigers baseball on a big, glowing tube radio was part of the summer soundscape.
Our kidz haven't had the same degree of freedom, but they are no less playful. Wonder what they've done that I don't know about.
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Post by Cornflake on Mar 2, 2010 20:29:55 GMT -5
"How'd you guys make TNT?" We didn't. TNT bombs were a trade name, I guess, for another kind of firework, somewhat more potent than cherry bombs but not dramatically so. Maybe they were specific to Texas, where everything's bigger.
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Post by Jawbone on Mar 2, 2010 22:00:04 GMT -5
Cherry bombs had a water proof wick coating, making them ideal to flush down an enemy's toilet.
on edit: I believe high school was the enemy at the time. There's a statute of limitation on that kind of shit, isn't there?
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