As a tween we jousted on our bikes with the neighborhood children. No injuries reported. Goal was to knock off the opposing rider without falling off ourselves.

After becoming a latch key kid at ten, and quickly realizing nobody was ever going to check on me between 2 and 6PM, I started riding my bike into neighboring cities and exploring.

By age eleven, I was riding into Somerville and Cambridge. Soon, I was taking the train into Boston.

Arcades, record stores, comic shops, and news stands to start. Then seedier shops that sold drug paraphernalia, dirty magazines, porn.

Met some interesting and sketchy people. Did this multiple times a week until I was fourteen and made a few friends. Then we started having adventures together in the city.

My folks never had a clue. I was always home in time for dinner. Frankly they never asked.

“How was your day?”
“Good.”

That was it.

Shooting bb guns at one another. And when we lived in El Paso, I was maybe 14 when I decided to climb up in the Franklin Mountains with no climbing gear. Almost didn’t get back down. Bad idea.

@Nomore_Tantrums A neighbor loaded his BB gun with raw spaghetti noodles, and shot anyone he wanted to. Hurt a-lot. Hurts in the knuckles.

There’s a bunch that I’m going to have to plead the fifth on.

One that I could share involves jumping off a 20+ foot cliff into a canal that probably should have been much deeper.

The one that was just completely moronic was when I swam through an underwater “tunnel” in a rock in a fast-moving river. If I’d gotten stuck there was no way to back out against the current and I would have drowned. The other kids were like “just swim towards the light.” It’s probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done (and I’ve done way more stupid things than most people).

Oh, I’d have been down with that @gorillapaws! For sure!

Oh, my parents, and everyone else’s, were around @cookieman.
If they’d looked out a window they’d have seen us. They never checked on us.

I was hitting a tennis ball against the outside of a school assembly room wall. When I hit it onto the roof, I ran up to the wall, and climbed up the rain gutter drain. When I reached the top, I climbed over the bend, to grab the gutter, and pull up to the roof, but the bend pulled out of the top, leaving me held up by the lower piece. If I had fallen, it was a 30 foot drop, at least. I kept going, and got on the roof.
Once I retrieved the ball, I realized I couldn’t return the same way. I found a much safer way down.
I still count that among my blessings.

@Nomore_Tantrums My husband is the youngest of tgree boys. Still has a bb in his throat by the jugular. Haha!

My country life may scare some of you but I thrived on it. My scariest time was a hike but my aunt took us off trail. We ended up in a vertical climb hanging onto saplings and trees, hanging over a river. We never hiked with her again, actually.

My cousin got his eye shot out with a B gun.

One of my class mate’s brother shot his eye out with a BB gun.

Raced down a hill with my bicycle, into a corner, right as a car was exiting it. Barely scraped by the side of it.
Was monkeying around on the balcony. Slipped, and fell throat first onto a clothesline. Nearly crushed my windpipe.
Lit some fireworks indoors. Burned a hole into the carpet, and tried to cover it up by grafting a piece of carpet from somewhere else into the hole. Didn’t work, got a good beating for it.

Jumping of the roof of a detached garage into bushes (I was 9 or 10) has got to be one of the stupider things I did.

BB guns are dangerous. As my dad taught me the hard way, when he drove up into the driveway one day when I was maybe 10 and caught me red handed shooting at a kid. Luckily nothing dangerous or debilitating happened. It caught him in the padded knee of his blue jeans. My jeans butt wasn’t padded, and dad used a belt on me.

There is a long list and, truly, I just don’t share it publicly. I grew up spending summers on the river in boats, on skis, having the best time a kid could have. We got into mischief pretty often but all survived. That really is a miracle.

There were many things and I still bear a few scars. The most stupid may have been to use two lengths of powerful elastic and a metal bucket to catapult my neighbour over the trees and into the sunset. The handle flew off the bucket and we were lucky there was only one injury and no lasting damage.

We played Man From U.N.C.L.E with BB gun pistols and shot at each other. We also took turns setting up targets while the other person shot at them. Of course the set up person stayed down range. next to the targets.
Fireworks were usually modified to do something spectacular..
We made mortars out of metal lipstick containers and lead balls.
Rockets with a shotgun shell and BB taped over the primer. as a payload.
Oh man… so many.

I have no recollection of this, but supposedly, I climbed up the balcony’s edge on the top floor as a baby.

My mom was hanging washed clothes, and that was the only reason why she saw me, and the only reason why I’m still here.

How I got up there was a mystery to this day.

@Nomore_Tantrums: What is it with kids shooting things at each other? Kids in my neighborhood used to shoot bottle rockets at each other. This other kid I knew played “arrow tag” where a bunch of kids would spread out in a large field and he would fire arrows up into the sky to try and hit someone. I never played either.

@Dutchess_III: My folks were off to work (in Cambridge and East Boston) at 7AM. Gone all day. Never even called the house to check on me. I had a neighbor who worked from home, but he never checked either.

@Nomore_Tantrums and @cookieman – why do kids shoot at each other?

Simple answer:

Westerns cowboy and indian movies that were made my the dozen back in the 1940s through 1960s.

There were three major themes:

- Paleface whites against the evil dark Indians.

- Good-guy cowboys versus the bad-guy rustlers

- the sheriff finding some sort of criminal (train robber, evil gold miner, etc.)

But they were full of shoot-outs.

@elbanditoroso
In East German Westerns, the roles were reversed. There the Natives were the good guys, with the white people being the villains.

I think throwing and shooting is kind of a primal instinct for those animals, like us, who have the physical ability to do it. Sports is an offshoot of that, too.

When I was a kid, we used to climb trees as high as we could. Luckily none of us fell down.

I almost set a car on fire using a smoke bomb, but that was a one-off thing. Just before I lit the match my friend said the car might explode. I didn’t think it was worth the risk so lit it somewhere else.