Stupid things you did growing up. (NDR maybe, maybe not)

Eric Patterson

Eric Patterson

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Below are a couple stories of stupid dangerous things we did as kids. Trust me, I have more :) What are some of yours?

Story 1: Childhood friend, around 10, and I were in their basement. He got his brother's 22 rifle and some ammo and wanted to show me how a bolt action flings bullets when you operate the bolt. Safety wasn't on and while he was working the bolt the gun went off. Bullet whizzed inches past my head and into the cinderblock wall. He heard his mom coming to investigate and started yelling "BANG! BANG!" to throw her off. She bought it.

Story 2: My best friend and I were curious how a go-cart clutch worked so we took the gear housing off and saw two metal hunks on springs. I got the bright idea of wanting to watch them while the motor was running. We started the go-cart and in idle the clutch spun but the metal chunks didn't do anything but go round-and-round. So I gave it some gas and low-and-behold the chunks started to grow as the springs stretched. I mashed the gas and the chunks spread out even more until the unrestrained springs straightened and the chunks broke loose, whizzing, again within inches, of my best friends head. Had one hit him he'd be dead. Had to pony up $30 for a new clutch so I could ride my go-cart again.
 
(A) school shop/wood working class; I had a fixed blade hunting knife and I wanted to make a new handle. I needed to open up the holes in the tang for larger diameter rivets. Took the exposed knife blank (which was already sharpened for previous use) over to the drill press. Started to drill out the holes when the drill bit caught the edge of the previous hole and bound up. Now I have a knife blade spinning round and round the drill bit at several hundred rpm. My teacher less than pleased.
 
Lit a Dixie cup full of black powder by pushing a lit match in it. Had tried several times to get it to light by flinging the match in, but did not have success... so went a more direct route to great effect.
 
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Putting coins on a high speed railroad track. Those things came flying out like bullets past our heads . We could here them whiz by us lol dumb and dumber
 
Wow, those are some amazing stories! Dave, your story about the knife and the drill press reminds me of a story I heard from a guy who tried putting a paddle drill bit in a router-lucky nobody got killed in that one!
A few from me-
My buddy and I locking ourselves in the trunk of my mom's car as a joke, they ended up having to take the back seat out to get us out. This was in the days before safety releases.

Lots and lots of free-climbing around Utah's slickrock desert without safety ropes, of course we were teenagers and indestructible. Fortunately nobody got seriously hurt but it could have been bad. We used to play a game where we would pick a spot on the horizon and walk in a straight line to it, climbing over or under whatever was in our way. Had some scary moments doing that.

Didn't happen to me, but to a friend-it used to be fairly common to fish the Green River right below Flaming Gorge Dam by floating down the river in a float tube, a buddy of mine in high school got pinned against a rock in his and drowned. They made this illegal a few years later. It was the first time that someone my age had died and it made a big impression on me.

Lots more, fortunately the saying about God looking out for drunks and fools seems to have some truth to it....hopefully I am a bit wiser now!
 
BB gun fights, many. Not to worry, we had a rule against shooting at the head.

My dad was a collector of anything black powder. He had a couple of cannons, fill a baby food jar with concrete and kaboom! They would fly quite a ways with the prescribed load which I think was 4 ounces of Fg. My buddies and I experimented with a double load for additional distance, the barrel cracked but luckily didn't explode.

Fired a crossbow bolt with a broadhead straight up and of course lost sight of it. Ran for the house. A week or more later we spotted it buried in the roof of a house a quarter mile away. Oops!

Not so dangerous but stupid:

Tossed smoke bomb out school bus window in 8th grade, barely missed cop directing traffic. Punishment..kicked off bus for a week. This one turned out to be good for me since I began riding my bike to school and didn't use the bus again that year. Result...girlfriend.

My family owned a farm and pit which had an old cinder block building. It was actually a three sided carport used to store tractors and stuff. Roughly 25 feet square with a roof height of about ten feet. We figured out that cinder blocks disintegrate in a satisfying puff of smoke when shot with 30-06 AP stuff from WWII. Even more fun was the 30 M1 carbine with a 15 round clip...pop,pop,pop,pop, reload. Demonstrated that once you shoot about 3/4's of the blocks out in one horizontal row the rest can't support the weight of the building. Punishment....no more '06 and M1 fun. Harsh. ;-)
 
Momma don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys.

A childhood spent in Nevada allows a kid to go to a rodeo often. I got to see my first, and so far only, person be killed in public. They would allow kids to come out and ride sheep for prizes. I was too young or little or something according to Mom. Posteriors of barrel racing women will always appeal to me. Something about that long hair streaming out behind a wide brimmed hat. The only way I could think of to get next to women like that was to become a rodeo star, and I needed to start learning how to ride bulls and broncos.

We would buy two calves each year and steer them, then raise them up for freezer meat. I really wanted to ride one one day. Dad stacked hay bales next to the calf shed, secured a piece of twine around the calf's neck and held the little fella in place for me to climb down off the hay onto its back. Once I was ready, I gave dad the nod and he stood back letting the calf go. The next thing I recall was being on my head with dirt in my mouth and my feet somewhere north of my ass. I lasted less than a second. I decided that morning at the age of 7 that being a rodeo star was not in the cards life had dealt me.
 
When I was in high school my fellow classmate and I were given the assignment by the principal to try and figure out a way during our home coming basketball game to have fog move over/around the American flag during the national anthem using dry ice. After several unsuccessful attempts we got the bright idea of putting chunks of the dry ice in all of the toilets in the boys bathroom. The eery looking fog bubbling out of the toilets and oozing out into the hall was a big hit with my fellow students but not so much with the principal. I think during chewing out we got I could pick up on a surpressed laugh about it all.
 
Sorry Eric - not enough bandwidth for me to include the dozens of dumb things done when younger.

I do have one that just came back to me last weekend that is kind of funny. I ran into an old female college friend (no girlfriend, she was way out of my league), and she was talking to my wife and myself. She brought up an evening of one of the dumber things we did.

We were all at a Perkins after bar closing. Someone got the bright idea that the Perkins flag would look great hanging in our college dorm. After we paid, one of us climbed up the pole and cut the flag loose (hold my beer and watch this moment - miss #1 - he missed cutting open his you know what on the flagpole cleat on the way down). As we were trying to get the flag and long rope into the car to make our get away, one of the employees came running out to stop us. He got sort of in the getaway car and was kicked out and rolled to the ground (miss #2 - he wasn't hurt). We get home thinking we were safe. Later that evening friend who drove got a call from the Perkins Manager. Friend was staying at parents house over the college break so Dad took the call (not a happy camper). When we find out how we got busted it wasn't because they traced the license plate or anything like that, turns out the driver that evening thought our waitress to be "the bomb" and left his name and phone number on the receipt asking her to call him if she had any interest in going out (miss # whatever).

At least the wife was laughing upon hearing that story since it happened 30 years or more back.

Got dozens more - unfortunately.

Mark W
 
Where to start? Duck related or non-duck related? We'll start with duck related.....


15 years ago my brother is in the Marine Corps and is stationed at Indian Head (at the confluence of the Mattawoman Creek and the Potomac River). Great duck hunting, so we go through all the steps necessary to hunt on the installation, and are out on the Creek (which is the better part of a mile wide at this point). We clip a hen mallard, who promptly begins swimming for the opposite shore. We have a 10 ft. john boat with more holes than rivets (just for deploying decoys), no life jackets (I mean, after all, how far out could we go?), 2 shotguns with about 10 shells, and 2 paddles (not oars, paddles)....oh, and no motor.


I'll spare you the details of the rising action of the story, but if you choose to picture it yourself, make sure you apply the proper Keystone Cops soundtrack to the adventure...or maybe the Benny Hill music. About the time we're close to making landfall on the opposite shore, we're down to our last shell, I can hardly paddle anymore my arms are so sore, and we have several inches of frigid water in the bottom of the boat. Half hour later...we had paddled back to our decoy spread (after figuring out just where the hell that was) with one dead hen mallard, $32 in Hevi-Shot debt, and a new-found appreciation for life.
Best tasting duck I ever ate.....oh, and I bought a real boat that summer (life jackets and everything).


F
 
Lots of things with fire. Threw .22 blanks in a campfire once, and on another occasion an "empty" can of Coleman fuel. I got burned by the .22 casings going up the back of my shorts. The "empty" Coleman can shot out and whizzed right by a kids head, hitting the large rock he was sitting against.

Played on the RR tracks alot, squashing things. The thing about the tracks on Long Island is they have a third rail. We used to cross over that rail on the rickety old board they had shielding it.

There are many more, but those few came to mind.
 
Gosh... I could go on all day. Some have been covered...

BB Gun fueled Cowboys and Indians in the woodlot, homemade gunpowder packed into toilet paper tubes and blowing holes in the clay bank back by the creek (wanted to block the creek and raise the water level for swimming), tunnels built in the baled hay in the barn, riding the big old sows, riding the bulls (should read attempting to), riding pretty much all the farm animals, (LOL) water skiing on the river and having competitions gathering leaves along the shoreline, skiing behind the snowmobile through wooded trails (really dangerous on the bends), tobogganing and jumping the pressure cracks in the river ice, shooting targets in the basement with a .22 LR without a proper backstop, riding a bike down every public flight of stairs I could find... These were all before I became a teen and speak to the amount of time left unsupervised.

My all time favorite was my buddies idea to make a hot dog cooker. A piece of lamp cord with a two prong plug and two nails in a board. Put the wiener on the nails an plug it in. Had to replace an outlet and some house wiring. I think we were 12 or 13 at the time and to this day his wife tells me to not let him do anything stupid when we are together. I am not usually successful.

We would race anything and used to build racing snowmobiles. 70 mph on a sled was really fast back in the 70's and resulted in a lot of wrecks. Rally racing our parents cars on open roads. Hill climbs on our motorbikes without helmets. Ages 14 to 17.

Walking, dragging, pushing, motoring a 12' aluminum boat through ice flows on the Great Lakes to get to the great fishing spot. Getting up before dawn and taking the rowboat 5 miles down Thunder Bay (Lake Superior) to catch trout and get back before anyone knew I was gone. (some of the best tasting breakfasts ever.) I think I was about 14 at the time and nobody knew where I was. The stream was completely isolated in remote forest and I almost always encountered bears. Teen years.

It's a wonder I'm still alive and could explain many of my aches and pains, several broken bones and scars acquired along the way. To describe my early years as uninhibited and reckless would be an understatement.

I should add that I started waterfowl hunting at the age of 15 by riding my bike with my shotgun (purchased with my own earnings) and lying in snowy fields covered with a white sheet. I would also ride to a swamp and hunt the flooded timber. Somehow I had the sense to never do anything risky with a shotgun.
 
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Lit a Dixie cup full of black powder by pushing a lit match in it. Had tried several times to get it to light by flinging the match in, but did not have success... so went a more direct route to great effect.
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I stood next to a friend while he threw a match into a cup of smokeless powder. It did a very good impression of a V2 rocket. Probably shouldn't have done that inside their garage.

I wasn't a risk taker as a kid. I did have a friend who liked to shoot me with his BB gun. I try not to think about the .357 he wanted to show me. No shots fired but I never really trusted his judgement after that.

Tim
 
Eric,
You didn't define "growing up" as if we are no longer little boys capable of doing very stupid things. Here are two stupid things done by not so young boys.

My buddy and I were layout hunting in Mitchell's Bay, on the Ontario side of Lake St. Clair. He was always more of a risk taker than I. That meant he generally talked me into staying about 30 minutes longer in bad weather than we should have stayed.

He was in the layout. i was in our 18' tender. Wind blowing' and starting to blow harder. I said, "Dale: we need to leave." Reply: "we're OK." This goes on for 30 minutes and finally I just drive the tender up to him. First couple of passes I can't control the boat well enough for him to grab the gunnel and climb in.

He jumps from the Busick layout boat to the gunnel of the tender. His hands make it. His body doesn't. He is 250 points. I am 170. I can't hall his butt in and keep the motor out of the decoy lines at the same time. We motored out of the spread with him hanging off the side. He hops his hands down to the end of the boat. I grabbed his legs and swung him in.

Later at the restaurant in town we hear the locals talking about whether the two fools in the layout boat drowned or made it. We just slunk lower in the booth.

Shorter story of a friend. Had ants in a crack in the concrete near his garage. Poured gas in the concrete. Got rid of the ants.

And blew up his garage.

Larry
 
Before we had cars We use to catch rides on the back(on the ladder) of the oil tanker truck, to get from one side of town to the other after hanging out on the corner. We would get off when he stopped for a light, there were many lights they always stopped LOL. It was quicker then walking. One day the driver got wise to us so did not stop for lights he also drive extra fast so we could not jump off, and drove for about a half hour. When he did stop we got off but we did not know where we were. We then had to take a subway. Not having money in out pockets we had to jump the turn style, It took hours to get home.
Keep in mind this was before cell phones and gps
 

I grew up in the 70's, when every kid had one of those bicenntenial "flint locks" that could shoot a cork ball with paper caps.

They had barrels about 3 feet long, and it turns out they also make just amazing platforms for launching and aiming bottle rockets. We had years of bottle rocket fights, and while several blew up inside the barrel, there were never any major injuries. We also tried to charge those barrels with a firecracker to launch the cork balls at higher speed. Burst the barrel, but again, no injuries.

My Dad and his buddies used to set off .22 rounds with a blow torch. One of them ended up with a slug in the ass.

My favorite was a friend's son at about age 9 playing "stunt man". Put on a Superman cape, soaked it with lighter fluid, lit it on fire, and then grabbed the corners of the cape to use it as a parachute as he jumped from the second story roof.

All the burns were superficial, and no bones were broken. That was about 15 years ago, and I think the kid's dad has finally recovered.
 
My favorite was a friend's son at about age 9 playing "stunt man". Put on a Superman cape, soaked it with lighter fluid, lit it on fire, and then grabbed the corners of the cape to use it as a parachute as he jumped from the second story roof.
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My favorite so far. This could be a skit on the next Jackass movie.
 
We found a cave in the woods behind my parents house that we would explore. One day we found a large "room" (maybe 10x10) that we thought would be a great place to have a clubhouse. Came back the next weekend to set up the clubhouse only to find that the cave had shifted and the room was no longer there. We would still be on the missing kid list if we had been in the cave when it shifted because nobody knew where we were. It was the last time I ever even thought about going in the cave.
 
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