A light hearted look at growing up in the 70's and 80's as a kid.

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#2808001 5-Nov-2021 13:22

surfisup1000:

Funny how four squares and dairies would sell fireworks to kids.

Yes, and smokes too. When I got my first bike (7 or so) I started getting sent to the shop for smokes for mum and dad (honest guv) and others if they came to stay. The shop staff never questioned me, I never even got a 'it'll stunt your growth' which would have been a good line for a 7 year old.

Back in those days, 'dads mags' were uncovered, much like the ladies featured within. Same neighbourhood shop used to pile these mags up in front of the lolly glass, beside the daily papers.

If I had to wait while another customer was served, curious me sometimes casually flicked through whatever was on top of the pile. Hello miss whatever month it is.

I think I was admonished once.

good times, jumpers for goalposts etc etc.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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#2808047 5-Nov-2021 14:38

I remember bullrush and big rumbles on the school field where nobody ever really got hurt - there was a lot of posturing though.

I remember walking 50miles to school, barefoot in the snow, while eating the last piece of lint found in the corner of our small cardboard box we called home.

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#2808050 5-Nov-2021 14:45

Handsomedan:

our small cardboard box we called home.

'Luxury'

Best read in a yorkshire accent of course.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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#2808051 5-Nov-2021 14:47

elpenguino:

Handsomedan:

our small cardboard box we called home.

'Luxury'

Best read in a yorkshire accent of course.

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elpenguino

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#2808059 5-Nov-2021 14:55

I can't tell from the meme - is that armstrong and miller?

We stumbled on their skit show on Amazon video - good stuff, in the tradition of catherine tate, fast show, and so on.

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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#2808144 5-Nov-2021 16:50

Handsomedan:
I remember bullrush and big rumbles on the school field where nobody ever really got hurt - there was a lot of posturing though.

Your school must have been full of weaklings. There were a lot of injuries at our school. It finally got banned at our school when some kid got his leg badly broken.

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#2808157 5-Nov-2021 17:05

vexxxboy:

i grew up using the Whenuapai Air base as my play ground. We had the entire underground Water pipe system mapped out and could travel the whole base underground from one end to the other . The Saturday matinee at the cinema where every week we would have a massive lolly war and sometimes watch the film . And the swimming pool where i learned to swim and where i almost drowned every week jumping off the diving board . Fun childhood.

Me too!!! Got up to so much shit around that base.

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#2808217 5-Nov-2021 21:37

Oh man, the memories! Thanks for everyone contributing, I've had some good laughs. Here are a few memories of my own:

General pyromania

I walked home from school (over 2km, I just measured it) from the age of 5. One day - I must have been only 5 or 6 - I found a box of matches in the gutter. Full of glee for my newfound possession, I started to look for some things to burn. I found several flammable bits of rubbish in the gutters on my walk home alone, and I decided that as a service to society I'd pick them up and burn them once I got home. It all started well: I found a nice dry place in the garden, arranged the rubbish to be burned, added a few sticks and leaves and lit my first prized match. The rest of it was a bit of a blur, but my mother remembers looking out the window and seeing me running down the driveway with a small red bucket full of water towards a towering pillar of flames to try and put it out... The next thing I remember was the fireman asking to talk to me and giving me a right earful.

My cousin had a farm where his dad was burning some rubbish one day when I was staying. His dad left us in charge of the fire (mistake #1) while he headed out for a bit. We found an aerosol can (paint?) and sprayed it in front of the lighter to singe as many things as we could until it ran out, then we threw the empty can in the fire (mistake #2). A minute or so later we jumped out of our skin when the can exploded and flew a good 20-30m into the air. It was so exhilarating we decided to raid my uncle's garage for more "empty" cans (mistake #3), planting each one upside down in the smouldering flames until they blasted above the treetops of the forest next to the house, some of them getting stuck up the top of the tree. We got a massive telling off when uncle came home to find all his spray paint cans missing!

Guy Fawkes

Double Happys and Tom Thumbs planted in the mushroom patch - my brother and I destroyed every last mushroom in the garden. That was the first and last time my parents ever tried to grow them. Not just mushrooms but mandarins, dirt, cracks in the footpath, anywhere big enough to fit a Double Happy was fair game.

driller2000: Holding dbl happy's in your finger tips to show you weren't scared. (You were.)

I remember one "brave" boy would let one off holding it with his front teeth.

I remember scouring the field at my primary school the morning after the Guy Fawkes display looking for undetonated fireworks. Found several large ones which I managed to combine with my own stash of wicks and gunpowder once I arrived home. One of them exploded in my hand and left me slightly dazed with my ears ringing for a few minutes afterwards - I was probably about 7 or 8 at the time.

Double happy rockets: wrap DH's tightly with several layers of tape, then finish by taping them, wick down, to the top of a used miniature rocket stick. Recycling!

One family Guy Fawkes night we nailed a large spinning firework to a ~150mm round fencepost at the above cousin's farm. That night the post smouldered to the ground and in the morning there was nothing left of it.

Other explosives and weapons

In high school I was tasked with ordering the dry ice for a production. After the last performance my mate and I made dry ice bombs in PET bottles in the school yard with the left over dry ice.

Growing up my mate (ok, he was actually my older brother's mate, but I always wanted him to be mine) was always making neat stuff - he was always trying to build stuff to go higher, faster, louder, further. I really looked up to him and my brother. One day we disassembled a bunch of ballpoint pens to see how far we could get the hose to squirt. One day we took out the kites and tied the ends of all the strings to see how high we could get the kites to go. He helped me build a tree hut in a macrocarpa tree (mere metres away from overhead lines :/), complete with iron roof, deadbolt and keys, seat and more. One day he brought over his latest build: a crossbow made from a stick of 4x2 with 3 long fibreglass sticks for the spring. It didn't matter what you put in that thing, once it fired you wouldn't ever see it again.

On camp the adults would have a knife-throwing competition. The game was that you stand on grass with an opponent face-to-face, just out of reach of them, feet fixed in place. You would throw the knife, trying to get it to stick into the ground, near the opponent's foot(!) - the further the better, but the harder it was to get the knife to stick. If it stuck in the ground then the opponent had to move the closest foot to where the knife was, pick up the knife and do the same to you. You lose if either you can't stretch your legs to reach the knife (keeping the other foot in place), or if the knife doesn't stick in the ground on your throw.

Ah, the memories.

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#2808226 5-Nov-2021 22:43

throbb:
vexxxboy:

i grew up using the Whenuapai Air base as my play ground. We had the entire underground Water pipe system mapped out and could travel the whole base underground from one end to the other . The Saturday matinee at the cinema where every week we would have a massive lolly war and sometimes watch the film . And the swimming pool where i learned to swim and where i almost drowned every week jumping off the diving board . Fun childhood.

Me too!!! Got up to so much shit around that base.

Sounds like there's a lot of Westies on here... anyone run into people like Herr Flick, where things would mysteriously explode or catch fire in his vicinity?

vexxxboy

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#2808228 5-Nov-2021 22:58

neb:

i grew up using the Whenuapai Air base as my play ground. We had the entire underground Water pipe system mapped out and could travel the whole base underground from one end to the other . The Saturday matinee at the cinema where every week we would have a massive lolly war and sometimes watch the film . And the swimming pool where i learned to swim and where i almost drowned every week jumping off the diving board . Fun childhood.

Me too!!! Got up to so much shit around that base.

Sounds like there's a lot of Westies on here... anyone run into people like Herr Flick, where things would mysteriously explode or catch fire in his vicinity?

it really was the west of nowhere, the harbour bridge wasnt built so it was an hour drive to get to Takapuna, so if you ended up in Hobsonville or Whenuapai you were either lost or you lived there.

Common sense is not as common as you think.

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#2808229 5-Nov-2021 23:08

neb: Sounds like there's a lot of Westies on here... anyone run into people like Herr Flick, where things would mysteriously explode or catch fire in his vicinity?

This thread makes interesting reading. Plenty of Pyromaniacs and Ordinance Handling Experts on here.

I do remember one school holidays helping out on a mates farm getting rid of a whole lot of rocks, by drilling holes in them using an pneumatic drill, plugging said drilled holes with gelignite, inserting electric fuses with a suitably long lead back a safe spot to detonate the gelignite and so distribute bits of rock all about the place which we then proceeded to pick up.

Not a Westie and had nothing to do with Whenuapai but I do know someone with that nick name, Herr Flick. Initials MR

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#2808285 6-Nov-2021 00:42

Yeah, the boomers were pretty chill about what us Gen-Xrs got up to.

My mom would get ice cream directly from the factory. As she got home we would be more interested in the dry ice. Made for fun bombs mixed with a little bit of water in a plastic bottle. We were allowed to set them off in the back yard as long as we tidied up after us when we were done.

From I was 16 I started working in radio and would do the night broadcast in Oslo during the weekends. (about 30 km from where I lived). I would basically be gone from Friday morning to Sunday afternoon without them really knowing where I was, and they were perfectly ok with it.

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#2808432 6-Nov-2021 11:04

eracode:

I was a kid in 1950s and that was before TV in NZ, let alone video tape. We used to listen to the radio in the evening. Monday night was a favourite because we could listen to Life with Dexter, an Aussie sit-com.

What's funny looking back is that as little kids we really didn't have much idea about what TV would be like because we had never seen it. When we found out that TV was coming to NZ, we all thought that it would literally be like radio with pictures. I can clearly remember talking with kids at school about how great it was going to be watching Life with Dexter with pictures to go with the sound.

Sometimes I just sit and think. Other times I just sit.

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#2808526 6-Nov-2021 16:22

eracode:

What's funny looking back is that as little kids we really didn't have much idea about what TV would be like because we had never seen it. When we found out that TV was coming to NZ, we all thought that it would literally be like radio with pictures. I can clearly remember talking with kids at school about how great it was going to be watching Life with Dexter with pictures to go with the sound.

I remember when Radio with pictures first came on TV Karyn Hay as the host, Its where I first started getting into punk music for a little while until I found my way into heavy metal and Bon Scott.

If there was any time I could go back and relive just as I did would be back then don't regret a single second of it.

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding : Ice cream man , Ice cream man

elpenguino

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#2808534 6-Nov-2021 16:53

Really? Happy with all your haircuts from those days? :-)

Most of the posters in this thread are just like chimpanzees on MDMA, full of feelings of bonhomie, joy, and optimism. Fred99 8/4/21

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