Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire actually remember doing this.

Sheeit! All that stuff was for sissies. We had Merthiolate.

I went to a local rodeo when I was about 11. Decided that bull riding looked like fun, so .... the next morning climed up top of the feeder in the bull pen and dropped an alfalfa leaf down. Over came Mr. Bull. I jumed down onto him doing a 180 in the air on my way down. Completely FORGOT the hand hold part and such. Lasted one jump or less and landed face first into the fencboard full of nails sticking out. If the bull had not been soo interested in the Alfalfa, he would have finished me off right then, easily.

That ANY young man lives to be 30 years of age is proof possitive that there is a God and he cares and watches over us more than we know, or deserve.

On the topic of bicycles and such, my best ever Christmas memory of my dad was when he bought a used Stigray and a bunch of parts, paint etc. then banned me from the garage. He then spent a lot of the month of December building me the coolest totally custom CHOPPER bicycle in the known world. Long forks, fat racing slick rear tire, metal flake paint, Apehanger handlebars, the works. I was 8 years old, and today at age 51 that memory still gets to me. Possibly because my mom and dad split up shortly after that.

A casual friend of mine had a golf cart roll on him one night in a drunken joyride on his way home one night in HS (shortcut across the course). His liver was split when the cart landed on him. He was found beneath it the next day, dead. Forever young.

I remember one winter morning it was back when I was seven or eight my granddad had refurbished an old sled and gave it to me over in Cheney,WA. One morning I got up and took that old sled down to the sleding hill the city had closed off for the kids to slide down on their sleds. I took off on the sled down the hill when I got to the bottom of the hill the city hadn't sanded the bottom of the hill yet that morning so I couldn't get stopped so I Slide across four lanes of traffic before getting stop. The street at the bottom of the hill was the main drag through town and at that time it was also Highway US 10 the main highway From Seattle to the East Coast long before the Interstate system was ever thought of it was in 1947.

Talk about one scared kid, I was lucky I didn't get killed by a car, truck or bus.

The '50's' were a comprably 'safe' pre Go Cart Era.
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I remember homemade 'cars' being commonly built by bigger kids, using a wide plank for the frame, with old Derby Car wheels (feet steering), and a Maytag washing machine gas motor, for (slow motion) propulsion.

No way you could possibly get 'hurt' driving one of these vehicles -

Unless you drove it ... ... ... DOWNHILL.

oh yeah we tore up many a big wheel when i was a kid. every kid always had mecurchrome (sp?) red knees. or riding a radio flyer wagon down the hill and crashing into something.

with butterfly handlebars

I had a red 'Mercury' Tricycle, a red 'Radio Flyer' Wagon, and a red two-wheel Scooter (mfg unknown) - all late '40's.

Never had those diversions. Instead I had a Benjamin pellet rifle made of brass and a H&R Topper that I hunted small game and birds with. A few years shy of 16 I was scaling cliffs, cave diving, spearing sharks for sport and making all my pocket change with the point of a spear. Oh, and free diving as deep as 80' and pilfering stuff from the carnage of the Mariannas Turkey Shoot.

I got my Stingray from my older brother. When he got his drivers license I bought it from him. We all had some kind of jobs then, cutting grass, raking leaves, delivering papers or something. The gun company catalogs (and Sears) were great motivators for work.

Ernie

we bolted a 5HP tiller engine on a '40s wooden wagon with a V belt to drive the rear axle.
Thank goodness the old hard tires just spun a lot

We never worried about brakes
and talk about horrible steering geometry!

Just sitting still it would flip over!

In the good ole days we had better gene pool cleansing!

Got a pile of stories like that.

Did 75mph on a recliner strapped to a chunk of sheet metal being pulled by a Wildcat 700.

Got tore a new one when dad found the pics of us jumping over his pick up truck with a CR250. (was his truck and 2 others parked side to side)

Hit a house on a Yamaha Phazer. Had to learn to do some siding. Course it happening in July didn't help the situation.

Problem was I was friends with access to a well stocked diesel shop (tools) and not a whole lot to do - most everything we did involved a motor of some sort.

How none of us ended up dead is beyond me.

I've googled myself silly trying to find an image of the Red Baron with no luck. I did find this old Kmart advertisement from 1977 with Green Machines or Red Barons on sale for $15.88, your choice, but I can't get it to post from my Droid.
[img:left]http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=19770518&id=Ww9UAAAAIBAJ&sjid=rowDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6679,2859503[/img]

but did you do that standing up?

O Lordy do some of these stories bring back vivid memories. I'm from the late '40s early '50s growing up.

First introduction to pure and un-adulterated pain and suffering. Standing up and pumping hard on the bicycle when the chain broke and I landed astride the crossbar.

Some time way back there all us boy kids saw Ivanhoe. I fell in love with Liz Taylor.
There for a long while we did jousts on bicycles. Long piece of scrap lumber from the saw mill for a lance, left over WWII helmets, and garbage can lids for shields. I had what passed for a dragon on mine. MOre like a pregnant earth worm with fins.

Peddling bicycles as fast as you could while trying to manage all the stuff you were holding in your hands and coming togehter resulted in some spectacular crashes.

Yea I did the Big Wheel thing down some nasty hills, even when we got too big to get our legs under the handle bars to the peddles and had to drape 'em over the handle bars.

But for a real trip tuck two or three kids inside a big ol' tractor tire and try the same hill, when we were lucky and didn't hit anything we could make it clear to the other side of town.

Guaranteed, You'll be comin' out of the tire with head spins!

I remember a kid trying to jump a drainage ditch on his 26" bike with a sheet metal "tank"

He sliced his sack open on it and you could see his 'nads. Plain as day.
Very little blood but an impressive wound!

I can still see the scar after 40 years from my big wheel accident. A bush and a fire hydrant and six stitches. Thankfully no sack damage, gives me the hebejebes thinking about that.