Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire "Amusements" of My Childhood

I grew up in Fargo, ND. It really never mattered what season it was, it seems to me we were always outside. Any kind of ball or just our imagination was enough to keep us entertained. No one did drugs or got into trouble with the law, we were supposed to come home when the street lights went on. I'm glad I grew up during the time I did.

Whatever I did involved being outside. From the time I got home from school if any critter season was open I chased them til dark. If no open season I roamed, roughhoused with other younguns close around, did dangerous stuff on bicycles, smoked cigarette butts if anybody stole them out of house ashtrays. Weekends fall and winter same things. Warmer weather brought hikes to the creek a half to a whole mile behind our house or the neighbor’s to wade and fish. All that or maybe just ganging up and doing kid stuff we’d be embarrassed to talk about years later. Oh what a life, free of responsibility.

Lots of people do

I had hundreds of toy soldiers, tanks, guns, all the trimmings. I had epic battles played out on the cellar floor!
Hot wheels cars and tracks. They had one called Thunder Shift, which a hand lever propelled the cars around the track.
But the wide open outdoors were the best toys a developing youngster could have! Salamanders and crawdads in the creek, and I was lucky enough to be entrusted with a good .22 rifle. Starlings and blackbirds, chipmunks And groundhogs.
As I got older, with The Old Man having an auto salvage, working on and playing with real live cars!
Like I said previously, I was the envy of most of the boys around! I honestly wouldn’t trade childhoods with a prince, because I was one lucky fellow!
7mm

Firewood. We burned approximately 40 face cord a year to warm the big ranch style house my Dad built in the early 70's. That's a lot of carrying, splitting, stacking, then hauling to the house only to re-stack it in the basement. I hated every stage.

In hindsight, my tough-as-nails Dad did the vast majority of the work.

I originally thought this thread was about things we didn’t like.

What I liked.

The thing’s already mentioned and playing in the ditches and woodlots, building forts, tree houses, shooting BB guns and pellet rifles, bows, slingshots, fishing, building pit and rope traps as seen on TV (that never worked) BMX bike riding, my buddies Honda 3 wheeler, going up north to my grandparents cabin and roaming the woods with my 10/22 slaying chipmunks and building deer blinds with my grandpa and uncle’s, salmon and steelhead fishing. Football with my buddies and snowball fights.

From about 6-12 I spent more time playing in the ditches and woodlots than anything else. Everything from BB guns, to tag, to playing war with toy guns and walkie talkies, to catching turtles and frogs, to forts and rafts was centered around the ditches and wood lots.

When I was 12 we went to my Great Uncle Rodgers farm in the country.
He had 2 boys in their mid-20's still at home.

Billy and Pat Moran.

Everything they had they paid $50 for, they had about 6 to 8 side by side
shotguns, only one barrel worked on each of them, they had several
coon dogs, rabbit dogs, all bought for $50 ea.
They had 2 pickup trucks, both bought for $50 ea.

These boys were not inbred, just little education i guess, $50 was their rule.

I lived and loved to go to the farm and shoot and hunt every weekend
they never bought a license or cared about seasons.

I was twelve in 58'

Using large pieces of cardboard as sails on a skateboard (you can move pretty fast with 30-40 mph winds). Whomever stayed on the longest won.
Lighting a remote control truck on fire after dousing it in lighter fluid and chasing my sister down the street with it (got my ass busted for that one ha!)
cap guns and those bows and arrows that had the suction cups on the arrows on horseback playing cowboys and indians. That was the best, but falling off the horse into a bed of goat's head thorns sucked. We still did it pretty routinely (riding, not falling)

and rock wars ...

I forgot about rock wars. Got my head cracked by a “dirt clod” with a rock in it. LOL. And king of the mountain.

Or trying to take out the legs of the kid running up a sled hill after he’d just tried taking out your legs while running back up the hill.

King of the ...what ever pile ...good times ..been is some monster snow ball fights to ! Somebody had to be crying hard before we would relent ..lol

Btw those fancy white rocks that folks dress up there trees in the yard with.....load'em up boys !

We made a sport out of making the most lethal snowballs. Packing em down hard, spraying them with water and letting them freeze back up, all sorts of things to make them hit harder. Great times.

Lionel train set when I was inside. Blowing up army men with firecrackers, hockey, baseball, and best shooting rats at the garbage dump. It was better than shooting p-dogs with my 22. Dad sold federal champ 22lr's and I could have all I wanted up to a brick a week.

I missed out on shooting rats at the dump. My dad took my mom on one of there first dates to the dump to shoot rats. LOL. That and carp spearing and smelt dipping. I heard stories and saw pics but the dumps were shut down for shooting and the smelt runs ended before my time.

My mom and dad told stories about hearing the rats crawl and then turning the headlights on to pop em. Kill the lights wait a few minutes and repeat.

I was born in 48 so our dump was open for whatever.

My parents were born in 51 and 53.

BB guns
Catching tadpoles
Dirt clod fights (usually there were rocks in the clods)
Playing war in the woods behind the house
Riding our bikes down the street from the hill down to the end where there was a lot of gravel. Point was to hit the brakes and see if you could stay upright, which we usually didn't
Riding our bikes over large dirt mounds as fast as we could to see how far we could go through the air and stay upright which we usually didn't
Climbing trees
Smoke grapevine

Yep. Die Hard # 3

My father in law and his brother grew up in Alaska during the territory days and they both said that the things they found in the dumps in Alaska were the things of little kid’s dreams. All sorts of discarded hardware would pop up from time to time. They’d found a couple of grenades and brought them back to the cabin where the old man promptly took possession of the grenades. The old man then proceeded to show the boys how to blow stumps…