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In the mid 70's Evil Knievel tried to jump snake river canyon, Fonzi from Happy Days jumped his motorcycle over a bunch of cars or trucks, I don't remember the exact details.

Anyway, this was inspiring for kids in the middle of nowhere with more time on their hands than things to do.

So we made ramps at the end of a dead end street.

There was a starting point, about 100 yards from the ramp, the game was to go as fast as possible on your bicycle, hit the ramp, and try to fly the farthest possible. The landing points were marked to see who was the winner. I don't know if it was my bike, or willpower to impress, but I always managed to win this competition.

After a couple weeks of these 1 foot high ramps, one of my friends hauls out a 4x8 sheet of 1/4 inch plywood, and a sawhorse.

The new ramp is installed.

"so, who goes first?" there were a few grumbles and not me's and finally I said I'd give it a shot.

I headed down the road to the starting point, my friends gathered around at the end of the ramp, and I was off, racing the bike as fast as I could and hit the ramp...

For the purpose of this experiment, the 1/4 inch plywood could have either been the best choice of material or the worst, I suppose it depends on what sort of outcome you are trying to achieve.

Anyway, when I hit the ramp the plywood bowed, when I got near the end it sprang back up and I was launched into the air. I remember looking down at my friends who's heads were a good 10 feet below me and thinking 'this can't be good'. So in midair I got off the bike and pushed it away so that I could land without it. Heck I was falling from only 15 feet, we jumped off barn roofs for fun.

Stobis, a kid 2 years younger than us thought what I did was real cool, so he wanted to go next. He stayed on the bike and, well, the result wasn't pretty. The ramp came down, never to be used again.

In the mid 70's Evil Knievel tried to jump snake river canyon, Fonzi from Happy Days jumped his motorcycle over a bunch of cars or trucks, I don't remember the exact details.

Anyway, this was inspiring for kids in the middle of nowhere with more time on their hands than things to do.

So we made ramps at the end of a dead end street.

There was a starting point, about 100 yards from the ramp, the game was to go as fast as possible on your bicycle, hit the ramp, and try to fly the farthest possible. The landing points were marked to see who was the winner. I don't know if it was my bike, or willpower to impress, but I always managed to win this competition.

After a couple weeks of these 1 foot high ramps, one of my friends hauls out a 4x8 sheet of 1/4 inch plywood, and a sawhorse.

The new ramp is installed.

"so, who goes first?" there were a few grumbles and not me's and finally I said I'd give it a shot.

I headed down the road to the starting point, my friends gathered around at the end of the ramp, and I was off, racing the bike as fast as I could and hit the ramp...

For the purpose of this experiment, the 1/4 inch plywood could have either been the best choice of material or the worst, I suppose it depends on what sort of outcome you are trying to achieve.

Anyway, when I hit the ramp the plywood bowed, when I got near the end it sprang back up and I was launched into the air. I remember looking down at my friends who's heads were a good 10 feet below me and thinking 'this can't be good'. So in midair I got off the bike and pushed it away so that I could land without it. Heck I was falling from only 15 feet, we jumped off barn roofs for fun.

Stobis, a kid 2 years younger than us thought what I did was real cool, so he wanted to go next. He stayed on the bike and, well, the result wasn't pretty. The ramp came down, never to be used again.

When I was maybe 6 or 7 years old, my sister told me that Rebecca was in love with me. 3 years older than me, my sister, I don't know how she found this information.

I filed this information away in my head.

A couple weeks later, in the play yard, it was just me and rebecca, dancing in the snow, I can still smell her. Most likely just cheap soap, but she had a fresh smell.

Anyway we danced in the snow, together and had fun. Afterwards, we are in class and the teacher asks, "what did you do during the break"

Becky is the first to raise her hand to say that she spent the time with me in the snow.

The boys started chanting, "wayne likes girls"

Dumbasses, screwed up my whole relationship with becky

One summer, a couple of guys opened a shop to sell a bunch of shit that no one really had interest in buying, BUT, they also sold candies that you couldn't get anywhere else.

Two of my friends were molested by these two guys.

15 years old, taking the law into my own hands, I went into the shop with another friend, told him to keep them occupied in the basement without getting molested.

While he was with the pedophiles, I went to the back of the shop and left the back door unlocked, figuring they never opened it and never checked.

My friend was happy to get the hell out of the basement, and we both left, after buying candy...

That night, we went to the back door,still open

Baseball bats in hand, we destroyed everything we saw

And then left

There was a small writeup in the local paper and the pedofiles left town

One evening, bubba and I are at the town telephone booth calling, I don't remember who.

Bubba would take pennies into his father's workshop and grind then to the size of dimes so that we could use the payphone for less.

Anyway, we finished calling whoever it was and were just hanging out.

Across the street was a bar, yes, difficult to imagine that there was a bar in a town of 200, but it is true

And some knucklehead comes stagering out of the bar, crosses the street to where we are,and is rambling on about nothing. Then he looks at bubba and says "your name must be darryl, all fat kids are called darryl"

and he staggerd off to his car

bubba was pissed, yes he was a bit heavy, but this guy was an asshole.

I told bubba to give me one of his penny-dimes and called the cops. Told them that there was a very drunk guy in a chevy impala heading west and I was worried for his safety and the safety of others on the road.

No idea if he got stopped or not, about 15 miles from the police station to his last known whereabouts

Bubba decided that winter that we could make money as trappers.

He got some traps from I don't know where, and we headed out into the forest, having no idea what we were trying to trap or what to do with whatever we did trap.

Fortunatly, we trapped nothing, however, near the comunity treehouse, bubba cornered a muskrat and killed it with a hammer.

He then spent most of the day figuring out how to skin it; once that was done, he didn't know what to do with the carcass or the pelt...

My new best friend and I decided to go fishing, at "Jack's pond"

Looking back, I can't imagine what we hoped to catch in a pond, but it was a nice day, and why not, who cares if we catch anything at all.

Bubba, my friend, caught something. Something big.

Took him 10 mins to reel it in.

A snapping turtle.

Bubba had no way to recuperate his hook from the turtle, so he found a stick and proceeded to beat the crap out of the turtle until it was dead.

I never went fishing with him again at Jack's pond

It is amazing that in a small town population 200, that, as a kid, I could find so much trouble to get into, and yet, never get caught.

There was a chestnut tree next to the bank (yes, in the 1970's there were still banks in tiny towns).

Anyway, come fall, lots of chestnuts on the ground, and we picked them up and hid behind the bank with a lookout in front. As soon as the lookout judged that a car was heading through town well in excess of the speed limited he'd give us a sign and a barrage of chestnuts would go flying out at the car.

It was all fun and games until the cops showed up one day and questioned every kid in the neighborhood.

I got questioned.

I asked how fast they were going.

Officer says "what"

The car, how fast was it going, if it was going 30 miles an hour, the posted speed limit, it could have easily stopped and identified whoever was throwing chestnuts at cars.

"harumff, I know it was you and your 'gang', just stop"

"Wasn't me (which in fact was true, I wasn't there the night in question), but I'll spread the word not to do that. I suppose everyone would be happy to comply if you could somehow stop people from speeding through town. The streetlights are dim and we're on skateboards and bicycles. Someone could get hurt."

He set up a radar trap every night for the next 3 weeks....

Didn't really matter, chestnut season was over and snow started to fall.....

LOL!!

A guy is driving down a county road and his tire blows out. He jacks up the car, takes the tire off, places the lug nuts in the hubcap while he replaces the tire and...

A truck passes, hitting the hubcap and the lug nuts are dispersed into the wind.

The guy is parked in front of an insaine asylum. One of the residents is watching the whole thing.

The guy is beside himself, what'll I do now????!!!

The resident says "hey buddy, don't panic, all you got to do is take off one lug nut from each tire so that you have 3 on the spare tire and you should be able to get to a garage."

The guy says, that's an excellent idea. But, what the hell, what are you doing in an insane asylum with a mind like that?

Guy says, I might be crazy, but I'm not stupid.

From explosives to beekeeping? That's odd.

I know a beekeeper that lives in Manitoba, but that isn't where he realy lives. We'll just use that address for the story.

When he was young he was into rockets. He would blend his own fuel to power the rockets to send them off into space. Of course the rockets never made it to space.

Anyway, he became somewhat of an explosives expert, he'd go into the local pharmacy and buy all the ingredients he needed to... I'll say wreak havoc..... The guy at the pharmacy knows exactly what the kid could do with the ingredients, but boys will be boys...

One halloween he decides he's going to blow something up. The nasty old man down the road. YES! He's going to blow up his outhouse!

So he makes his cocktail, his explosive, and late at night, on halloween, tosses it down the hole in the outhouse.

Unfortunately, he miscalculated the explosive force of his creation.... He didn't get 100 feet away before everything blewup and shit and boards were flying past him and he realised that what he had done was probably not a good idea.

This story in memory of a good friend

There was a group of kids in my town that had a treehouse. The treehouse in question was at the corner of an abandoned field next to my parent's house.

Joey and I were never invited in. One day there was no one there and we decided to take a look.

We climbed up the tree to the treehouse...

We gained access...

I said to Joey, "let's get out of here, this thing could fall out of the tree at any minute, it is not stable".

Joey, being Joey, Said OK, then we exited the treehouse and he proceeded to push it off the branches. It was quite spectacular watching it crash to the ground.

Which of course was the exact moment that Johny Beemer arrived to witness what we had done.

Johny was 2 years older and a good 2 feet taller, and he was part of the exclusive club.

He came at me full of fury and I was yelling "Johny, stop, Johny stop, IT JUST FELL DOWN, the whole design was flawed"

Somehow, I'll never know how, I managed to get Johny to listen to me. What happened next was that I designed a much better treehouse, much bigger, with electricity and yes, heat for the winter, although, looking back, I wonder why no one was asphiciated...

The new design actually brought all the rivals, and nobodies together to play cards, everynight. We'd make up all kinds of strange card games. Crazy 8 with 6 decks of cards. CHEAT with 8 decks of cards... Our boredom was endless yet our imaginations were limitless.

What is the difference between a dead bird?

It is almost 40 years I've struggled with the question and the answer.

I will take the liberty of changing names and places to protect both the innocent and the guilty. It sould be noted that the guilty were innocent children at the time. There is a saying, boys will be boys.

Then the internet advanced and good, clean, bad, fun just seemed to have vanished.

Anyway, the internet is not important to the story, so let's forget about it.

I remember when I was 12 and school let out. The summers seemed to last forever. So many things to explore, so many streams and ponds to fish in.

I'd wake up with the sun, which in my area meant around 6am, no alarm clock needed.

A bowl of cereal and I was off in the countryside looking for bugs or snakes or whatever I could find until 9 o'clock when I could go pounding on my friend Joey's house to ask his mother if he was awake.

He never was and I'd have to wait another hour while he ate his cereal, got dressed, and we headed out to do whatever boys decide to do.

Summers were long, at the time, it seemed, so we managed to invent all kinds of crazy shit to do.

One time, I invented a slingshot. Not that the slingshot wasn't already invented, just that it was invented with crap I found laying around. So we had our slingshots and went around the small town using them.

They worked best with BB gun pellets. One night we are walking around the community center, about 500 yards away from tne center itself, and we got the stupid idea to fire off some BBs with our homemade slingshots towards the band that was setting up.

We were snaked in the trees and so damed good with the slingshots by this time that we could hit just about anything.

So we sent out a salvo. DING DING DING off the drums and shit. I heard one musician say "What the fuck was that?".

We waited a few minutes and then fired off another salvo. DING DING DING. The guys seeting up got real pissed. One said "I must be kids throwing stones." The other said "There ain't a god damed kid in sight!"

It was right about then that me and Joey decided we might be better off going somewhere else.

Joey was't much for books, but he was my best friend. So I did the reading and presented him ideas. These ideas started out first with simply cutting off match heads, putting them in a bottle, creating a fuse with 2 other matches and then running away aftering lighting the fuse.

They just made a big noise, the bottles didn't even break. But it was cool.

Back to the books.... One day I'm in the library and I discover a book, I have no idea what the book was actually about, but I found plans for a better fireworks project.

That we were not actually killed by this idea still amazes me.

So the idea (never try this, anyone), is that you take a shotgun shell, glue a cork to it, push a nail into the cork, toss the fucking thing in the air and when it lands, the shell goes off.

We had a problem of balance i think. We had to toss the damned thing in the air 5 times before the thing exploded, each time running to hide behind a dumpster.

I suppose at the time I didn't realise that a shotgun shell, fired, with no shotgun barrell to contain it, woul d do unpredictable things. I also wonder who the fuck put that book in the library.

Anyway, we were OK behind our bunker, but the shotgun shell took out someones window and we got the fuck out of there real quick.


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