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Does learning to spray paint count?
Mike
If for spray painting public property like subway cars, overpasses, bridges, etc., then it's a very NYC 1970s retro thing, but probably not Golden Era.
Does learning to spray paint count?
Mike
Putting your two GE toy items together, a Mr. Potato Head character made a good target for our BB guns. As you say, we roamed the backyards, creek, and empty lots shooting at whatever. Since the creek ran right behind our house we very often floated paper and balsa boats and shot at the moving targets as they floated down the creek. More difficult than it sounds, and we wasted a lot of BB's on such activity.There was a short piece on the radio this morning about the original Mr Potato Head. It was a kit of eyes, ears, nose etc made to be placed on real potatoes. I reminisced to my wife of my favourite toy when I was 7 or 8...a potato gun. It was metal and fired a projectile of potato at a fair velocity. A potato in one hand the gun in the other. You plunged the barrel into the potato and snapped off the chunk. I created an air tight seal at the barrel and then with a squeeze the air shot the potato bullet. I was the first in the neighbourhood to get one but once seen all the guys bought their own. We had tremendous fun chasing each other, shooting each other. Although it greatly irritated my mother to be wasting good food....she was a child of the depression so wasting food was sinful and in her world this was a great waste of an edible item. The potato guns lasted the summer and we graduated to more sophisticated pursuits and when I was about 10 received my first BB gun. I still marvel that we were allowed to roam the neighbourhood, in packs, each armed with our BB rifles shooting at things animate and inanimate and each other.
You reminded me of my very low key bomb making. We would scrape the heads off wooden matches and pack them into a spent .303 shell casing with a fuse. It was more of a rocket than a bomb as we would place it on a piece of wood at about a 45 degree launch angle, light the fuse and watch with glee as our rocket spanned the length of our very long yard. We lost interest fairly quickly as scraping the matches was tedious and the reward very short lived. On the chemistry side of things my junior year of high school chem teacher passed me under the proviso that I would never ever take another chem class in my life. He was the only chem teacher and knew that if he flunked me I would be back the next year as I needed one science class for Uni entrance. I swore to honour his request as keeping it would be the easiest thing I ever promised to do.Putting your two GE toy items together, a Mr. Potato Head character made a good target for our BB guns. As you say, we roamed the backyards, creek, and empty lots shooting at whatever. Since the creek ran right behind our house we very often floated paper and balsa boats and shot at the moving targets as they floated down the creek. More difficult than it sounds, and we wasted a lot of BB's on such activity.
Before we were old enough to get BB guns we played Army with real rifles. (true story)
My best friend's father had brought back two Japanese Arisaka rifles from the Pacific after WWII. In those days there was no ammunition available for those, and even if we had any, in those days kids were credited with enough sense not to shoot each other. So, the rifles were kept in the garage and anytime we wanted to play Army my friend grabbed one and I grabbed the other and away we went.
In the post-BB gun era we had real .22 rifles when we were still too young to drive. My cousin and I would put our rifles (they actually belonged to my uncle) across our bike handlebars and ride to the grocery store and buy ammunition. In those days grocery stores here (Nashville) sold ammunition (and would sell it to kids). We would each put up a quarter and buy one box of .22 shorts for 50 cents.
Speaking of passtimes, by careful rationing that one box would keep us occupied for a whole summer afternoon.
As a contrast to the so-called Modern Era, a lot of what we did as "passtimes" in the latter-part of the GE would to get a call first to the cops, then a SWAT Team, then mental health counselors, and we'd all be put in some sort of juvenile incarceration. (And it would go on our "permanent record".)
By coincidence there was a PBS biography this week of Dr. James Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018 for his cancer research. He is the same age as me, and in the show described fondly his bomb-making activity at the age we are describing here. We did that, also.
A colleague of mine - also the same age as me and Dr. Wilson, once said that if he had his way the admission test for engineering school would consist of two questions: 1) When did you make your first bomb? and 2) How did it work? If you didn't have a good answer for those two questions you were not worthy of admission to engineering school.
As one more data point, when our Chemistry Department chairman recently retired he mentioned that his childhood bomb-making activities led to his life and career in chemistry.
Put all this under the heading of why the GE was better than now.
You reminded me of my very low key bomb making. We would scrape the heads off wooden matches and pack them into a spent .303 shell casing with a fuse.
We never possessed that level of sophistication!Home made black powder and nitrogen tri iodide were my modus operandi.
Amateur Radio, the ORIGINAL internet...
Would like to shoot poor defenceless pheasants too.
Would Bridge count?
Black-crayon or pencil graffiti was much more the mainstay of the Era. Especially goatees, horns, glasses, and blacked-out teeth on advertising posters.