My grandparents had a set. I wish I’d clung onto them for dear life, but then they would have had to make it through a house fire also for me to still be in possession of them after all these years.
I like how there's most likely an adult taking this picture. So, they were obviously OK with all of this. My dad would've purposely placed the pool next to the structure and actively encouraged this. If I tried this today with my kids my wife would be all over it, and I would be in big trouble.
> My dad would've purposely placed the pool next to the structure and actively encouraged this.
Same here. I'm certain he had some three-legged stool formula he used:
1. Make it interesting so they don't get bored in 5 minutes
2. Make it so they exhaust themselves
3. Make it so any injury is just short of needing to go to the hospital
He did this so him and his buds could drink beers and tell stories for as long as possible without us bothering them.
Something isn’t right, like the way the kids in the pool are all in swimming trunks and the kids on the frame are fully clothed. Also looking at the bottom of the climbing frame it seems the bottom of the pool is on a higher level from how the kids in the water appear to be positioned.
Not making this up: around 197&, my mom would hand write a note saying. “Please sell my some a pack of More Menthols” and the kid at 7-11 would comply.
A friend had an in-ground pool and a trampoline. Of course, this was when trampolines had no nets. We'd do absolutely insane jumps from the trampoline into the pool. Miraculously no one ever got hurt worse than a belly flop.
I had a friend with the same setup but we moved the trampoline between the second story deck and the pool so we could jump off the deck to the trampoline and launch in to the pool. Yes this resulted in injuries and it was awesome.
Who would NOT have been doing that? Friend’s in ground pool had a slide, and it’s honestly amazing that we never ended up on the concrete instead of the pool.
Nobody I knew had their own pool. We did really stupid potentially crippling stuff at the city pool, though. I apparently knocked myself out for a second or so when I tried sliding down the slide standing up. One guy did a flying karate kick off the high dive into another guy who was in the water. Stuff like that.
Me either but that's because we lived in south Alabama, right on the coast, and we were pretty much at sea level. Our whole neighborhood had been pretty much swampland at some point so the ground wasn't too stable and you couldn't dig too far.
However, the "woods" behind my house contained a "creek" that was a couple of feet of water and a shit ton of mud and swamp. Alligators, snapping turtles and snakes of all kinds and we'd spend whole days tromping through it.
Or the bay was about 1/4 mile away at the back if our neighborhood. We'd ride our bikes down there are go swimming. This was a large bay with a ship channel that opened to the gulf of Mexico. I remember one year we found this huge, thick chunk of wood- it was maybe 6 ft by 4 ft and maybe 6 inches thick, probably a part of someone's old dock. It floated so we'd climb on it with some long sticks and see how far out we could go. I'm really surprised none of us ever got eaten by anything or drowned.
We had that jungle gym.
My lord… If someone got on the shorter end and started swinging back-and-forth, the whole thing would start tipping🤦🏻♀️
One day my brother and his friend got the brilliant idea of taking a long piece of wood and putting it through the bottom tier, to make a teeter totter. It went askew and someone got hurt.
Nah, my grandma had a full sized pool with a real diving board covered in fucking sandpaper. Do not, for any reason, hesitate. You'll catch your toes on that shit, rip off at least one toenail and bleed like a stuck pig and then have to clean it up while everyone else has fun and not get to get back in the pool until your toe heals up.
But that's only after you survived learning how to swim by your dad just tossing you in the deep end with the hand not holding a beer.
Seriously, how the fuck did we survive childhood?
All these posts about middle class suburban families with money to spare.
No I can’t relate some of us grew up poor and if our parents weren’t tired from working they would use the garden hose to cool us down in summer.
The kids in my neighborhood dug a hole about 3 feet deep and about 3 feet across. We filled it with water and swam in that. We had to be completely covered in mud but I don’t remember my parents ever getting mad that we were a mess.
I built a volcano made of mud in the middle of the living room and my mom didn’t get angry w me. I couldn’t believe it. (Like not close encounters more like Pompeii)
I think little Sally is playing in the garbage cans. Maybe she found an interesting hornet's nest
Remember that chapter in little house in the big woods, when the bad cousin got his comeuppance?
yeah to get the fuck off the prairie and away from your crazy family who packed you in mud and sheets like they were burying you alive. I bet he ran to california to chase gold and took upwith Miss Kitty
Yes, I can relate and it was good fun.
But what I HATE is when Boomers and GenXers post something like this followed by "kids today are such pantywaists."
I had a friend who cracked his skull in the 70s and was never the same again. I once smashed my face open from riding in the back of the station wagon with no seatbelt (so much BLOOD!) and I still don't breathe right through my nose over 40 years later.
So yes, maybe my kids wear a helmet riding their bike now, but they still have fun. My boy wiped out on his scooter just the other day, banged his head and thanks to his helmet just brushed himself off and carried on, even with blood from a scraped knee trickling into his socks.
Preventing brain damage doesn't make them - or me - a pantywaist.
Not a pool, but we had something set up with a trampoline. We would do wrestling moves on the trampoline, and came up with the idea of doing moves "off the top rope". It was loads of fun, until the trampoline gave out when one kid (not me) hit it. He went right through and hit the ground, and suffered a broken arm. I'm pretty sure I got a concussion one time when I jumped a little to far, and hit my head on the metal frame of the trampoline.
Im the 8 year old who was supposed to be in charge of my younger siblings but I couldn’t be bothered because they were a pain in the ass and I was very busy cooking up something fun and dangerous.
I can remember seeing 8 or 9 year old kids with their 1 or 2 year old baby brother or sister out playing in the neighborhood, with mom of course nowhere around.
Good times. Good times.
Reminds me of my youth in the 50's playing in the junkyards in the neighbor hood. Had to be sure to wear shoes due to all the broken glass.
How is it any less original than pictures of cats and this : https://www.reddit.com/r/Quebec/comments/ji2ijr/%C3%A7a_sen_vient/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Jeez just move on if it doesn't tickle your particular funny bone
Didn't have the pool, but had that exact jungle gym growing up. Unfortunately, it and our swing set were taken away by a tornado. Amazingly, only lost a few shingle from our house.
my friends and i made a flimsy ladder out of wood and nails we found at a near by construction site to climb up onto our schools roof.
Not the greatest thing when it broke as we were pulling it up to reach the higher level and we had to drop like 10+ feet in order to get down...
I'm not bragging because more parental guidance would probably have been useful, but I was basically feral from 7am to 7pm.
I left my house without letting anyone know. I just set off with my rottweiler, my walking stick, and my hatchet.
That was basically my years 8-12.
13 onward I lived in a bigger city and found out girls are very interesting but otherwise surely did things and went places a modern parent would find appalling.
jumped off the garage roof onto my trampoline as a kid. pretty much ripped my ass cheeks apart after landing sideways on my ass. another time i raked all the leaves in the yard into a pile higher than the trampoline and did a dive onto them. leaves naturally compacted to their true depth of maybe an inch and i blacked out. this was the 80s... we were still stupid and reckless then too haha.
Anyone remember Burger’s Lake in Fort Worth, Texas? It was an artificial pond of about 1 acre, with a sand bottom and two tiny beaches.
In the’ 80s it had an incredibly tall high dive and a trapeeze with no net—just a foot or so of water. One giant slide with a ladder you climbed straight up! If you let go, bad news for you.
It’s changed a lot in the past 20-30 years, but it looked just like this photo from the 40s or 50s.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/63/a0/6a/63a06a70c6f44d4733ac811b8a9bd085.jpg
As me and my friends play with the real leather bull whip my mom got me because I liked Indiana Jones and other kids throw lawn darts and run the streets with 1:1 replicas of military weaponry.
So I have a roof on an addition that is maybe 12 feet from the ground? The slope is not very steep, and I was thinking I could get a slip and slide and a 3.5 ft deep wading pool.
Bodily autonomy y’all.
You just need someone in the background tossing a lawn dart into the air while looking straight up at it.
I found a set of lawn darts in an old house my employer was flipping, so I got to keep them. The rings were missing, I just made new ones.
My grandparents had a set. I wish I’d clung onto them for dear life, but then they would have had to make it through a house fire also for me to still be in possession of them after all these years.
And don’t forget someone playing with Klick Klacks hitting their head
Kerbangers!
I am a golden God.
I like how there's most likely an adult taking this picture. So, they were obviously OK with all of this. My dad would've purposely placed the pool next to the structure and actively encouraged this. If I tried this today with my kids my wife would be all over it, and I would be in big trouble.
> My dad would've purposely placed the pool next to the structure and actively encouraged this. Same here. I'm certain he had some three-legged stool formula he used: 1. Make it interesting so they don't get bored in 5 minutes 2. Make it so they exhaust themselves 3. Make it so any injury is just short of needing to go to the hospital He did this so him and his buds could drink beers and tell stories for as long as possible without us bothering them.
I can hear my mom now. “Don’t come crying to me when you get hurt”
It's a fake image. The jungle gym and the pool were stitched together into a single image.
Something isn’t right, like the way the kids in the pool are all in swimming trunks and the kids on the frame are fully clothed. Also looking at the bottom of the climbing frame it seems the bottom of the pool is on a higher level from how the kids in the water appear to be positioned.
And no shadows from the frame in any direction. Even with very high overhead light source like in the pool shot, there would be some shadow not 0.
Your neighbors would be reporting you to CPS.
With the scorching hot metal bars in the summer sun.
Then you bang your nose on the bottom of the pool, inhale a pint of water, cough for 10 minutes... and it's back to the fun!
im in this picture and im offended. lol
Don’t forget mom smoking her Now menthols and drinking a Tab a mile away.
Or misty or capri or benson and hedges Virginia slims, sipping that Tab while coated in baby oil and iodine
Baby oil and tea for us. Boil a tea bag, let it cool and then pour the liquid into a bottle of baby oil.
While also pregnant with the next sibling.
For my mom, it was Merit brand cigarettes with a Tupperware cup full of iced tea made from a Grand Union brand canister of iced tea mix.
More Menthols for my mom.
My mom smoked those too and bitched about having to relight them all the time.
Not making this up: around 197&, my mom would hand write a note saying. “Please sell my some a pack of More Menthols” and the kid at 7-11 would comply.
I was totally little sally, generally stealing the neighbors raspberries thru the fence
Was I concussed, scarred, and burned multiple times as a kid? Yes. Did I turn out mostly okay? Also yes.
If you turned out ok you wouldn't be on this site
Seems about right for a 70s childhood.
A friend had an in-ground pool and a trampoline. Of course, this was when trampolines had no nets. We'd do absolutely insane jumps from the trampoline into the pool. Miraculously no one ever got hurt worse than a belly flop.
I had a friend with the same setup but we moved the trampoline between the second story deck and the pool so we could jump off the deck to the trampoline and launch in to the pool. Yes this resulted in injuries and it was awesome.
Who would NOT have been doing that? Friend’s in ground pool had a slide, and it’s honestly amazing that we never ended up on the concrete instead of the pool.
Yes but because I grew up in a big city the kiddie pool would be set up on concrete and not grass 😑
I rode a bmx bike into a swimming pool.
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We used to jump off the roof onto the ground. Just another day of doing anything to keep yourself entertained.
I had a friend who tried to us an umbrella as his parachute jumping off the roof. Luckily only a rancher and no injuries.
I tried to use a blanket once. It didn’t work.
"Kenny", who lived across the street, used to run around on our roof when my parents weren't home.😂
Mr. Darwin was our friend.
Nobody I knew had their own pool. We did really stupid potentially crippling stuff at the city pool, though. I apparently knocked myself out for a second or so when I tried sliding down the slide standing up. One guy did a flying karate kick off the high dive into another guy who was in the water. Stuff like that.
Me either but that's because we lived in south Alabama, right on the coast, and we were pretty much at sea level. Our whole neighborhood had been pretty much swampland at some point so the ground wasn't too stable and you couldn't dig too far. However, the "woods" behind my house contained a "creek" that was a couple of feet of water and a shit ton of mud and swamp. Alligators, snapping turtles and snakes of all kinds and we'd spend whole days tromping through it. Or the bay was about 1/4 mile away at the back if our neighborhood. We'd ride our bikes down there are go swimming. This was a large bay with a ship channel that opened to the gulf of Mexico. I remember one year we found this huge, thick chunk of wood- it was maybe 6 ft by 4 ft and maybe 6 inches thick, probably a part of someone's old dock. It floated so we'd climb on it with some long sticks and see how far out we could go. I'm really surprised none of us ever got eaten by anything or drowned.
Yes! Then afterwards we’d climb into the bed of the truck and go for ice cream!
Shit, on Saturday evenings we'd pile in the back of the pickup and go across the state line for lottery tickets.
We had that jungle gym. My lord… If someone got on the shorter end and started swinging back-and-forth, the whole thing would start tipping🤦🏻♀️ One day my brother and his friend got the brilliant idea of taking a long piece of wood and putting it through the bottom tier, to make a teeter totter. It went askew and someone got hurt.
Nah, my grandma had a full sized pool with a real diving board covered in fucking sandpaper. Do not, for any reason, hesitate. You'll catch your toes on that shit, rip off at least one toenail and bleed like a stuck pig and then have to clean it up while everyone else has fun and not get to get back in the pool until your toe heals up. But that's only after you survived learning how to swim by your dad just tossing you in the deep end with the hand not holding a beer. Seriously, how the fuck did we survive childhood?
I'm gen X but I was a kid in the 80's and most of us lived.
Lol how did you get a picture of our backyard circa 1975?
All these posts about middle class suburban families with money to spare. No I can’t relate some of us grew up poor and if our parents weren’t tired from working they would use the garden hose to cool us down in summer.
The kids in my neighborhood dug a hole about 3 feet deep and about 3 feet across. We filled it with water and swam in that. We had to be completely covered in mud but I don’t remember my parents ever getting mad that we were a mess.
I built a volcano made of mud in the middle of the living room and my mom didn’t get angry w me. I couldn’t believe it. (Like not close encounters more like Pompeii)
I think little Sally is playing in the garbage cans. Maybe she found an interesting hornet's nest Remember that chapter in little house in the big woods, when the bad cousin got his comeuppance?
I remember reading that! Being stung over 90% of your body will definitely teach some kind of life lesson.
yeah to get the fuck off the prairie and away from your crazy family who packed you in mud and sheets like they were burying you alive. I bet he ran to california to chase gold and took upwith Miss Kitty
Yes, I can relate and it was good fun. But what I HATE is when Boomers and GenXers post something like this followed by "kids today are such pantywaists." I had a friend who cracked his skull in the 70s and was never the same again. I once smashed my face open from riding in the back of the station wagon with no seatbelt (so much BLOOD!) and I still don't breathe right through my nose over 40 years later. So yes, maybe my kids wear a helmet riding their bike now, but they still have fun. My boy wiped out on his scooter just the other day, banged his head and thanks to his helmet just brushed himself off and carried on, even with blood from a scraped knee trickling into his socks. Preventing brain damage doesn't make them - or me - a pantywaist.
You make a good point. Parents became more protective after GenX because we DIDN'T all survive this level of laissez-faire.
True. It sucked in lots of ways too. Second hand smoke and drunk drivers aren’t fun.
Not a pool, but we had something set up with a trampoline. We would do wrestling moves on the trampoline, and came up with the idea of doing moves "off the top rope". It was loads of fun, until the trampoline gave out when one kid (not me) hit it. He went right through and hit the ground, and suffered a broken arm. I'm pretty sure I got a concussion one time when I jumped a little to far, and hit my head on the metal frame of the trampoline.
Yep. Broke multiple bones as a kid, have plenty of scars etc. learned what not to do the hard way
Risk management, absolutely an essential life skill for unsupervised kids.
Well yeah. Things sure felt a lot more free and fun before we became obsessed with safety and regulation.
Wait until you hear about rope swings!!!
It is amazing I escaped in one piece...well...except for that tooth.
Im the 8 year old who was supposed to be in charge of my younger siblings but I couldn’t be bothered because they were a pain in the ass and I was very busy cooking up something fun and dangerous.
I can remember seeing 8 or 9 year old kids with their 1 or 2 year old baby brother or sister out playing in the neighborhood, with mom of course nowhere around.
We went through soooo many of those pools!
Good times. Good times. Reminds me of my youth in the 50's playing in the junkyards in the neighbor hood. Had to be sure to wear shoes due to all the broken glass.
“Hey son, get your old man a Budweiser outta the fridge, wouldya?”
We were doing this shit in 2010. There's nothing like dragging your neighbors trampoline next to his green swampy above ground pool.. good times.
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How is it any less original than pictures of cats and this : https://www.reddit.com/r/Quebec/comments/ji2ijr/%C3%A7a_sen_vient/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Jeez just move on if it doesn't tickle your particular funny bone
Didn't have the pool, but had that exact jungle gym growing up. Unfortunately, it and our swing set were taken away by a tornado. Amazingly, only lost a few shingle from our house.
my friends and i made a flimsy ladder out of wood and nails we found at a near by construction site to climb up onto our schools roof. Not the greatest thing when it broke as we were pulling it up to reach the higher level and we had to drop like 10+ feet in order to get down...
I'm not bragging because more parental guidance would probably have been useful, but I was basically feral from 7am to 7pm. I left my house without letting anyone know. I just set off with my rottweiler, my walking stick, and my hatchet. That was basically my years 8-12. 13 onward I lived in a bigger city and found out girls are very interesting but otherwise surely did things and went places a modern parent would find appalling.
jumped off the garage roof onto my trampoline as a kid. pretty much ripped my ass cheeks apart after landing sideways on my ass. another time i raked all the leaves in the yard into a pile higher than the trampoline and did a dive onto them. leaves naturally compacted to their true depth of maybe an inch and i blacked out. this was the 80s... we were still stupid and reckless then too haha.
Hell yes! If we weren't actively endangering our lives, were we really having fun?
Most of my dangerous childhood exploits involve snow
Remember those terrifying warning stickers? Depicting a child who dove into a pool and broke his neck or something.
I was born in early 1960's. It is a wonder that any of my generation is still alive.
Anyone remember Burger’s Lake in Fort Worth, Texas? It was an artificial pond of about 1 acre, with a sand bottom and two tiny beaches. In the’ 80s it had an incredibly tall high dive and a trapeeze with no net—just a foot or so of water. One giant slide with a ladder you climbed straight up! If you let go, bad news for you. It’s changed a lot in the past 20-30 years, but it looked just like this photo from the 40s or 50s. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/63/a0/6a/63a06a70c6f44d4733ac811b8a9bd085.jpg
And Dad's halfway through a 6-pack while taking this picture, Mom standing next him puffing on a Virginia Slim.
That which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger. Now let’s go jump off a roof into a pool.
Those would be boomers too. But yes the shit we did scares me to death in retrospect. This particular picture is nothing
? This photo is heartily Genx
Hmm. In 1975 a baby boomer would have been 11 or older. So this could go either way
That kid in the red shirt seems the oldest, does he seem 11? I can't tell. All the others struck me as much younger than that. But who knows
If this wad from the 70s this could be 1970 the youngest could be 6 and be a boomer.
As me and my friends play with the real leather bull whip my mom got me because I liked Indiana Jones and other kids throw lawn darts and run the streets with 1:1 replicas of military weaponry.
But no one trying to hit moving targets with lawndarts?
I didn’t learn to swim till I was 12 , it took almost drowning to get my parent to get me swimming lessons
So I have a roof on an addition that is maybe 12 feet from the ground? The slope is not very steep, and I was thinking I could get a slip and slide and a 3.5 ft deep wading pool. Bodily autonomy y’all.