I grew up with lawn darts and, yeah, M-80's. It was fun, indeed, but the real fun was had by my grandpa, who was able to buy actual dynamite at the hardware store...as a kid.
I'm 50 and I remember seeing dynamite being sold in the small farm community hardware stores outside Denver like in the early 80s! Lol it's crazy how recent you could buy dynamite at a hardware store
It was considered a labor-saving tool at the time. People would remove large tree stumps, boulders, dig large holes and ditches, etc.
It's crazy how times change and how people change. And yeah, bad people did do bad things with it. Check out the "Bath School Disaster". It's a wonder dynamite was still easy to buy even after that. You could order it from the Sears catalogue!
I was 12, in 1983. I could walk to the Armory in town in R.I. and buy a Lb of black gunpowder... no i.d., no questions. We'd take take it home, , dig a 2' deep hole, run some powder for a fuse, bury the 1lb container in the hole, light it and run to the shed to watch it go BOOM! The good old days.
When my grandfather died, we found half a dozen sticks of dynamite in his safe, INSIDE his house lol. He used them for blasting stumps out of the ground, apparently.
M80's.....pfft, you thought they liked you until you found out I got to pay with Pineapples...1/4 stick of dynamite!. The fish we unknowingly killed as youths. Oopsie.
I only heard of pineapples as a myth back in the day lol I never got to see one but my friend Anthony used to make his own little 1/4 stick pipe bombs with gun powder. We called him MacGyver because he was always making shit. Little psycho lol
Funny. When I was a very young child (30 years in the past or something) we had a neighbor who collected militia and a lot of other stuff. he was heavily into Surprise Egg figures. I had some and we traded. I received a military helmet and a chain from a machine gun with one round in it. It was a big box of figures so there was some value coming into the trade from my side too. Only warning was that I should never ever hit it with a hammer. Boy was my mum angry after finding out. There was a third item but I don't remember what it was. Maybe a belt or something else. Times where different back then, high trust society. Edit: it is possible that the round was not live anymore and the warning was just to increase the trading value of the collectible item. But I was too young to know for sure.
You laugh, but: some neighborhood kids lit one m80 during July 4. And less than 10min cops came to my house because my kid was just hanging out, watching… my kid wouldn’t rat the boys out so the cop decided to come to my house…
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u/SinoSoul 1d ago edited 1d ago
Real *polonium
plutoniumin toy bomb, real coke in Coca Cola. Kids back then lived their best lives.