Hmm, lots of things, some of which as a parent I probably would pull my hair out (what I have left) over lol. Anyone remember creepy crawlers, which you made by pouring this goop into molds then putting them in this heat unit to bake? It was ‘reformulated’ because too many kids got burned with the unit (and I am not saying it should have been left on the market), but it was a lot of fun (and being a kid, the aspect of possibly getting hurt probably added to the fun…like I said, would be a thing I as a parent look at it and say “you have to be kidding me, who would let a kid have that” Later on, thanks to “Steal This Book” by Abbie Hoffman, discovering you could make one heck of a smoke bomb mixture out of caramelized sugar and saltpeter that could be tricky to make without getting hurt.
I think, too, I look at kids today and I am nostalgic for the life we had in other ways that they don’t have. There wasn’t the organized stuff for kids back then, our lives weren’t packaged the way kids are today, we didn’t have organized play dates, we didn’t have that many organized activities (little league was around, of course, and school sports and activities). While there was emphasis on getting good grades in school, we didn’t have the pressure that kids have today, even young ones, it saddens me when I hear kids in grade school and middle school who actually know their GPA…and in high school, you took AP classes if you were interested in them, you did activities and music because you wanted to, not because it would look good on a college resume. We had a lot of fun to ourselves, we had a lot more freedom to do things, sometimes not all that safe (there was an old dairy farm when I was a little kid, maybe 7 or 8, we used to ‘go exploring’ to get to, and we had things like shingle fights and climbed on the roof, not exactly totally safe things to do), we had pickup baseball and football games (including the mud bowls we all loved so much, playing in the rain), a lot of that, at least where I live, is gone.
Then again, nostalgia is nostalgia, and it isn’t always reality. As kids, looking back at when my parents grew up (they grew up in NYC, in the 1930’s aka the Great Depression), to us it seemed like they had a lot more freedom, parents thought nothing of my mother and friends going to the World’s fair in 1939 by themselves (my mom was 12) from the Bronx, or riding the subway downtown or wandering all over the city, to us kids in the burbs, where our world was limited by how far we could walk or ride our bikes, and where our parents didn’t give us the freedom they talked about, it seemed like a better time back then (the depression? My mom’s family was lucky, her dad worked for the Comptroller of Union Carbide, my dad’s father was a stone mason, on the other end of things in that troubled time).
Other things i am nostalgic for? When we had some money, going to the local convenience store we could ride our bikes to, and buying candy (jawbreakers, atomic fire balls) and those wonderful balsawood gliders and propeller planes were would fly until our arms hurt, and for the couple of days before we couldn’t glue or tape them any more, flew more then WWII combat pilots did:). My old train setup that I spent hours working on and playing with (and if I ever get my basement fixed up, which I have been working on for only 20 years or so, I’ll build a more elaborate one, if I can find the time…), having the time. As someone who grew up tinkering with cars, I also look back at a time when I had the time and cars were simple enough to work on (modern cars are a quandary for me; for me they are too complex for me to work on, but on the other hand, you don’t have to work on them too much because they are so complex:).