I don't think they would believe it nowadays?

[D_W]

I grew up in Gettysburg (civil war town in the US). Two of my relatives when they were younger would make gunpowder, and buy rocket fuse and take both to the national park at night and load the cannons with homemade black powder and set the cannons off (by inserting the rocket fuse through the muzzle of the gun - I'm sure they were set off by percussion or something at the back, and that sealed shut, but the fronts were open).

That would allow them to get in a car, head across the park somewhere else and wait for the boom. Probably would be deemed terrorists now (by the time I was in school, the park commission had plugged all of the old cannons with wood so that you couldn't put anything in them. Wasn't usually gunpowder, rather fast food wrappers stuffed in as tight as people could get them in).

 

[D_W]

One other one - somewhere around 1988, two neighbor kids down the hill from me were shooting bb guns. I was sitting at a picnic table watching them act like idiots, and at some point, they got the idea that they could shoot a BB from one gun into the barrel of the other and then fire it out from that gun after.

I told them this was a bad idea (sitting orthogonal to them as they got this idea and put it swiftly into practice). Just as I was getting up, I assured them one would be carrying the BB with them for a long time internally, and one of the two fibbed the other and said he'd done it before. I didn't manage to get both legs over the picnic table bench and I heard them clack the muzzles together and shoot...

...the kid who "had done it before" held his hand up and the BB entered one of his fingers on one side and stopped under the skin all the way on the other side.

As it wasn't my house and i had no interest in getting in trouble, I got up and walked back up the hill. The father of the boy who hadn't gotten shot razzed me later for being a chicken (he was a big tough guy - tough for real, and not great judgement) - he said "what'd you get up and run for? I held gary down and pushed the BB back around his finger and popped it out like a pimple.

What's more about that is that gary would ride up and down the road with a bb gun that was a scale model of an AR-15 (M-16 back then). Riding his bike on a highway. Both things would get you taken in now (wandering around carrying what looked like a firearm, and allowing a 9 year old kid to ride a bike on a major highway).

 

[D_W]

Remember green shield stamps, ice on the inside of windows in the morning.

The stamp gimmick was well used here at stores. I never met anyone who got anything with the stamps, but we had books of them licked and stuck together.

There was a green stamp store the next town over, and after taking a giant stack of books of stamps to the store to get an ice cream maker (just a little tabletop thing, not a typical larger type in a barrel), we realized that about half a decade of stamps was perhaps 1/10th of what was needed to get the ice cream maker.

Nobody was shopping (or buying), each person going in realizing they'd been scammed. The price with partial stamps was higher than prices elsewhere. We never thought to see how many stamps you'd need ahead of time, and when the "Green stamp" store posted a newspaper ad to encourage you to patronize other stores that issued their stamps (so that those stores would pay them also for the gimmick), the items you could buy never had number of stamps needed matched to the pictures.

Same thing with cereal boxes here -general mills put a key code on the top of their boxes in the 80s and put pictures of the toys you could get on the back of the boxes. I'd saved about 50 over a year, paid to get a catalog mailed to me and found that the price with box tops (as in, you could buy toys and submit a huge number of boxtops, or you could buy toys for about 10% more) was about the same as the toys in a store .

Perhaps one of these was legitimate at one point, but not in my lifetime.

 

[Tris]

The only people I ever knew get things with green shield stamps were sales reps as they were given out when you bought petrol.
Is my memory playing tricks or was it taken over by Argos in the UK?

 

[JohnPW]

Penny for the Guy. Nowadays it would be Pound for the Guy. Now replaced by "trick or treat" and Halloween.

 

[Droogs]

I used to love being MT Cpl as it meant I had to refuel all the L/R and HJ & MKs at the local shell garage and I got to put all the greenshield points on my card. Still never got enough to claim the nice new Vauxhall Nova 1.2SR at the back of the catalogue and believe me I did try

 

[Terrytpot]

size of a sixpenny bit, or was it a shilling, I forget. Ian

As my father was HM forces I was born in (then West Germany) and spent a fair chunk of my childhood on pop's posting to various parts of the BAOR and as such was an avid collector of 5p coins when we came to the UK for the odd family christmas etc as it was the same size as a German 1 Deutchmark which back then was worth roughly 25p... ironically,many years later I worked in a motorcycle shop where they never bothered to "upgrade" their old coffee vending machine from the old shilling/5p coins to the newer midget 5p coins so they recycled roughly £4.00 worth of the old ones to keep the machine going but we kept finding foreign coinage sneaking in, including the old deutchmarks..

 

[D_W]

Here's a little more - when my grandparents were running a farm, it was common for itinerant bachelors to go from farm to farm looking for work. They lived on near nothing, but you could do that in those days - making just enough to go from one place to the next living on free meals after doing work and the alcohol you could buy with cash in hand.

If you went to town, you may find someone with a sign saying they were looking for farm work, because they actually were.

About 25 years ago, when I was at home in town, a man with a few small kids showed up at the median at walmart (keep in mind, rural area). "will do any work for food". The man was there for about three weeks - one farmer after another saw the opportunity to get work out of someone hungry yet the man never left the median. About two weeks in, everyone was saying "wow...have you seen the man standing at walmart with the forlorn looking kids? he's brown as a berry - times must be hard for him." One of dad's friends stopped and said "I've got several weeks of (farm)hand work that I'd be glad to have you help with for $8 an hour ($20 equivalent now). The guy flatly said to him "nah, I'm collecting money here. I'll make more money if I stay here than if I go work somewhere. When that dries up, I'll move on".

He must've done well. Within a couple of weeks, he was gone. That's already two different eras - from the guys looking for work to the guys looking for no work. These days, neither would exist as the first person who sniffed out the guy wasn't looking for work would have him on facebook or patch here in the states and he'd have to keep moving.

Who knows what other rackets the guy was running - I'd assume he may have been on disability, but with the way he allowed himself to look and his kids, same, he must've been collecting at least several hundred bucks a day back then - working over the naive folks in my rural town who would never even consider that someone would be that scammy.

 

[Droogs]

As my father was HM forces I was born in (then West Germany) and spent a fair chunk of my childhood on pop's posting to various parts of the BAOR and as such was an avid collector of 5p coins when we came to the UK for the odd family christmas etc as it was the same size as a German 1 Deutchmark which back then was worth roughly 25p... ironically,many years later I worked in a motorcycle shop where they never bothered to "upgrade" their old coffee vending machine from the old shilling/5p coins to the newer midget 5p coins so they recycled roughly £4.00 worth of the old ones to keep the machine going but we kept finding foreign coinage sneaking in, including the old deutchmarks..

That reminds me o keeping 5ps in my wallet for the vending machine on the way back to camp for both fags and a bite to eat and 5 mark note to show the local Kripo you weren't a vagrant before getting into camp halcyon days

 

[doctor Bob]

My mum and dad got all xmas presents from saving Embassy number 6 tokens.
I reckon I was on 20 a day from birth due second hand smoke. Both still going at 87 but gave up 30 years ago.
Glass Ash trays the size of dinner plates and weighed 10KG, fag lighters like liberace's chandalier.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Embassy or No.6 - they both had coupons.

 

[artie]

No 6
one and tenpence for ten when I was 14.

Then came No 10 and Sovereign too cheap even for a schoolboy.

 

[TomGW]

The only people I ever knew get things with green shield stamps were sales reps as they were given out when you bought petrol.
Is my memory playing tricks or was it taken over by Argos in the UK?

The UK version of Green Shield Stamps had no connection with the US version and was widely popularised by Tesco. When Tesco abruptly ceased its association with GS stamps, in order to survive, the company started to combine stamps and cash to purchase from its catalogue, before eventually rebranding as Argos. So Green Shield actually became Argos following a move from promotional stamps to a cash only operation.

 

[Sachakins]

"Buying loosies on steps of the mobi"

Translation : buying a single cigarette from the mobile shop!

 

[Anthraquinone]

Has anyone mentioned
izal medicated toilet paper

 

[Phil Pascoe]

Bronco.

 

[Peri]

Being dropped off at my grandads house on Saturday morning while my parents did the shopping, and spending my day playing 3 card brag and pontoon (Black Jack). Grandad would let me pick 7 horses for a 10p accumulator, he'd fill out the slips and I'd go to the bookies to put the bets on (sometimes I'd have to pick him up 20 Park Drive on the way back), then we'd play cards and watch the horse racing with Dickie Davis on Grandstand (I was about 7). I loved my grandad!

------------------

Party packs

 

[Sandyn]

Has anyone mentioned
izal medicated toilet paper

Really best forgotten about!!!

 

[Sachakins]

Izal, well it was more like a plasterers trowel, great for spreading stuff around, but not much else

 

[D_W]

color coordinated napkins, toilet paper and paper towels...forgot that they determined later that wiping some of the colorants against your delicates was perhaps ill advised.

Daughter (11) spotted blue paper towels on the wall on an old episode of roseanne and was enamored, and I was transported back to the 1980s, looking at a rusty baseboard next to a toilet with carpet around the bowl, and blue toilet paper on the wall.