Those boiling hot slides! arrrrgh! Here in the UK we called the last one a 'roundabout' but it was flat one layer, a perfect disc. You could spin it crazy fast! we all got thrown off one of those at like 30mph 😂
We had a Victorian park in East Ham East London back in 5he 70s and I got my teeth knocked out by a roundabout and broke my hand and wrist all at the same time lol. Great days!
In Scotland we used to beam on the swings until you hit 'the bumps' when the swing was level with or above the cross bar, there'd then be a bit of slack in the chains, and as you started swinging back, you'd drop just that wee bit until the full tension came back into the chain and you'd get 'the bumps'. We'd have competitions to see who could jump off the swings at the highest point. Jumping off at 'the bumps' was insane as you had to get the timing right for one thing, then enough forward momentum to carry you out the way of the swing or you'd get cracked on the head as it swung forward again. It felt like you were flying, like you were airborne for an eternity and then you had nail your landing. Chutes, i lost count the number of times i got friction burns on those things. The 'round-a-bout' was great fun. We had a couple of designs, all had a flat circular base with a pole sticking out the middle, you'd have a series of 'spokes' coming off it to the outer edge. Some were just that, others would have a wooden seat, literally a bench that you could sit on. You always convinced yourself though that there was a 'good' way to go round, and a 'sick' way, the 'sick' way made you feel sick. There was always that older kid there who would spin the thing faster and faster with everyone hanging on for dear life. Great days though.
The merry-go-round was awesome it spun so fast we looked like cartoons!! Grass stains was a daily event and the swing of death is a 14 foot flying leap!! An entire generation of no fear!
So true! As a late boomer, we had all these dangers plus hard seats on the swings so that at least once a week a kid would get a bloody head from one of those things swinging forward or backward into an innocent kid talking or looking around. We survived! It made us tough😂
I totally remember a kid breaking his leg when we were in the second grade! Lesson: "When the crowd tells you to"jump" you probably should ignore them!"
Shit I broke my arm BMXing with my parents out of town and my Friends parents had me lay on the couch for two days till they got home. They’re great people too. Just how we were raised.
@@mumbles215 Don't I know it! That generation thought some Vicks salve and a nap could fix everything! I can't imagine how much pain you were in! 🤯 I was forced to go to school despite having the stomach flu! The adults thought it was no big deal but I was so weak I couldn't lift my head off my desk! It was only 3rd grade, not calculus! 🤨
I was born in '83, this is the only playground equipment I grew up with. Xers like to think they are the last generation to suffer through this, but in reality, Elder millennials were the last generation to live like Gen X.
Absolutely. I once got it in my head to swing so hard o would go all the way around. Lol I learned a valuable physics lesson that day by slamming back down on the chain. Lol
Lawn Darts were my go to with my older brother in the early 80's during summer activities, Mom was inside drinking away while we hurled massive Darts into the air with steel tips just to watch them plummet back down and stick into the earth. Cool times back then.
my cousin's & I shot each other with BB guns. Only 4 pumps max were allowed, then someone would scream out hey that was more than 4 pumps, next thing we were having BB being dug out of our little bodies
I had 1 rule as a kid, be home when the streetlights come on. From the crack of dawn when the front door opened till then we were free. We rolled in troops of 10 to 20 on a good day.
We used to have two three person standing merry go rounds we called Pukelators. You could really get those things spinning fast! I remember sometimes feeling close to being tossed off, but always held fast.
"Pukelators" ! Lmaoooooooo Oh man that made me laugh so hard. When I was about 8 I decided to try and get right in the middle and stay there. Big mistake, I almost puked lol.
That swing set takes me back. I was good w/regular swings mostly, but my issues will always be with the swings with the leg holes. The 'monkey bars' on my playground should get a mention-gave our School nurse real job security lol
In the UK we had a ride like the first one but it had a metal frame in the shape of a upside down cone on the pole, it was called the witches hat and was lethal, as it could swing enough to hit the inner pole, the amount of broken fingers and kids being flung off at speed.
I chipped a front tooth on the dome and shredded the skin off my arm on the roundabout. I'm 48 now and still have the chipped front tooth and the scars on my arm. We were made of tougher stuff back then lol
Those metal slides were brutal in shorts. We had a log roll at Baldwin Park in the late 70s early 80s, 5ft off the ground and like 3 inches of sand bark to break your fall. Good times
I'm an 82 baby but had a gen x childhood. I feel so lucky. My friends and I were all over the place playing rough. We would go out to playgrounds and basically battle each other on the playground. We rode bmx all over our naighborhood sometimes riding 20 miles a day just having a blast. We got in trouble in school a dozen or so times for play fighting like ninjas, jumping off of trees, flipping each other around like rag dolls, a few of us got bloody noses, broken arm or collar bone here and there. Best days of my life! I'm pretty sure I got at least 2 concussions but totally worth it hahaha
the swingset ... we would play that song "let it whip", someone blasting it on the boom box. Everyone trying to get as high as they dared, then at a certain point (let it whip) everyone jumped at the same time. hardly anyone died, much fun.
I love every single moment of it and I loved all those things in the part that you talked about. You're bringing very great, happy fond memories. And the swings were the best because you could swing so high. And that one person sitting down and one person Pop in the swing, it was the best. Yeah, you got hurt and the equalizer too swing and right off of it.
Those swings were so awesome! And the slides. The best was swinging until you were horizontal and the chains would flex….you’d think you were gonna fall.
My Unit's have to disagree with you on that. When they came out i was the right height to get bean-bagged. If you fall backwards you got a chance to get bean-bagged
Born in '89. There was an Equalizer in the public park during grade school. It was the only thing I liked about the park and then one day, it was just gone. :(. I never seen any of the others anywhere in my city. They even got rid of the damn see-saws and sometimes there's swings out there. I hate the new plastic crap. We had a playground in grade school- all wood and metal. I loved it!
Playground equipment. We swung from a pulley on a rope from one lift of the barn to the lift on the other side, 40 feet up; ice skated on ponds as soon as they froze, even when not all the way through; jumped off the open top floors of houses onto sand piles below, without ever checking for tools or sharp objects in the pile. 😎 That was just what we did near home before we went on real adventures away from home.
Born in 88 here. All but the first one I've been on. Thinking back to the late 90s, I'm baffled on how my elementary school still had the slide and swings then. That slide was no joke in the summer and winter. Kids were dumb enough in the winter to go down the slide standing up....
You ain't tuff until you take a tetherball to the face by a kid who was either held back (before no child left behind) or had a genetic disorder that made him look like a JV Highschooler 😂
Even as a millennial/Zillenial they had these as left over half and half at school and the more dangerous ones at parks , I had the dome but on top of the bark , the metal slide at parks the “roundie round 😂” at parks , I think that wrist one in a fever dream but never school but our danger after the revamp in 4th grade that was left was tether ball…we lost many great soldiers in those days.
As an 80's and early 90's kid I can confirm that this stuff was awesome. 😂 So were the giant teeter-totters you could catapult your friends off of and the good old merri-go-round, otherwise known as the wheel of death. 🤣
I was born in 60s. And the playground equipment was fine me and my friends had a great time. Course we was rough back then course we had some bumps and bruises and cuts. I still consider that the best time of my life.
We used to use waxed bread bags on our slides. The brass got so slippy you'd shoot off the end and across the cement base ,tearing the rear out our jeans. But that would have been the mid-60s to early 70s. England.
Those swings.........getting them going well....then launching off forward...got boring. I started jumping off at the midpoint or higher on the back swing....hell of a lot of fun If you mistimed it and jumped earlier, the chain link fence, 3 feet behind the arc of the swing, would really eat you alive. (I was a bit crazy back in 70-71..... I'd try anything.... Was dared to put a knife in a wall outlet......I grabbed a metal butter knife....stuck it in....got thrown across the room......got up...."wow, that was cool".....and did it again.) (8 year old me.....Key West, FL....1973.......get a slice of cheese out of the fridge.....unwrap it.....tear it into little pieces.....pile it back in the wrapper and make a ball.......go bicycling....see a cop car with windows down....toss the ball at the officer's head..... OMG.....on impact, the ball opened...cheese EVERYWHERE. Then bicycle away like hell Got away several times, caught just once.....the police made me wash every car they had...AFTER my mom applied belt to my bottom... Lot's of fun back then, even though dirt poor. I'd take my strong handline, with a shark hook, to Sunset Pier. Bait it. I was 8-13 years old, so...smart enough NOT to hold it. Had a sailor make a study loop at my end....and slip it over a piling. Barracuda, shark, large ray, whatever.......it fought the piling.....then...anyone who helped me pull it up...got an equal share. Barracuda... delicious, manta ray was soso, shark was good.......what we didn't eat...was dog or cat food. 92° or more in the shade...high humidity.... bicycling with no shirt......tired bees would land and recover strength....enjoying the breeze....never got stung
Our school slide was just as tall as the swings, we used to swing on the supports underneath and kick at the slide trying to buck the others off early.
When I was a kid there was an old playground way back in the woods about a half mile from my house. Apparently there had been a school there a long time ago that had been torn down but the playground equipment survived. The merry-go-round was mostly wood with a huge center shaft and bearing of some kind. The wood was painted with many coats of heavy green paint, which likey was what held it together. It didn't have bars on it like the one in the vid, it had several T handles around the flat deck surface to hang on to. A trick we learned as we got older was to take a long piece of rope, and wrap it around all the posts, with one end tied to a gocart or old farm vehicle to pull start the thing at high speed. Kids broke ribs, arms, ankles, etc as they flew off it. One got smacked by the rope as it slid up and over the bars it was wrapped around. The slide was stainless steel riveted along the inside, outer bottom edges to the structure below. A few of the rivet were loose and often caught your clothing, or skin if you weren't careful. The swing set was huge, with 8 swings, there were two seesaw style double swings on each end, and the rest were chains and saddles. The problem was that trees had grown up in the way of a few of the swings, and a few had tree stumps right below the swings that someone had cut off more recently. If you didn't lift your feet, you smashed them on the stumps. It was probably a really cool playground at one time, there were old cast iron grills on iron posts all around the place, concrete and wood picnic tables, a huge seesaw, (that was good for braking legs because of how high it went) and nearly complete shade. By the time we found it, it had been grown over for years, half of it was dug out and only a huge pit remained on opposite ends, one pit had filled in and turned into a swamp. Even more concerning were several very old tombstones in the nearby woods that were apparently left overs from a long since gone homestead. The one thing that really stands out in my memory is how the area would get infested with bees as the summer progressed each year, between wasp nests on the equipment to ground bees making nests in the soil and old tree stumps, lot of us got stung a lot there. As a kid I had asked some of the older folks what used to be there but none remembered. It had apparently been abandoned even when they were young. That was in the early 70's, it got bulldozed and turning into housing by the end of the decade, but had apparently been there in disrepair for a very long time before kids our age had come along.
@@grumpyoldbastard0563 The concrete picnic tables were likely there so no one just carried them away. If they were easy to move, there would be one in every back yard for blocks around. Another park here in town had those ride on animals with the coil spring beneath them. As they got old they'd either break or if the rider was to heavy, you slammed your skull into the pavement as it bounced back and forth.
These were in the 70s also. I did witness a 3 year old girl fall from one of those solid metal slides. It her head on the steps going down . Killed her. This was about 1972.
I’m an older Gen Z and I had a thunder dome at my elementary school until 5th grade, when it was replaced by a spinning thing that actually caused more injuries!
I left more skin from my legs and a piece of my soul on our rusty elementary school playground slide in the 70s! But it was the best time EVER to grow up!
And notice, there wasn't any cushy mats under any of this equipment. If it was just the ground, cool. Most times it was concrete, which also wasn't too bad. When you played at max level, the underneath was covered with the sharpest gravel stones known to man. :-) No pad, helmets or supervision. Great times.
The playground equipment that hurt me back in the 70’s was the new fiberglass slides that were 6 stories high! Joking but they were way taller than todays. I walked up the side of it all the way to the top when my younger brother comes down and his feet swiped my legs out and down I went….fell straight on my ribs into the sand. Couldn’t breathe for a week at least. Do you think my parents took me to the doctor??? Nope. Middle child here. Also went two weeks with a broken hand and had to beg them to take me. But if the youngest had a hang nail he was swept up and taken to the ER. 🤷🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
Those were the 60s and 70s play ground equipment and we used to swing so high and jump out of the swing or try to do a complete loop and it never worked we would swing so high up and fall straight back down usually breaking the chain on the swing and almost breaking us . And they have been many of slung off the maypole and have some major strawberry on use. And your right about the slides they were hot as a skillet. And many a people lost teeth jumping off the back of seasaw and the 2x12 hitting them under the chin and turning them a back flip .
We had that first swing in our front yard when I was a kid. My grandpa got it from the one room schoolhouse he went to as a kid when it closed down. It was the best.
Bonus points for the days when the merry go round was searing hot but you had to grip it hard or else! Had to be tough enough to hack it even at that age or you were a joke.
When a kid falls from a swing today they land on nice soft compound of rubber pellets. When I fell off a swing when I was a kid I landed on concrete sometimes with added extras like broken glass or dog poop. Fun times.
To my knowledge, not many Gen X played on the Mayport because they were removed from school yards between 1963 and 1965 or there abouts!! Younger boomers however!!
My school had a playground filled with baseball sized tanbark, and the equipment was made from old, used truck tires bolted and chained together, a metal slide that would get so hot that it looked wavy in the heat, and the roughest logs treated in some cancer causing chemicals.. Black eyes, bloody elbows, burnt skin and shank size slivers were all part of a normal recess. I've got to be honest though. The next generation got plastic slides and still got pretty hot. The worst part was sliding down and getting a big static shock and your hair would stand up.. I guess I was used to the old metal ones.. 😆
Those were the good ol days. Wipes tears from my eyes
I wish I could go back and stay!
For real😊😊😊
I miss the slides and the swings.
I wish I had a dime for every kid I saw get thrown off of the merry-go-round.
It was the best thing on the playground!
Yeah it was fun getting thrown off that thing
Roundabout.
me i got thrown spun across the park no broken bones but it hurt
That was half the fun, seeing if you could keep up with the big kids lol
If not, pa-chng! Right off the merry go round! lol
Hell yeah! And no padding on the ground! No bark! Plain ol' cracked concrete or gravel
I burned my legs on that slide so many times.
Yes sir!! Built charecter!! I sure enjoyed all those growing up.
what's a charecter
I played on those in the 60s. The playgrounds were covered in asphalt back then.
My playground was covered in Asphalt and concrete in the 80s
I was born in 82 and played on all of these dangerous but built Character
Sir I deem you an honorary gen-xer these torture devices turned mice into men
Those boiling hot slides! arrrrgh! Here in the UK we called the last one a 'roundabout' but it was flat one layer, a perfect disc. You could spin it crazy fast! we all got thrown off one of those at like 30mph 😂
We had a Victorian park in East Ham East London back in 5he 70s and I got my teeth knocked out by a roundabout and broke my hand and wrist all at the same time lol. Great days!
Anyone else remember those metal slides in the blazing Sun.... Scorching your legs going down
In Scotland we used to beam on the swings until you hit 'the bumps' when the swing was level with or above the cross bar, there'd then be a bit of slack in the chains, and as you started swinging back, you'd drop just that wee bit until the full tension came back into the chain and you'd get 'the bumps'. We'd have competitions to see who could jump off the swings at the highest point. Jumping off at 'the bumps' was insane as you had to get the timing right for one thing, then enough forward momentum to carry you out the way of the swing or you'd get cracked on the head as it swung forward again. It felt like you were flying, like you were airborne for an eternity and then you had nail your landing.
Chutes, i lost count the number of times i got friction burns on those things.
The 'round-a-bout' was great fun. We had a couple of designs, all had a flat circular base with a pole sticking out the middle, you'd have a series of 'spokes' coming off it to the outer edge. Some were just that, others would have a wooden seat, literally a bench that you could sit on. You always convinced yourself though that there was a 'good' way to go round, and a 'sick' way, the 'sick' way made you feel sick. There was always that older kid there who would spin the thing faster and faster with everyone hanging on for dear life. Great days though.
😂
The merry-go-round was awesome it spun so fast we looked like cartoons!! Grass stains was a daily event and the swing of death is a 14 foot flying leap!! An entire generation of no fear!
I remembered all those rides. Gen X grew up tough
Ahhhh the days off “ walk it off “ lol I miss them lol
These are, without a doubt, the trials that built men.
Ahhh king of the mountain on thunder doom, great memories.
So true! As a late boomer, we had all these dangers plus hard seats on the swings so that at least once a week a kid would get a bloody head from one of those things swinging forward or backward into an innocent kid talking or looking around. We survived! It made us tough😂
Me and my friends would call these swings the guillotine if swung write it possibly could take your head off
Late boomers rock. Just like us.
I totally remember a kid breaking his leg when we were in the second grade! Lesson: "When the crowd tells you to"jump" you probably should ignore them!"
Shit I broke my arm BMXing with my parents out of town and my Friends parents had me lay on the couch for two days till they got home. They’re great people too. Just how we were raised.
@@mumbles215 Don't I know it! That generation thought some Vicks salve and a nap could fix everything! I can't imagine how much pain you were in! 🤯
I was forced to go to school despite having the stomach flu! The adults thought it was no big deal but I was so weak I couldn't lift my head off my desk! It was only 3rd grade, not calculus! 🤨
OSHA requires fall protection for work lower than slides we had as kids
So much fun. So many memories.
The equalize( merry go round) was the best. Sent kids flying!
Bring it all back. Survival of the fittest. Lots of people are going to cry and fail. Not this Gen X.
I was born in '83, this is the only playground equipment I grew up with. Xers like to think they are the last generation to suffer through this, but in reality, Elder millennials were the last generation to live like Gen X.
who remembers tonka toy's that's us, BUILT TO LAST!!
Loved the swings ,the higher you went the better
Absolutely. I once got it in my head to swing so hard o would go all the way around. Lol I learned a valuable physics lesson that day by slamming back down on the chain. Lol
Lawn Darts were my go to with my older brother in the early 80's during summer activities, Mom was inside drinking away while we hurled massive Darts into the air with steel tips just to watch them plummet back down and stick into the earth. Cool times back then.
I hear that...mom and gramma with old milwaukee tall boys...go play, go swim, go shoot stuff with a bb gun😂😂😂😂
my cousin's & I shot each other with BB guns. Only 4 pumps max were allowed, then someone would scream out hey that was more than 4 pumps, next thing we were having BB being dug out of our little bodies
Nice to see good videos on my scroll. Keep up this kinda stuff, man!
I had 1 rule as a kid, be home when the streetlights come on. From the crack of dawn when the front door opened till then we were free. We rolled in troops of 10 to 20 on a good day.
We used to have two three person standing merry go rounds we called Pukelators. You could really get those things spinning fast! I remember sometimes feeling close to being tossed off, but always held fast.
"Pukelators" ! Lmaoooooooo
Oh man that made me laugh so hard. When I was about 8 I decided to try and get right in the middle and stay there. Big mistake, I almost puked lol.
You would get smarter and tougher everytime and you would always be excited to go back.
God was and is always with us and everyone GOD bless's US all
That swing set takes me back. I was good w/regular swings mostly, but my issues will always be with the swings with the leg holes. The 'monkey bars' on my playground should get a mention-gave our School nurse real job security lol
In the UK we had a ride like the first one but it had a metal frame in the shape of a upside down cone on the pole, it was called the witches hat and was lethal, as it could swing enough to hit the inner pole, the amount of broken fingers and kids being flung off at speed.
Best toy was a Lawn dart !!!! great toy Gen X
nah my fav was the slip n bleed
This equipment taught you how to duck, or suck it up and keep moving if you didn't have a concussion. But we survived 😂
I chipped a front tooth on the dome and shredded the skin off my arm on the roundabout. I'm 48 now and still have the chipped front tooth and the scars on my arm. We were made of tougher stuff back then lol
po baby 😂😂😂😂 still got my scared up knee
Damn you’re spot on with this one!!!!! This clip brought back some bone breaking memories 😂😂😂😂😂
Those metal slides were brutal in shorts. We had a log roll at Baldwin Park in the late 70s early 80s, 5ft off the ground and like 3 inches of sand bark to break your fall. Good times
I'm an 82 baby but had a gen x childhood. I feel so lucky. My friends and I were all over the place playing rough. We would go out to playgrounds and basically battle each other on the playground. We rode bmx all over our naighborhood sometimes riding 20 miles a day just having a blast. We got in trouble in school a dozen or so times for play fighting like ninjas, jumping off of trees, flipping each other around like rag dolls, a few of us got bloody noses, broken arm or collar bone here and there. Best days of my life! I'm pretty sure I got at least 2 concussions but totally worth it hahaha
Good times!!!😊
I remember the swing sets and running the gauntlet. Trying to reach the end of a dozen kids each trying to nail you, bring back memories.
Oh yeah! I forgot about that!
Hahaha running the gauntlet to see if you could get not knocked down. Lol
Swinger higher! You're cheating! Haha
the swingset ... we would play that song "let it whip", someone blasting it on the boom box. Everyone trying to get as high as they dared, then at a certain point (let it whip) everyone jumped at the same time. hardly anyone died, much fun.
I love every single moment of it and I loved all those things in the part that you talked about. You're bringing very great, happy fond memories. And the swings were the best because you could swing so high. And that one person sitting down and one person Pop in the swing, it was the best. Yeah, you got hurt and the equalizer too swing and right off of it.
LOL! I remember them all! Thank you, this video made me smile!!
I got five stitches in my head falling from the top of one of those spider climbing "thunderdome" thing. The picture alone gave me chills! 😢😅
Those swings were so awesome! And the slides. The best was swinging until you were horizontal and the chains would flex….you’d think you were gonna fall.
Looks safe to me.
I miss the old white horse spring rider. Even as an adult, it was fun trying to break the spring.
My Unit's have to disagree with you on that. When they came out i was the right height to get bean-bagged. If you fall backwards you got a chance to get bean-bagged
I’m 64 years old. This is hysterical and so true lol remind me of my childhood I love this video thank you and you’re funny to.
My kids loved these. No major injuries but many scabs and scars!!!!
Born in '89. There was an Equalizer in the public park during grade school. It was the only thing I liked about the park and then one day, it was just gone. :(. I never seen any of the others anywhere in my city. They even got rid of the damn see-saws and sometimes there's swings out there.
I hate the new plastic crap. We had a playground in grade school- all wood and metal. I loved it!
Playground equipment. We swung from a pulley on a rope from one lift of the barn to the lift on the other side, 40 feet up; ice skated on ponds as soon as they froze, even when not all the way through; jumped off the open top floors of houses onto sand piles below, without ever checking for tools or sharp objects in the pile. 😎 That was just what we did near home before we went on real adventures away from home.
ahh fun times ... those we the times to grow up , these playground equipment helped us learn many many scientific concepts !
Ohh the good old days! Miss em😢
Playing King of the Hill on the Thunderdome was the best. Kicking some kid down into the middle was the greatest feeling ever.
Lovely memories😊 Thank you😊
Merry goround was scary, that older kid pushed it so fast we cried lol. And then we got back on , and he did it again. Lol Smh.
Born in 88 here. All but the first one I've been on. Thinking back to the late 90s, I'm baffled on how my elementary school still had the slide and swings then. That slide was no joke in the summer and winter. Kids were dumb enough in the winter to go down the slide standing up....
You ain't tuff until you take a tetherball to the face by a kid who was either held back (before no child left behind) or had a genetic disorder that made him look like a JV Highschooler 😂
Lost many lunches to the equalizer. 🤣
yeah think it squeezed me back in the day aswell
Even as a millennial/Zillenial they had these as left over half and half at school and the more dangerous ones at parks , I had the dome but on top of the bark , the metal slide at parks the “roundie round 😂” at parks , I think that wrist one in a fever dream but never school but our danger after the revamp in 4th grade that was left was tether ball…we lost many great soldiers in those days.
As an 80's and early 90's kid I can confirm that this stuff was awesome. 😂 So were the giant teeter-totters you could catapult your friends off of and the good old merri-go-round, otherwise known as the wheel of death. 🤣
😅😅😅 memories😅😅😅
You forgot the uneven bars and the cherry drop. 🍒
I was born in 60s. And the playground equipment was fine me and my friends had a great time. Course we was rough back then course we had some bumps and bruises and cuts. I still consider that the best time of my life.
Dangerous but fun ! The thrills ,the exhilarating adrenaline rush !
I miss the merry go round and the dome shaped equipment.
It wasn't fun unless you got thrown off!!! 😂
We used to use waxed bread bags on our slides. The brass got so slippy you'd shoot off the end and across the cement base ,tearing the rear out our jeans. But that would have been the mid-60s to early 70s. England.
I loved every minute of it.
Those swings.........getting them going well....then launching off forward...got boring.
I started jumping off at the midpoint or higher on the back swing....hell of a lot of fun
If you mistimed it and jumped earlier, the chain link fence, 3 feet behind the arc of the swing, would really eat you alive.
(I was a bit crazy back in 70-71..... I'd try anything.... Was dared to put a knife in a wall outlet......I grabbed a metal butter knife....stuck it in....got thrown across the room......got up...."wow, that was cool".....and did it again.)
(8 year old me.....Key West, FL....1973.......get a slice of cheese out of the fridge.....unwrap it.....tear it into little pieces.....pile it back in the wrapper and make a ball.......go bicycling....see a cop car with windows down....toss the ball at the officer's head.....
OMG.....on impact, the ball opened...cheese EVERYWHERE.
Then bicycle away like hell
Got away several times, caught just once.....the police made me wash every car they had...AFTER my mom applied belt to my bottom...
Lot's of fun back then, even though dirt poor.
I'd take my strong handline, with a shark hook, to Sunset Pier. Bait it. I was 8-13 years old, so...smart enough NOT to hold it.
Had a sailor make a study loop at my end....and slip it over a piling.
Barracuda, shark, large ray, whatever.......it fought the piling.....then...anyone who helped me pull it up...got an equal share.
Barracuda... delicious, manta ray was soso, shark was good.......what we didn't eat...was dog or cat food.
92° or more in the shade...high humidity.... bicycling with no shirt......tired bees would land and recover strength....enjoying the breeze....never got stung
Our school slide was just as tall as the swings, we used to swing on the supports underneath and kick at the slide trying to buck the others off early.
When I was a kid there was an old playground way back in the woods about a half mile from my house. Apparently there had been a school there a long time ago that had been torn down but the playground equipment survived. The merry-go-round was mostly wood with a huge center shaft and bearing of some kind. The wood was painted with many coats of heavy green paint, which likey was what held it together. It didn't have bars on it like the one in the vid, it had several T handles around the flat deck surface to hang on to. A trick we learned as we got older was to take a long piece of rope, and wrap it around all the posts, with one end tied to a gocart or old farm vehicle to pull start the thing at high speed. Kids broke ribs, arms, ankles, etc as they flew off it. One got smacked by the rope as it slid up and over the bars it was wrapped around.
The slide was stainless steel riveted along the inside, outer bottom edges to the structure below. A few of the rivet were loose and often caught your clothing, or skin if you weren't careful.
The swing set was huge, with 8 swings, there were two seesaw style double swings on each end, and the rest were chains and saddles. The problem was that trees had grown up in the way of a few of the swings, and a few had tree stumps right below the swings that someone had cut off more recently. If you didn't lift your feet, you smashed them on the stumps.
It was probably a really cool playground at one time, there were old cast iron grills on iron posts all around the place, concrete and wood picnic tables, a huge seesaw, (that was good for braking legs because of how high it went) and nearly complete shade. By the time we found it, it had been grown over for years, half of it was dug out and only a huge pit remained on opposite ends, one pit had filled in and turned into a swamp. Even more concerning were several very old tombstones in the nearby woods that were apparently left overs from a long since gone homestead. The one thing that really stands out in my memory is how the area would get infested with bees as the summer progressed each year, between wasp nests on the equipment to ground bees making nests in the soil and old tree stumps, lot of us got stung a lot there.
As a kid I had asked some of the older folks what used to be there but none remembered. It had apparently been abandoned even when they were young. That was in the early 70's, it got bulldozed and turning into housing by the end of the decade, but had apparently been there in disrepair for a very long time before kids our age had come along.
Ahh yes, the concrete picnic tables. God save you if you tripped coming off the grass on to the blacktop surface.
@@grumpyoldbastard0563 The concrete picnic tables were likely there so no one just carried them away. If they were easy to move, there would be one in every back yard for blocks around.
Another park here in town had those ride on animals with the coil spring beneath them. As they got old they'd either break or if the rider was to heavy, you slammed your skull into the pavement as it bounced back and forth.
I still have nightmares to this day about trying run up the slide and bashing my shins!!
😂 yup
My elementary school playground was a set of swings, monkey bars, a merry-go-round on a CEMENT pad.
You nailed it on all of them
These were in the 70s also. I did witness a 3 year old girl fall from one of those solid metal slides. It her head on the steps going down . Killed her. This was about 1972.
I swung on those swings in the 60s and passed out. We would stand and swing. Woke up sitting upright
I’m an older Gen Z and I had a thunder dome at my elementary school until 5th grade, when it was replaced by a spinning thing that actually caused more injuries!
I left more skin from my legs and a piece of my soul on our rusty elementary school playground slide in the 70s! But it was the best time EVER to grow up!
Oh my gosh’ All the memories.
I used to throw dry and fine grained dirt on a metal slide to gain speed and crash at the bottom.
And notice, there wasn't any cushy mats under any of this equipment. If it was just the ground, cool. Most times it was concrete, which also wasn't too bad. When you played at max level, the underneath was covered with the sharpest gravel stones known to man. :-) No pad, helmets or supervision. Great times.
The playground equipment that hurt me back in the 70’s was the new fiberglass slides that were 6 stories high! Joking but they were way taller than todays. I walked up the side of it all the way to the top when my younger brother comes down and his feet swiped my legs out and down I went….fell straight on my ribs into the sand. Couldn’t breathe for a week at least. Do you think my parents took me to the doctor??? Nope. Middle child here. Also went two weeks with a broken hand and had to beg them to take me. But if the youngest had a hang nail he was swept up and taken to the ER. 🤷🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
Lol this was my early 90s childhood too 😅
Those were the 60s and 70s play ground equipment and we used to swing so high and jump out of the swing or try to do a complete loop and it never worked we would swing so high up and fall straight back down usually breaking the chain on the swing and almost breaking us . And they have been many of slung off the maypole and have some major strawberry on use. And your right about the slides they were hot as a skillet. And many a people lost teeth jumping off the back of seasaw and the 2x12 hitting them under the chin and turning them a back flip .
Now days kids is so soft you could hurt their feelings with a few words.
Thats gen z not the 90s millennials
Born 71 I remember someone had a cast on at school growing up
Ahhhhhh, memory lane was a nice jaunt, thanks
We had that first swing in our front yard when I was a kid. My grandpa got it from the one room schoolhouse he went to as a kid when it closed down. It was the best.
Bonus points for the days when the merry go round was searing hot but you had to grip it hard or else! Had to be tough enough to hack it even at that age or you were a joke.
When a kid falls from a swing today they land on nice soft compound of rubber pellets. When I fell off a swing when I was a kid I landed on concrete sometimes with added extras like broken glass or dog poop. Fun times.
Oh the memories. 😊
To my knowledge, not many Gen X played on the Mayport because they were removed from school yards between 1963 and 1965 or there abouts!! Younger boomers however!!
Born in '91. We had every one of these...
The equalizer was so fun!!
My school had a playground filled with baseball sized tanbark, and the equipment was made from old, used truck tires bolted and chained together, a metal slide that would get so hot that it looked wavy in the heat, and the roughest logs treated in some cancer causing chemicals.. Black eyes, bloody elbows, burnt skin and shank size slivers were all part of a normal recess. I've got to be honest though. The next generation got plastic slides and still got pretty hot. The worst part was sliding down and getting a big static shock and your hair would stand up.. I guess I was used to the old metal ones.. 😆
Lawn darts! The most dangerous of them all - no problems for Gen x- suck it up and don't be late for kick the can later !
The swings had blacktop surface. Scraped my entire back.
I was pushed off of one of those slides. I broke both of my wrists, as soon as they came off went right back to playing.
The thunderdome, 7 out of 10 broke something playing king of the dome.
GEN-X were AND are built to LAST!! HANDS DOWN 🎉WE ARE G'S
yup same in the UK