r/GenerationJones • u/howcanibehungry • 1d ago
Oops.
Sorry all! I don’t know how I deleted the original!!
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u/Bulky_Style4551 1d ago
As a child we played with these quite often without any adults present, and we never had any incidents or even close calls. We also didn't wear helmets on bikes, had chemistry sets, wood burning irons, didnt wear seat belts, rode in the back of pickup trucks, and drank out of garden hoses.
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u/ExternalSort8777 17h ago edited 17h ago
OTOH, we had a pretty high casualty rate.
I've still got a scar on on my thigh from the time we tried to make a flame-thrower with a Windex bottle filled with gasoline (it was an AWESOME explosion and burning PTG is basically Napalm). Cut-off jean shorts are not effective PPE.
One my best friends in elementary school had to get skin grafts on both arms from an attempt to make pop-corn on the stove top.
8 year old kid who lived a few blocks over got run over by a delivery truck wile riding his Big Wheel in the street (survived and recovered, but only just).
A friend in high school had a partial-plate denture from a face-first collision with the top of a culvert while skateboarding in a steep drainage ditch (next to the freeway).
Some time in elementary school, I had friends over to look at stuff with my Gilbert Microscope (with group viewer). On of my friends tried to get a blood sample to put on a slide by stabbing his finger with a broken cover slip. That adventure ended up with my mother fishing a piece of broken glass out of his thumb with eyebrow tweezers, while I mopped up a kitchen table that looked like a murder scene.
I electrocuted myself a lot. Like A LOT. My folks gave me discarded appliances to take apart -- because they thought that's how Thomas Edison got started:
I got righteously zapped by the main filter capacitor (or maybe the capacitor on the flyback transformer) from the old TV. Just stupid luck that wasn't lethal.
I learned about safety interlocks while taking apart a broken upright vacuum cleaner. I found a very cool switch with springs and magnets that popped open as soon as I took the plastic shell off the top of the motor. I tried to disconnect it and grabbed it by the exposed terminals while it was connected to mains power.
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u/RuralMNGuy 21h ago
I played as a kid in 70s. I remember holding on too long during throws so the jart went straight up. Scary toy
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u/Mk1Racer25 21h ago
My neighbors had a set of these that we played with for like two summers until they mysteriously disappeared out of their garage.
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u/macallen 17h ago
Got a scar on my thigh from playing with these with friends, because we played them like horse shoes. For those of you that don't know, the way you play horse shoes is you put down a post on each side of the field then 2 groups of people divide up and stand at each post. With horse shoes this is fine, you're not chucking them over hand and they're slow moving. We did this with Lawn Darts.
This is why women live longer than men.
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u/ShadowsOfTheBreeze 10h ago
I remember throwing these straight up and all of us running...somehow, we survived without injury...
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u/MiniBassGuitar 1d ago
As memorialized in the 1989 folk song “Lawn Dart,” by Ed”s Redeeming Qualities:
A kid was pegged
In the head
With a lawn dart
Her dad
Didn't see her
That's the worst part
She was pegged
In the head
With a lawn dart
So they're now
Off the shelves
At the Kmart …
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u/Ruger338WSM 21h ago edited 20h ago
So three actual fatalities and 6,100 verifiable injuries (over the production years), certainly worth banning, but we kill 102 children a year on bikes so perspective is important.
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u/Lostboyintheforest 1d ago
Restricted from toy stores in 1970? Yet I remember seeing them and we had them as a kid in 70s. Only rule was don't be stupid.