So who has a strange, weird, bizarre, unusual or unique story to share from your childhood?
dreher
Member Posts: 8,886 ✭✭✭✭
When I was a kid I worked at my gramma's grocery store. She focused on having the best meat in town so we sold lots of meat. Which means lots of meat scraps. One of my jobs was to take those meat scraps and put them in the tightly covered garbage can in back of the store. In the summer time I quickly learned to hold my breath when I opened that garbage can. That rotten meat REALLY, REALLY smelled!!
So one pretty summer morning I'm doing what I was always doing, riding my bike around town. I happened to swing through the parking lot in back of the Sears and Robuck catalogue store. As I'm riding through the parking lot I smell something nasty. So I start circling around the parking lot trying to pinpoint the source of this smell, thinking it smells just like grammas garbage can! I kept getting little whiffs of the smell and couldn't quite locate the source. So I rode off going about what ever business a ten year old boy goes about on a pretty summer morning.
The next afternoon the town was all a buzz about some traveling salesman found dead in his car in the parking lot in back of the Sears and Robuck catalogue store. Everyone was saying he had been dead for several days! So I almost found a dead body when I was ten. Which is a pretty unusual, unique experience.
Comments
I went cougar hunting in Daytona during spring break.
Brad Steele
It's an annual hunt with no bag limit. 😉
I see what you did there!!! Don
i saw God when some older boys threw me off the lock wall into the Kanawha river, about 40 feet.
I just saw fallen angels. Some had fallen more than others.
Brad Steele
Alaska provides all the weird and unusual you could ask for and then some. I could tell stories for hours to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.
Hunted by polar bears, chased by a wolverine, followed into an outhouse by a black bear, fallen through the ice 3x in one day, buried my truck in a snowdrift at -135F wind chill, head-on crash into a cliff at 60mph, escaped getting my head cut off by 1/8”, almost walked through a propeller, heard a guy’s plastic heart valve ticking during poker so I knew when to fold, spilled 20,000 lbs of salmon onto the active runway at Anchorage International, broke a XC ski binding backwoods skiing at -40, broke the frame of a Mercury Montego jumping Jim Creek, lost a dirt bike in Jim Creek, it just goes on and on.
*shudder*
Winner
Can’t go into details, but it involved my barber’s Korean wife. I was 16, and, well…
most all of mine involved a car(s) . I had no fear and did a lot of stupid things way too many stories from the drive ins and all the movies I missed seeing , too street racing and well just flat out being dumb and fearless think of the old thrill shows like Joey Chitwood except in heavy traffic down town .. and in the parking lot of the store I worked in. oh add in the motorcycle riding in the store I worked at it smelled like gas for two days in the place 🤐 the local police all knew me and the neighbors would call the police at least twice a week a LEO would stop by say well as long as the neighbors see our car they know we visited LOL keep it down a bit way too many times got pulled over and let go with a bad boy talk ( that did not help put any fear in doing it ) I still wonder sometimes why I am still alive now but some how made it 😁
when younger I did resemble John Denver a lot of people called me that , I did not mind , even better a lot of gals seemed to like that I looked like him and well when your 16 , a7 yrs old you take advantage when you can ..
with that said I still tip my hat to a lot of you especially the military people and of course the LEO who put in on the line every day and put up with AH like me to break up there day I know I had to make a few smile with my BS stories when puled over
I ran away from home when I was about 6 years old. I took a bag of junk and my hampster.....made it three doors down, knocking on every house I could find until finally someone answered. They wouldn't let me live with them and called my mom.....jerks.
Small rural school grade school and high school were in the same place. Phy Ed was the same. Playing on the baseball diamond with the HS kids I was in the 8th grade. Regular baseball field but no wall in outfield... The cinder track was about the outside limit . Baseball coach was the Teacher. He was sitting in a dugout reading the paper. I hit a softball that left the premise. He jumped up with the crack of the bat. That ball flew over every ones head, the width of the track and smacked a barn.. with a mail pouch painting three quarter high on the barn. No regular baseball players had ever hit a regular baseball that far. Not even close. I was a skinny 125 pound runt. Teacher stood there while I ran around the bases in disbelief. Next bat up I hit a puny grounder.
My friend and I found an old rocket casing or JATO thing ejected off onto the mountainside up by Arctic Valley. It was a big thing, maybe 6 feet long and 24" across at the opening. It was a waisted tube and he figured if we put some gasoline in there and lit it, and got enough airflow blowing through, we could make the ram effect work. So we mounted a 24" phenolic bakelite fan on a vacuum cleaner motor, and he wanted to try it. "Here hold this" and he plugged it in.
It started spinning and went faster and faster and faster, and I never once thought about centrifugal force. It reached a certain number of rpms and the fan blew apart. I was holding it at arm's length.
One blade disappeared forever, one stuck in the fence, one stuck in the lawn and the other hit me right square on the end of my jaw. It spun me around and threw me against the house, leaving a huge blood splash. I hit the ground then turned and looked at Joe, my earns ringing and eyes blurry. He started retching like he was going to puke, and screamed like a little girl, saying "You're dying! It cut your throat! You're DYING!!!" over and over.
I got to my feet and his mom came out, luckily she was an ER nurse. She kinda pushed something up under my chin, then gave me something to hold against it to slow the bleeding, and we headed for the emergency room. By the time we got there the whole backseat was smeared with blood, it was on the floor, soaked my shirt, running down on my jeans, running off my elbows in a stream. We walked into the ER and instead of making us do paperwork the nurse said "You can go right in" and pointed toward the double doors.
The docs and nurses were all kinds of worried about my blood loss and did something that stunk REAL bad to get it to stop, probably cauterized it. Then doc had to clean up the wound. The thing Joe's mom pushed up was all the meat under my chin, it was cut loose and hanging in a big slab. The fan blade had hit me right at the exact point of my jaw bone, spinning like a knife, and cut its way backwards, . As he was trimming away the shredded meat doc said "If this had been 1/8" higher or lower, it wouldn't have slowed so much, it would have cut clear back to your spine and severed everything. And I mean everything. You're the luckiest SOB I've ever seen." He cleaned up the ragged edges with snips so he'd have a good starting point, and started stitching, and sewed my neck and jawline and chin back together.
As it healed my beard grew around the black stitches, and sort of hid them. Eventually he removed the stitches and it left a massive scar from my chin back to my ear. Since then I've never shaved my beard off so it hides the scar.
So there's one bizarre story from my youth, if the fan had hit me 1/8" higher or lower I wouldn't be sitting here typing.
Nanuq907
I think of the lines from the old movie stripes LOL
your are one lucky fellow
i enough to put a 50cal bmg round into a single shot shotgun an try to shoot it. Took a lot of hit to make it work.
Was not a good idea.
When I was 14 years old I came home from school one day and Mom was sitting on the couch crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said "your Father packed up his clothes and moved out". It wasn't long after that I brought home a letter from the post office from a lawyer. I didn't have to ask her what was in it.
That was the day my life took a turn for the worst. I eventually got over it and understood why he left, but it still saddens me to think back to that day.
Joe
I do not. Hope this helps.
And fiery auto crashes
Some will die in hot pursuit
While sifting through my ashes
Some will fall in love with life
And drink it from a fountain
That is pouring like an avalanche
Coming down the mountain
This story frightens me to this day as it could have turned out different.....
I was maybe 7 years old and a group of us were playing army in the neighborhood. Our side captured a guy from the other side and decided we needed to hang him. All of us had watched some western the night before and it included a hanging....so up a tree the guy went with a couple guys from our side. They put a piece of looped twine around his neck and told him to say his prayers. There was no intention to follow through with it but the kid got freaked out and fell off the branch he was standing on. Thankfully the twine was not in good shape and not tied well to the tree.....He hit the ground and ran home and told his mom what happened....
The kid ended up with a big scrap on the side of his face.....the rest of us all got our butts warmed by our folks when the whole story came out.........
That is a tough situation.....my experience was similar but it was my mom that left us when I was 12.....
I was thankful we were able to forgive and move on in my adult years..
I don't think it is very strange, weird, bizarre, unusual or unique these days as several had similar stories above, but my father left my Mom with 5 kids between an infant and 11 years old, I was 5 and 2nd youngest so Mom had to work 3 jobs to put a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. Mom was a waitress for the breakfast shift in a coffee shop, spent the rest of they day as a book keeper at a slaughter house then loaded mail bags on trucks for the USPS on the graveyard shift... she was and is to this day my hero and I got my work ethics from her. My two older sisters had to fill in for Mom around the house and pretty much raised me and my two brothers. Both my Mom and father are dead and I miss my Mom but will always love her for never giving up (at least not so we could see).
I try not to post unless I can make a contribution. I don't actually remember this, as I must have been only 4 or 5 years years old. However, Mama always said it was the most embarrassing day of her life. We were country folks, and only got an indoor toilet when I was a sophomore in high school. In those days, the ladies had a Home Demonstration Club where they would dress up, meet, have refreshments, and give presentations on the latest ideas to make a housewife's life easier. As one of these meetings was breaking up, I reached the hostess's front doorsteps, reared back, and took a whiz off the top step. I sure wish I could remember the reactions of those fine ladies.
Probably not too unique, but at 16, a neighbor lady asked me to help get some things from her attic. It seems that she really didn't need anything from the attic. That was my most memorable summer ever! She moved to Dallas that fall, leaving me and all that fun behind, but she taught me a lot of things most 16 year old boys never thought of in the early 60s.
Before this turns into 'Penthouse Forum', one episode I recall was in about 1962 when a salesman came to call on our rural farm. This guy was all dandied up and driving a '60 Thunderbird convertible with the top up. We had an ornery goat at that time who liked to climb up on about anything. Well, he jumped up on the car, and then onto the roof. That is when his hooves went through the fabric and he bellied out. When he attempted to remove himself from this situation, his flailing hooves shredded the front seats.
When the salesman came out of the house he saw the spectacle and almost fainted. He demanded we pay for the damage and dad said he would be happy to when he got some money. But about everything on the farm was mortgaged except the goat, and the guy sure didn't want that. Salesmen had a rough time of it when they came to our place.
Almost as bad as "Second Hand Lions" eh!
I was too young to remember this on my own but my folks told the story a few times. We were on the observation deck at Weir Cook Airport and I wandered away from my parents and asked a man, “Are you Little Black Sambo’s daddy?” He thought it was hilarious, when I repeated what I had said to my folks they were not so amused.
Wow- I guess I really led a sedimentary childhood! Nothing to report here🤔
OK :
Got plenty of such tales ,,,
Will ad one or more as soon as Im up to such typing !
Thanks !!!
I Grew Old Too Fast (And Smart Too damn Slow !!!) !!!