Neighborhood Games

I remember we used to play a lot of hide and seek and kick the can. Kick the can was my favorite. What were some of the neighborhood games you would play as kids?

Marbles and red light-yellow light-green-light/stop.

We rode our bikes many miles a day. Neighbors had a trampoline and we used that a lot. Winter time we did a lot of sledding and playing in the woods behind our house. Having to do anything inside was like a punishment to us back then. Way different than kids now days

Coletrain27 wrote:

We rode our bikes many miles a day.

Was thinking about this myself the other day. Wouldn’t be uncommon to put 10-20 miles on my bike a day during the summer as a kid.

Fun with Jarts.
Apple/rock fights.
Ding dong ditch.
Skitching in the winter.
Lots of things that are now considered no bueno.

Lived in the city,so no fun with anything motorized,and the”rich”kids got the Schwinn Sting Rays

Ghosts in the graveyard is one I remember

Coletrain27 wrote:

We rode our bikes many miles a day. Neighbors had a trampoline and we used that a lot. Winter time we did a lot of sledding

Ya I did those a lot too as a kid. Playing a lot of pond hockey down at the local city-maintained rink in the winter too.

Kick the can, never. Marbles, never. Occasional game of 2 hand touch football or ultimate frisbee if we could get enough people together.

Same here with kick the can and hide and seek.

Also in becker football was a way of life a lot of touch football games in yards.

Freeze tag on the jungle gyms! And riding bikes of course. Anything as long as it was outside. I was (and still am!) a big tree climber. 😁

Justin riegel wrote:

Ghosts in the graveyard is one I remember

Glad someone else calls it this too, most call it 61. Loved that game, funny we were north Mpls back then with 20 kids playing the entire block with not a care in the world. How things change. Over there we had pickup games of baseball except we used wiffleball bats and taped the wiffleball with hockey tape, sometimes in the front yard and the opposite side of street houses were homeruns. Sometimes went over to empty lot few blocks away. Nerf football games played between a few front lawns that had good grass and the owners didn’t care.

Over in birdtown lots of biking. Hit the train tracks up and the dirt pits to make some jumps. Never really any games, night came and you kinda went in. Maybe some hacky sack or pogs here and there.

We built a big BMX track at a local kids house and the older we got the bigger it got. His parents were awesome and his dad would bring a skid loader home on the weekends to help. Once we hit about 12 to 13 that turned in to our mx track and we rode dirt bikes. Besides that most our time was spent in the woods building forts, trapping and plunking critters or at fawn lake.
Then it turned in to party’s and trying to keep out of the laws eye. Which wasn’t easy in our little town of linwood.
We used to ride our bikes from linwood to forest lake every day in the summer because they had sweet BMX jumps and cute girls that was 15 miles from my driveway 1 way. If you got hurt or wrecked your bike it was a long crappy peg ride bac,, getting hurt was part of the norm. The 4 guys I rode BMX with were crazy and we all pushed each other to do some crazy stuff back when hurting your self was not even a care or thought. Especially in front of those cute girls.
That would typically turn in to a scuffle or 2 with those forest lake boys for picking up their chick’s lol.
Man those were the days.
We also had neighborhood boxing matches. Being I boxed since I was small I loved fighting older kids and in stead of fighting it was funner to beat them down with gloves on.

Being from Canada, we always had a road hockey game going.pretty much from sun up to sun down with maybe a hotdog for lunch. We would challenge other streets to games.

A group of us would ride our bmx bikes to the billiards a town over (14.3 miles on google one way) or to the mall (18 miles). Sometimes we played pool at the bar but they kicked us out when happy hour started. Neighbor had a dirt bike track that we used our bikes on. There were lots of jumps we built in the woods just clearing trees by inches. Lots of snowball fights, sledding, snowboarding, nerf wars, football, fishing… Still have a BB in my arm from gun fights. No safety glasses or anything. Had fun with yard darts for a short while until we damage the grill playing over the house. 4th of July we would always have roman candle wars. How am I still alive?

Capture the flag

Rode our bikes for hours and hours
Ding dong ditch
Pig, horse, lightning
500 (football or baseball style game)
Baseball, 2 hand touch
Smear the queer (not sure what they call it now days to be political correct)
Have alot of great memories as a kid growing up in our quite neighborhood. We had 5 empty lots that’s we could go and do what we wanted and not ruin someone’s yard with a bunch of kids trampolining the grass down.

Did a lot of carp fishing between the Lake street bridge and the Ford bridge. A couple cans of Green Giant maybe a 12er of Blatz and we were GTG.

Eelpoutguy wrote:

Did a lot of carp fishing between the Lake street bridge and the Ford bridge. A couple cans of Green Giant maybe a 12er of Blatz and we were GTG.

Even as a youngster you had bad taste in beer!

Its funny how we all grew up doing the same things and the most common is it was all outside. Now kids don’t even go outside.

Even as a youngster you had bad taste in beer!

Its funny how we all grew up doing the same things and the most common is it was all outside. Now kids don’t even go outside.
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My kids are never inside. I run my house like my mom did.
The kids want to play inside and do nothing then I have a chore list for them

Bearcat89 wrote:

My kids are never inside. I run my house like my mom did.
The kids want to play inside and do nothing then I have a chore list for them

Great job BC!

A few games of kick the can & ghost in the graveyard. But, We spent almost every day playing a sports game of some sorts. We had no problem rounding up 6-10 kids, varying in age by about 10 years, and playing backyard football & baseball. Also, spent A LOT of time playing street hockey all year round. My neighbors dad worked at a plastics company down in the cities where they made the plastic street hockey pucks with the black roller balls.

When we got a bit older, we’d hang in the street after dark and throw the baseball as high in the air as we could, last person to move was the winner! we all had a few close calls getting hit when that ball came back down, but luckily, nothing seriously bad ever happened.

Can’t forget about good old Ding Dong Ditch & playing Scruffy too.

IceNEyes1986 wrote:

Oh man scruffy, I forgot about those days. And ding dong ditch.

Lots of ghost in the graveyard. One time got the cops called on us (THREE cop cars showed up!) while playing in a friend’s neighborhood in the wealthy part of Maple Grove.
Capture the flag, whiffle ball, frisbee. Good times.

John Rasmussen wrote:

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>Bearcat89 wrote:</div>
My kids are never inside. I run my house like my mom did.
The kids want to play inside and do nothing then I have a chore list for them

Great job BC!

As long as I can keep them from the stupid trouble I went through. Then I’ll say I did a good job.

John Rasmussen wrote:

Now kids don’t even go outside.

My kids (8 and 10) literally spent hours this weekend playing in melting runoff water running down the curb/gutter.

Sure, sometimes they want to do inside stuff, but usually, playing outside keeps them more entertained.

During the day, biking everywhere, all the sports, in the summer we’d go to the river for rope swings, swimming at Horse Rock or across the Mississippi or once old enough friends parents boats/jetskis, in the winter it was the hockey rink, Muskie Hill sledding, or snowball fights/forts. Biking to St. Cloud for a matinee at the movie theatre or Crossroads run was a couple times a summer occurrence.

Then Night Games were their own whole thing, kick the can, capture the flag, ghost in the graveyard among others I can’t recall. It was pretty much every night, all summer long. When we moved to Carver a year ago, one of the first nights I heard some screaming and saw someone go running thru our backyard, stepped outside and heard the sounds of commotion that kids playing night games can make, and smiled. We have an awesome neighborhood, and my kids have no idea how much fun is in their future.

Oh, I was that one kid all the neighbors hated

Ding dong ditch
Spin the bottle
Skitching
Ripping around the neighborhood on the ole YZ 250
Put snowmobile engines on gocarts….
Built my first street rod when I was 14 (fortunately neighbors didn’t turn me in for drag racing down the street.
Had private ponds to fish that were about 5 blocks away, so sneaked into there a lot

Randy Wieland wrote:

Oh, I was that one kid all the neighbors hated

Ding dong ditch
Spin the bottle
Skitching
Ripping around the neighborhood on the ole YZ 250
Put snowmobile engines on gocarts….
Built my first street rod when I was 14 (fortunately neighbors didn’t turn me in for drag racing down the street.
Had private ponds to fish that were about 5 blocks away, so sneaked into there a lot

We had old yz250s and the cr 500. Still have the cr500 around. It’s Been in a home made shifter cart, mini sand rail and a 98 blaster. Damn thing like to tear axles off machines though.
We also put a gsxr600 motor from a bike I totalled in to a mini home built sand rail. But every time you touched the gas pedal you could only see the sky. Until it would throw the rear axle

Randy Wieland wrote:

Put snowmobile engines on gocarts….

We did this as too!! A few of us figured out how to get a the snowmobile engine mounted on the cart and the belt drive lined up. However we found out our break system was horse poo!! Also forgot to add a heat deflector on the backrest of the cart. She got hot!!! We built this on the farm I worked at and still cannot believe they let us drive this thing. The old man was teaching us how to weld and this was our project. Did about 65 and we destroyed it in one weekend. God was on our side I think. No one got hurt and never crossed our minds when we were kids..

We spent most of our summer riding the bikes down to the river or pond here fishing and shooting stuff with wrist rockets. Had to cross some tracks on the way to the river and would fill a pocket full of taconite every time we went down there.

We played sports, mainly baseball or street hockey from time to time, rode bikes,made jumps and played ghosts in the graveyard or capture the flag at night. Most of our free time during the day was spent fishing and playing on the banks of the rum river.

Nick, we used to do the same with a tennis ball and racket. Hit it straight up in the dark and wait for it to come down. Using a baseball sounds a bit more exciting though!
Ding Dong Ditch was fun until my mom called every house in the neighborhood and sold us out. After that we just got ignored when we tried.

Like others did a lot of bike riding.
We had a public outdoor rink in our backyard so it was whatever sport we wanted to play. It was very close to the movie the sand lot. Kids would show up and we would play baseball football kickball whatever or go in the street and have great street hockey games. Maybe even brotherly scuffle here and there.
Difference back then is there was not that many things to do in the house.
Video games were limited. TV was limited. Toys were limited.
Friends running a muck were not. They would just show up each day out there.

Weekends were spent at the lake.