Do you remember what happened when you turned thirteen?

Sac Arrow

Sac Arrow

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Snorting his way across the USA
I think that was about the age when it started happening with adult women in mind.

Oh yeah, I learned to drive, too. We didn't even own an automatic until I was fifteen. And I didn't set foot on the continental United States again until I was seventeen.
 
I was hanging out, launching model rockets, and riding bikes to the local diner for chocolate malts, and pop bottle rockets at the neighbor kid's heads from old hard chunks of garden hose. Usually we missed.

Also had my first 300 baud modem hooked to the Tandy by that year and was ... hanging out on message boards in the BBS days.

The next year, I set up a BBS. Our one "extravagance" back then, our folks got tired of the computers always being on the phone line and bought a fancy new "Teen Line" second phone line add on service which was ostensibly for the kids who talked on the phone incessantly, we used it for the modems. Stepdad's and mine.

I rewireed the phone lines in the house to make it all work properly. Even wired up my own Line 1/2 switch so I *could* actually call out on Line 1 if the modem was downloading something.

I know, I know. Neeeeerrrrrrdssss! LOL
 
Oh, I can answer this one!

No, I don't remember... must be that getting old thing.
 
The first summer of fun and independence.

I spent the summer working on a horse ranch. I cleaned stalls, washed horses, fed the horses, raked horse apples, carried hay from the field to the barn, then stacked it in the barn, fished, rode horses, camped, learned to cook on a camp fire, cleaned saddles and other tack, bottle rocket fights, dirt clod fights, learned to hitch mules to a wagon and drive that wagon, also learned how to drive the tractor, a pickup and the 1 and 1/2 ton flat bed.

I got up at 5 am every morning except Sunday to ride my spider bike 3 miles so I could have such fun........



I also got my first kiss. A friend of my sister, I was 13, she was 17........
 
Hm...

I was flying airplanes and hanging out on message boards.

Except the airplanes I was flying had Cox 0.49 engines and the message boards didn't support attachments or hyperlinks.
 
I think that was the summer my dad and I built my minibike. Found the frame in a junkyard and rebuilt it. Built and sold a bbq grill made from a 50 gal drum and used the money to buy a motor. I recall my dad telling me, "Nah, you don't need a helmet. It's not any faster than your bicycle." Then he took the governor off the motor. That little rocket would do about 45. Never did get a helmet, despite a few spectacular (and bloody) wipeouts.

Also built a gokart with some buddies using another junkyard find for a frame. No brakes; we'd just put our shoes against the front tires to slow down. The cable to the gas pedal broke, so we ran a piece of wire over the driver's shoulder. We didn't have anywhere besides the street to drive it, and it was fast. Lord knows how I survived my youth.

I can't recall specifics, but my advances were also rejected by a girl or three that year, a pattern that continued until I got married when I was 31. Of course, the pattern resumed shortly thereafter.....
 
denverpilot said:
I was hanging out, launching model rockets
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ditto

denverpilot said:
Also had my first 300 baud modem hooked to the Tandy by that year and was ... hanging out on message boards in the BBS days.
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ditto

denverpilot said:
The next year, I set up a BBS.
Click to expand...
ditto

denverpilot said:
Even wired up my own Line 1/2 switch so I *could* actually call out on Line 1 if the modem was downloading s omething.
Click to expand...
ditto

denverpilot said:
I know, I know. Neeeeerrrrrrdssss!
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... ditto
 
I was a red cross volunteer at a mental hospital, in the ward where they locked up the completely dissociated ladies. Saw some shocking stuff.
 
I grew up in the country and didn't see much of kids my age outside of school until I was 16. I had model rockets as well, sometime around that age I got to take a gun out on my own and go hunting... or was that 14? We got dial-up internet around that time, played a lot of PC games and started connecting with friends via the internet. Used to take the dog and walk through the pasture, back through the woods, around through the other cow pasture then walks the 2 miles back home via the road when I got really bored.

We had a really old cemetery on our property in the back of the cow pasture. In the olden days I was told there used to be a wagon trail up to it but no longer. I got hired to mow it after the "minimum wage idiots" as my dad called them managed to screw up badly enough to get fired by the cemetery committee. I think it was something like 2-3 acres, took me about 4-5 hours to do it initially with the push mower. About 2-3 when I finally got to use the rider. I got paid $50/mowing. At that age I thought I'd made it big with that kind of cash.
 
denverpilot said:
I bet @mscard88 discovered boobies. LOL
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Oh discovering booies happened way before 13, but 13, well there was this hot teacher that always had me stay after school see, and, well....I better not say, probably get banned for allowing a teacher to take advantage of my pureness, ok?

Kissed a girl at 10, and then ran like hell home lol.
 
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At 13, I also spent a fair amount of time fishing. My family had a weekend lake place and there was decent bass fishing. I learned to use a fly rod and started tying my own bass bugs. It was a year or two later when I got my first shotgun and started hunting that area every weekend.

No messing around with modems; I don't think Al Gore had invented the internet yet. The TRS-80 didn't come out until my senior year of high school.
 
13? Well the interwebz hadn't been invented yet and cable tv was something some people had in big cities. We could watch a war most nights...on the news. Okay, not really, that was ended just before election night a couple years before. What a crock of crap. Yes, I was a cynic before I was a teen. I delivered a lot of newspapers. Read the paper every day. Definitely stayed up with current events.

I didn't go to band camp. Didn't bang a drum or blow a trombone like some posters here. No band in podunk town, only southern baptists and a few methodists and church of christers. Good protestants all I'm sure.
 
Sac Arrow said:
I think that was about the age when it started happening with adult women in mind.

Oh yeah, I learned to drive, too. We didn't even own an automatic until I was fifteen. And I didn't set foot on the continental United States again until I was seventeen.
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Sac Arrow said:
I think that was about the age when it started happening with adult women in mind.

Oh yeah, I learned to drive, too. We didn't even own an automatic until I was fifteen. And I didn't set foot on the continental United States again until I was seventeen.
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Pearl Harbor.

Bob
 
bobmrg said:
Pearl Harbor.
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Apollo 13. OK, I had to look it up.

I don't know how people remember what happened in their lives at 13. I'm having trouble with the thread that asks about 50.
 
I got my first real six string. Bought it at the five n dime.



Kidding, I was born well after summer of '69.

I did start "dating" my now wife 5 days before I turned 13. When viewed in that context, it does feel like we've been together since the summer of '69, but it was actually ~'98-'99.
 
bobmrg said:
Pearl Harbor.

Bob
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Oh my.

Everskyward said:
Apollo 13. OK, I had to look it up.

I don't know how people remember what happened in their lives at 13. I'm having trouble with the thread that asks about 50.
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They say that the distant memories start to become more clear at some point.

Come to think about it, we owned our first boat when I was age 13. Hobie Cat. Even though a 16 footer was technically a two person boat, I used to take it out on my own all the time. And you need two people to right the thing if you capsize it, unless you have enough wind that it pushes on the trampoline, and you can use that plus your weight on the righting rope to get the mast out of the water again.

Those were fun times. I spent a lot of time out on the water, crewing on boats in the Summer break for cash. Damn. I'm starting to sound like Henning. Well okay I'm not that accomplished.
 
Sac Arrow said:
Those were fun times. I spent a lot of time out on the water, crewing on boats in the Summer break for cash.
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Bet you ate buns then too. Buns on burgers and dogs, not a girl's buns. You know. Maybe you did that too though, I dunno.... :dunno:
 
mscard88 said:
Bet you ate buns then too. Buns on burgers and dogs, not a girl's buns. You know. Maybe you did that too though, I dunno.... :dunno:
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There was a time when I could do that. On both counts.
 
13? Spent most of my time in the basement building model planes, or at the flying field with Dad. Veco and K&B and Supertigre and Kraft gold boxes. Or doing dangerous things after school with match heads and metal tubes at the local sand pit...
 
Isn't that when infinite knowledge is bestowed upon a young adolescent?
 
I thought it was the year a tornado flattened Plainfield, IL (just to the south of me) but that was when I was 12. No idea about 13.

The summer I turned 16 is very vivid. Make a thread about that.
 
GeorgeC said:
Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons, pretty standard, really.
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You too, huh? A year later, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
 
Sac Arrow said:
They say that the distant memories start to become more clear at some point.
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I hear that's right before you move on to another world. I hope that's not for a while but who knows.

I've noticed that some people have almost photographic memories of their youth. And there are some who look at those people in confusion when they talk about some incident in which you supposedly participated. I'm among the latter group.
 
flying control line model airplanes with .049 engines, and riding a minibike with a Briggs and Stratton lawn mower engine.
 
I was probably doing something stupid with model airplanes. Or painting on cave walls.

Brad Z said:
There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking...[emphasis added]
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Stop using aftershave.

Nauga,
who says, "if it smells like cologne, leave it alone."
 
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