If you'd like a few laughs, you stopped at the right place. Oh, those free-spirited adolescence days!
My buddy and I used to walk or, preferably, hitchhike up the small mountain where the town dump was located. We went up there to scavenge for any kind of speaker that we might be lucky enough to find in a TV or radio console. We also took delight in smashing some light bulbs, if there were any lying around. One time on our way up there, as we were about halfway up the steepest part of the grade, we both started playing this funny game we devised. It went like this: When we heard no cars coming through, and back then there were not too many cars on the road to begin with, we both pulled down our pants just so we could see if we could get them back up in time before the next vehicle would drive by. We laughed a lot, and when we first pulled our pants down, we jovially yelled out, "Yeeee!" Boy oh boy, did we two gesticulate in the strangest ways at times.
Back at my house, the family never had a power lawn mower. So when our good ole' neighbor Jed got a new one, he gave our family his old Toro, which still ran pretty good. As kids, we resented the fact that all we had was an old rotary-style grass cutter that had no motor and only ran with some elbow and leg grease. There was not much grass to begin with in our yard to cut anyway; it was sparse. Dad never had the money or even the know-how to have a splendid lawn like most of the other homes had in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, Dad did have faith to get us through the hard times. Now with this more modern contraption, I became happier than a pig in crap. I thought I was mechanically inclined, and so I proceeded once nice day to take this machine all apart to see how it worked. Then I cleaned it all up and refueled it. Of course I didn't know about two-cycle engines or fuel ratios, so I put plenty of oil in with the gasoline, and I tell you, when that thing got a runnin', blue smoke nearly filled the whole neighborhood. It was quite dense, but not dense enough that I couldn't see my mother looking out the kitchen window. I can imagine what she was thinking at the time: George the menace!
