Being bored helped people learn to live in the 1950s and before. You sort of watched "The Grass Grow" a lot. I remember summers from about age 10 on and I spent a lot of time reading Science Fiction by Robert Heinlein and things like this while laying out on the lawn in my front yard. This was interrupted by long bicycle rides sometimes to friends houses or to movie theaters. My life reminded me a lot of what you saw in Stand by Me(1986).
Summers away from Los Angeles and Glendale were a lot like the movie Stand by Me where I met boys in my church from all around the country and world who came to Shasta Springs in Mt. Shasta and brought things like Firecrackers and all sorts of interesting things with them and we rolled boulders and things down hills.
One time my cousin and I were rolling boulders (he was 13 and I was 8 years old) at the time and we loved the crunch crunch sounds as boulders took off rolling down the steep mountain hill through other rocks and bushes and knocking down smaller trees. From your point of view now this would be awful for a variety of reasons (and likely you would be right) but remember this was 1956 when this happened and I was only 8 years old with my 13 years old male cousin from Seattle and I lived in likely either Tujunga or Glendale in the Los Angeles are in California then.
But, here's the problem we ran into.
No one was below (that we know of) that got hit by the boulders.
However, the problem was that a large boulder got stuck on the railroad tracks and we could hear a train coming south fast from the little City of Mt. Shasta.
We were terrified we would be held responsible for derailing a freight train but we were not big enough or strong enough to move a 300 or 400 pound boulder we had rolled down a steep hill in the forest onto a railroad track heading between Mt. Shasta and Dunsmuir alongside the Sacramento River which runs eventually into Shasta Dam 40 miles or so down Interstate 5.
So, we were crying and struggling trying to get this boulder off the tracks before we got blamed for a train derailment. We were both just boys and this was horrific.
Finally my older cousin found a solution in a railroad tie and enough leverage to pry the big boulder off the tracks and into the Sacramento River. We were crying when the train went by but we waved to the engineer and tried to smile like everything was okay!
But, we were a mess because we felt we had almost derailed a train by fooling around rolling boulders down a hill. We never did that again! obviously.
Images for stand by me cast
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