re: Name something crazy your dad had you do growing up

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We drove boats at our camp long before we ever thought of having drivers licenses

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I was 10 or 11 and my grandparents lived on lake ouchita and had a big ski boat. We would visit in summer and get the boat out of storage and launch it and leave it in the cove by their condo all weekend. Come time one Sunday to put the boat up my dad tells me “your grandad doesn’t feel like going out he is sick and it’s about to storm, you take the boat to the marina I’ll be there with the trailer” now this lake is huge and marina was 5-6 miles away and I’ve never driven a boat beyond him letting me steer. And it’s whitecapping out there from the wind. He quickly shows me throttle and tilt trim tells me don’t hit anyone and don’t run into an island, tilt it up before driving it straight onto the trailer. And this ain’t no jon boat on a pond I’m learning on, it’s a 21 ft ski boat with a V-8 that’ll run 60 mph on the biggest lake in Arkansas. Just toss me feet first into the fire dad

I made it though and succesfully got it straight onto the trailer

My dad had a string of businesses when I was in high school, none of which really worked out. He bought a battery recycling plant, which mostly consisted of a large recycler in a dark, dank warehouse with no A/C. My job one summer was to shovel up the wet sludge mixed with battery acid, which was a byproduct of the recycling process. I'd be covered in sludge and acid, taking frequent breaks to wash with pumice soap. Little ventilation and no mask. I'm sure the whole thing was a huge OSHA violation. We went a few months before my mom stepped in and made me stop, and dad ended up selling it. Helped me realize I wanted to study hard in school and not work that way for a living.

My dad was the responsible parent and was pretty over protective. Once I turned 18, it was like a switch flipped.

Nothing crazy to report, but we went through a DUI checkpoint when I was 19 or so and my dad was loaded in the passenger seat sipping scotch out of a glass. I’m freaking the frick out (19, open container, DUI checkpoint) and he tucks his glass up under the seat while the cop shines a light in the car and starts questioning me. Cop made a joke like, “you better not be drinking with your pops in the car haha, have a good night” and let us through. Dad pulled his glass out from under the seat and kept right on sipping. Never spilt a drop.

Actually my Stepdad….We had a push mower and he would just stand there and watch me to make sure I cut the grass in straight lines. If he didn’t like what he saw, I had to go over it again.
Probably why I’m OCD about my yard to this day

Probably the only "punishment" type work my old man assigned was when he had me clear 2 quarter mile sections of overgrown fence row. I was 10 years old, swearing and swinging a ditch bank knife through saplings and briars on summer afternoons. Don't remember what I had done to get that particular punishment, but it definitely included a preliminary beating. Anyway, after about 6 full weeks of sweating to clear that goddamn fence row, he brought our dozer over and pushed the whole damn fence into a pile in under an hour. Apparently he had planned to replace the fence all along, and the manual labor was just his way of teaching me a lesson. I still get irrationally angry when I see one of those old ditch bank blades.

I did enough stupid stuff on my own--he mostly just kept me busy enough that I had to work really hard to find a chance to unleash my inner idiot.

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My dad ran out of gas mowing the lawn and gave me a plastic milk gallon jug and told me to go get gas on my bike.

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I remember doing this as a really young kid. And I had to cross a busy 2 lane hwy. I can’t decide if those were the good ole days or if my dad was fricking retarded.

He taught me on the catfish farm how to drive a tractor at 9. JD 5400. One time I had it in high gear driving it to the fuel tank and came in too fast and ran it into the tank. Got cussed out and told never to go any higher than the middle gears.

Couple weeks later have a pond with low oxygen and the fish are about to die. 5 am, dark. He puts me on a tractor with a pto driven aerator to drive to this pond. I’m in middle gear crawling along and he pulls back up screaming and cussing to put it in high gear and why I am I going so slow the fish are gonna die. He later apologized when he realized I was just doing as he told me

My dad backed me down the boat ramp sitting in a 14' flatboat with a 6hp Mercury when I was 12, waved out the drivers' window as he drove away. Me and my 11 year old cousin had the whole Tangipahoa river to roam from daylight til dark.

My Korean war vet grandpa was a farmer, and had me driving and using 40 and 50 year old tractors and implements with zero safety features before I was 13. Funniest story from him: He caught me with and took away from me (furiously) a box cutter my grandmother had given me for cutting the black plastic I was literally driving a tractor and using the implement for laying over the rows. Said the shovel laying on each end of the rows was for that.

I'm sure I still have a few knots on my head from his LSU class ring bopping me for not holding the flashlight right.

When we would drive down to fish, he thought it was good driving practice for me to sit in the middle front and steer. Not a bench seat, I sat on the damn emergency brake lever. It didn't always go well.