Sling Shot - Dave's Midwestern Ohio Memories

Series of Guest Blogs by an out-of-state Fish Report reader originally from this area about fond memories of growing up in Midwestern Ohio during the 50’s & 60’s

Sling Shot

As a kid growing up, at the first sign of spring, we’d always make homemade sling shots to shoot small stones at various targets around the farm. The crude weapon was easy to make out of a forked tree branch and a slice of rubber inner tube. The tricky part was attaching ends of the the sliced inner tube to the two forks so that they didn’t come loose. The first one was usually pretty flimsy and typically broke after a few tries, then we’d learn from our mistakes and create a better version, a pattern that was repeated until we made one that could fire a pebble over the barn. That was our test. This tried-and-true trial-and-error approach honed as a kid helped me tremendously as an auto engineer later in life.

Typically each spring, there was usually a heavy rain that would flood the bottom land in our pasture next to the creek allowing large carp to spawn along the edges of the shallow flood plane, making perfect targets for our sling shots.

Dad never liked the carp because they were bottom feeders and were considered inedible trash fish, so he encouraged us to go after them with our sling shots; better than shooting out windows in the farm buildings, I guess.

That occupied our time for a while, until the water receded and we were off to our next target, usually a tin can on top of a fence post. But shortly thereafter, the land was dry enough to till the ground, so no more time to goof off - as it was planting time, and on our dairy farm, that meant sunrise to sunset work for the next six months through the harvest season. Tough but rewarding work, but not as much fun as being an auto engineer - build it, bust it, fix it!

Check out this old timer by the name of Rufus Hussey using his sling shot to hit some amazing targets:

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