My aunt's house sat on the side of a hill in Lakeside. From her front porch you had a great view across the hardly-a-valley to the hill on the other side of the road. If you strained to the right, you could look down the length of the valley out across Winterhaven Blvd to what would become Santee but then was just more valley. There were three houses serviced by the driveway. It was a sharp turn off of Marilla drive and a steep climb up to her parking lot; maybe not a lot but a parking little, enough for three or four cars and a turn-around. At the bottom of the driveway there was a five foot bank on her side, a ten to fifteen foot drop on the downhill side. Right on the corner of Marilla and her drive way was a huge, old Eucalyptus tree. It was a kid magnet. It served as a jungle gym, a space ship, and many other imaginative places for kids from all over the little valley.
My older brother, let's call him "Skip"...heheheeee, found a long piece of rope that had to be an inch and a half in diameter. After several experiments with geometric stuff like angles and curves and such, we found you could tie the rope onto one of the high branches and have a clear arc from one of the lower branches out over the bank and across the road. You would be about 10 to 15 feet over the surface of the road. The construction took a lot of the day. We tied a short piece of 2X4 to the bottom to serve as a seat and we were ready to test fly. We needed a test pilot. I wasn't Big Fat Daddy then but was concerned with building a reputation worthy of being the Chief's son. So my hand flew up before I knew what I was doing.
When I got up to the "lower" branch we identified as the launch platform (we probably didn't call it that...no one had been in space yet) I immediately noticed that one of the stranged properties of physics is that things look higher up when you are in them than they do from the ground. Another thing I hadn't allowed for was the weight factor. We hadn't been very careful about the length of rope needed to make our flight successful and we sure didn't think about how much the higher branch would flex under someone's weight. Well, on the first flight I drove that 2X4 about two inches into the hard packed dirt. I stopped RIGHT NOW. As I rolled off the 2X4 to DIP (die in place), I heard Skip grabbing the rope and telling everyone they needed to tie the board up a little higher on the rope. I don't remember anyone speaking to me until I was told I had to move out of the way for the next test flight.
We got the arc, the flex, the velocity, and aim down pat after a few more tries. We had been careful up to that point to avoid the cars one Marilla. But that mischief bug stung ol' Skip and he started figuring the timing of the swing. He told me that the next car that came by, he was going to swing out over it. Genius!. He worked on the timing, which required a spotter on the ground to count down the distance of approching traffic. Soon he had that down pat, too. He swung out over a pick up and a car or two then we all had a try at it. Skip was on the rope waiting for the next car when his spotter, me, yelled that it was a Thunderbird, a convertible, and it had a chick in the shot-gun
seat. Skip timed it perfectly, swung out directly over the top of the chick and the driver. She screamed, he ducked and lost control momentarily, the Thunderbird skidded and slewed sideways and came to a stop. The driver was out of the car the instant it came to rest. But Skip was on his own...all the rest of us were scattered to the winds, hiding behind trees, bushes and fences before his return swing brought Skip back to the bank. Skip was off the rope and dashing, T-Fird man was hot on his trail.