knives and your childhood

UnixDork

UnixDork

Joined
Dec 2, 2001
Messages
453
Earlier today I was reading replies to the question "What is your earliest childhood memory" and I wondered about how childhood experiences influenced people to collect knives later in life. I don't want to get too armchair psychologist about this, but looking back I remember that ever since I was very little I had an interest in everything to do with hunting, including knives. Also I remember that all men carried pocket knives back then, that's just what you did. I remember thinking that some day I would be older and would be allowed to carry a pocket knife and that was just about the greatest thing ever. I was fascinated by knives then and I am still today.

Did anyone else have a similar experience, and also do you think that has influenced you in what type of knives you're interested in now? Do you still have any of those knives from your childhood, like your first pocket knife?
 
It's hard to remember when I got interrested in knives. My best friend when I was about 5 or 6 was a tomboy named Andie. She had about 5 older brothers who had things like BB guns and pocket knives. I think that they gave me some. Andy and I were big on exploring and would hike or take our bikes anyplace strange that we could get to. I liked having a pocket knife with me on those trips. The one that I specifically remember was equivalent to an AG Russell Funny Folder http://www.agrussell.com/knives/by_..._russell_funny_folder_aluminum_and_aus8_.html
When I was about 9 or 10 a friend and I got stuck in an excavation out in the desert. I dug a ladder into the side of the excavation with that knife to let us get out. It was not a place to be stuck at noon on a summer day. After that I was really stuck on the notion of always having pocket knife.
 
I grew up in the country edge of what would eventually be swallowed by northeast San Antonio. My first knife I still have (and a pic of me with it). It was a no-name knife/fork/spoon combo my dad brought back from Japan. As long as I remember I have had a fascination with knives.
http://photobucket.com/albums/v332/merekk/Knives/
 
I learned about knives, guns, and respect for those tools through my father and stepbrothers. Around the age of 5 my dad gave me my first knife, a Wenger SAK. Though the years him, my mom, and stepmom all gave me various knives. Around the same time I got my first knife I got my first gun, a Crosman Classic .177 cal Pump Airgun. A couple years later it was a Ruger 10/22, then a Remington 870 Express Mag. My dad and stepbrothers, and most of my family are all hunters and fisherman. My dad was also a police officer for 30 years and also in the military as a young man. So basically I grew up this way. I collect a lot of other things too, like comics, stamps, and some coins. I think the urge to be collector of things came mostly from my mom.

Come to think about it, I also remember my dad bringing home knives he would have to take off kids in the city... I actually remember a few mornings I would wake up super early and wait for him to get home so I could see what his nightly booty was, fun times yer sir.
 
Uncle Paul.

If one thing was to influence me it was he.

I started life as a city boy on the northern outskirts of Washington D.C. My family was from New Jersey and my dad had moved us down to Washington just after the end of WW2 as it was a booming area and employment was good. Once in a while my Uncle Paul would drive down from Patterson to visit and these were some great memories. uncle Paul and my dad were as unlike as any brothers could be. My dad was not into knives, while Uncle Paul always had a couple on him. I think today he would be called a Knife knut!

Of course this being the late 40's and early 50's his knives were typical of the era. Traditional slipjoints. On family picnics he'd be whittling flutes from reeds, little dog or pony figures from peach pits, let alone hot dog and marshmello sticks. I was always in terrific suspence to see what knife Uncle Paul would pull out of his old khaki work pants. My dad always just had the same old stockman and as long as he had a knife he did not see the reason to buy another.

When Uncle Paul passed on I was in my 20's and he left me his pocket knives. I still have them today in a glass display case in my living room, as very treasured items. Once in a VERY great while I will carry one of his knives, but would never use them hard, cut a piece of twine, open mail or package, ect.

He seemed to prefer stag to other materials. The three German Bruckmans are stag, as is the couple Case peanuts, and jacks, the old Remingtons in stockman and trappers.

My Uncle Paul awakened me to the world of knives.
 
My dad is an Eagle Scout, ex-Navy, and an avid outdoorsman. Back when I was younger and he had the time, we'd always be out and about it the woods. Most of my memories of my single-digit years involved running around in the wildlife preserve that the company he worked for owned. He gave me my first knife, a Buck lockback, and a medium Arkansas whetstone. I vaguely remember the knife not having much of a blade after about two years of my inept sharpening.
 
I still have my first "real" knife -- a 4-bladed Belknap Hardware congress pattern that my dad got for me for my 10th birthday back in 1968. It is very worn and abused, but has a lot of sentimental value to me.
 
I don't remember ever not having a pocketknife. I think my first was one of those camping knives with a single blade, can opener, and a spoon. I used that sucker for years until the cheap carbon steel was black and pitted.

My first "real" knife was a small Old Timer that my 84 year old great aunt gave me the day she decided to teach all the kids how to play mumblety-peg. I wish I still had that one but it was swiped along with the rest of my early collection of knives back when I was in junior high.
 
I had various cheap fixed blades and folders , when I was about 11 I got my first "real knife , a Case trapper , and an Arkansas stone for sharpening , I had quite a few case trappers and stockmen . In the later sixties , along came the Buck 110 , from there on in there was no looking back .
 
My earliest childhood memory is of Christmas Day at my grandmother's house just before I turned 3. There was a bird in the house that kept flying into the ceiling until it left blood smears and died. Thats the sad, morbid part.

The fun part was putting together my He-man Skeletor castle with the help of a SAK used to cut all the little pieces out of the plastic frame. My uncle did all that work, I don't think anyone was going to trust me with a blade just yet!

He ended up giving me that SAK when I got a few years older. To this day, its the only knife that ever cut me. It closed on my thumb, cut to the bone. I still have the scar. Probably makes me a bit odd but looking at it makes me smile. :)
 
I was 7 when I received my first SAK. I grew up in an area of Staten Island that had a lot of kids. Getting your pocketknife was like a rite of passage - it was when you became a "big kid". We'd all sit on somebody's front porch steps and sharpen sticks until we got yelled at for the mess of shavings all over the place.

We all got the same lecture when we got home with our dull knives. "I'll sharpen it for you THIS TIME, but no more whittling sticks or you're on your own!"

When I moved to Colorado a few years later I was shocked to find that I was the ONE kid allowed to have a pocket knife and that the other kids were amazed by it and all wanted to see it and play with it. It's odd that NY would be more liberal about that kind of thing than Colorado, but that's the way it went.

I guess I grew up with the idea that carrying a pocket knife was just the sort of thing a person should do. It was the NORMAL thing to do.
 
my first knives were cheap swiss army knock offs and 110 clones, my first "real" knife was something similar to the swiss army secretary, the silver one with a large and small blade, i cut my self with in 2 mins of getting the knife for my 8th birthday, it was the first time i had a knife with an actual edge, i instantly learned my lesson and respected that knife. since then there might have been maybe 30 days total that i havent carried a knife, and im 20 now. and 20 of those days i was on vaction in jamaica and my dad didnt want me to bring a knife due to possible hassles at the airport.

now i carry a buck\strider everywhere i go, plus some others. :)
 
I grew up on a farm, where we butchered our own cattle, and my Dad was always hunting.

Knives were a part of my life from my earliest memories.

I've always viewed knives as something that should be used, and still only buy knives that I'm prepared to put to hard use.

Even the beautiful knives I own, like my Fallkniven Northern Lights, get used regularly.

David
 
come to think of it....

when i was around 6 years old
I was given blades by my grandfather, a knife he rought back from the war with clear nazi symbols on it. I was fascinated by it so it was promptly taken away by my mother.

When the dust settled a few years later i was given a tourist khukuri by of course my grandfather, nothing special but it was a gift and fullers are pretty.
It was promptly taken away.

Same story for a big buck folder

Thats pretty much the cycle until my teens.


edit: my first "real" blades began as a himalayan imports khuk followed up nicely by a benchmade 880.

Edit: i try hard as day not to think about it but that nazi knife was lost forever when my mother forgot where she hid it and moved to another house, someone got a nice suprise in that old place.
 
I grew up in Pennsylvania and we were always in the woods exploring and causing mischief.

A prerequisite was to have a 1) knife, 2) matches, and 3) a BB gun. My first knife was a rather small 1.5 inch celluloid slipjoint penknife by Western Cutlery my father gave me whe I was around six. I went with me on all my adventures and surprisingly it is one of the few items from my childhood that I have not lost nor broken.

However, I always wanted more knives as a kid but only had that one until I was around 15 years old (when I could afford to buy my own). Maybe it was all those years of wanting that turned me into a knife knut.

Mike

P.S. I have always carried a knife as long as I remember.
 
I've been collecting and using knives for 20 years now. My Dad and my uncles got together and gave me my first knife on my first birthday. I get at least one knife a year from my family, and I buy many more.

I grew up in the suburbs outside of St. Louis. With the exception of the time I was in school, I always had a pocket knife on me. Dad and my uncles would take me to knife and gun shows, where I would eagerly spend all of my money on knives. I'd use most of the knives in the creeks and local woods, in Boy Scouts, and doing yard work for my parents and neighbors.

The last year or so, I have taken an active interest in making knives, too.
 
He liked pocket knives, and always carried at least one at all times. He hunted, and fished, woodworked as a hobby, and looked a lot like Ernest Hemingway. My brother got the woodworking bug from him, and I got the fishing/knives interest/major psychotic obsession.

He gave me a little two-blade penknife with checkered red metal scales when I was five or so, after giving me a very strict lecture on how to use it safely. Over the years he gave my brother and I knives on a pretty regular basis, up to and including a British Crimean War-era bayonet that he used as a fireplace poker. When I was maybe seven, and my brother five, he gave us both hobo knives. He had something of a sense of humour, and in recent years I've occasionally wondered whether he did that to see how we went about cutting our food with them.

My mother was pretty cool with the idea of us carrying knives, too. Probably his influence. She had a really nice Ka-Bar hunter that she carried while camping, and gave us a number of knives over the years, including a Leatherman Micra that I still carry daily (or rather wear, on a carabiner/neck lanyard).

I didn't get any of my grandfather's knives when he died (although I did get his best bamboo fly rod (a Farlow "The Alexander") and am angling for one of his shotguns, currently in my aunt's possession). But one thing that I did get from him is the habit of carrying a knife on me at all times, usually a SAK, and currently a Victorinox Rucksack. I cannot remember ever not owning a knife.
 
i remember being fascinated with pocket knives as a kid. guess i was between 6 and 11 years old then. i could never afford them, but usually managed to actually find knives on the streets or in bushes that other people had lost or ditched. heck, i could hardly afford my daily candy fixes and card-collecting habits...

i thought they were the coolest thing ever an 8 year old could possess. i remember playing this game with some fellow neighborhood kids on the school playground. you'd hold the knife by its very butt and let it drop down vertically in the soil where a square piece of dirt was flattened as a play-area of some sorts, and then you could cut a line of choice to divide the square into pieces if you landed your knife nicely straight. some sort of 'gathering more land' game, not sure.

i remember that my mom didn't like me having knives and she'd always take them away from my room when i wasn't aware and she'd hide them in closets and on the fridge. every now and then i managed to find my precious again, and re-pocketed it and carried it with pride. one knife i remember quite vividly, it was a beautiful gent's folder with some sort of yellow-green pearl handle. i was totally devastated when i finally 'lost' that knife for good.

then, somewhere between the age of 12 and 16 my interest shifted to balisongs because i thought they were cool. i got a relatively good one which had cost me around $40. i was pretty good at it too, but the funny thing is that i don't remember actually using a knife to cut stuff during those years. it was more the thrill of ownership and handling-skill itself i suppose. on the other hand it could very well be that the knives were equipped with crappy 410 made in china 'steel' which won't cut any better than a fingernail...

then somehow, between the age of 16 and 26 i totally lost interest in knives for some reason and didn't own a single one anymore. i guess i ditched them or gave them to my younger brothers.

then, only 3 years ago, suddenly i got struck by the bug again and regained interest in knives. it began with collecting daggers, not sure why, they just appealed to me aesthetically i guess. then some good 'ol buck 110 and 119's, over to collecting vintage AMK's.....too expensive,....sold all knives i collected and started over with a clean slate.

i'm currently a user-collector of spyderco, strider, tops and leathrman. come to think of it, i find it somewhat odd that i now routinely EDC a folder everyday, how did THAT happen?!

ok, to the point, sorry about the longwinding story.

yes, i definitely think the knife-hobby might have some psychological links to my childhood: NOW i can legally and safely carry knives whenever i want (sorry mom! ;-).....), and NOW that i have the money, which i didn't have as a kid, a whole new world of purchase-opportunities has opened up for me. yeah, that's it i guess. i might just be 'making up for my losses' during my childhood.......( :confused: )

dennis
 
To put it simple, I wanted to do something 'exciting". My folks talked about weapons and knives either with some fear or with awe. This made feel that collecting knives made me a little different from them. It was the only thing that was just 100% me, something that they couldn't touch or even understand.
Later, it became more of a practical interest, along with the already mentioned collectors urge.

And yes, my first knive was a SAK too. Can't remember if it was a vicky or a wenger. My dad used to carry one, so he bought another for me. The first knives that I bought myself (without my parents) were some switchblades from a friend in highschool. My very first legal purchase was an Almar Fairbairn/Appelgate dagger. I am also facinated by other weapons. Ranging from guns, ancient weapons to warmachines like tanks & jets. I own a bb gun and used to have one an airshotgun. I am planning to begin collecting firearms too.
 
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