Re-reading this thread prompted an old memory that I had deliberately buried (at least until the statute of limitations is up). Waaaaay back in the day before the "Harvey Oaks" subdivision was a thing it was an old farm. For those of you not intimately familiar with "West O", that's roughly 150th & West Center Road, north side, east of the train tracks & trestle. So word got out that the farm had been sold for the new development, and the people living there moved out and it sat empty for a while.
Well, four of us from the old neighborhood thought it would be really helpful of us if we helped them knock it down. Armed with a "universal ignition key" (flat blade screwdriver, firmly smack it into the keyhole and twist to the right - like
@Elizabeth Reed probably does during the sects while yelling "Takedown - 2 points!"), my mechanically inclined neighbor (let's call him Tom because that's his name) managed to fire up a full-blown, genuine Caterpillar issued bull dozer. Just what a group of juvenile delinquents needs to be operating in the dark, amIright?
A few moments to familiarize ourselves with the operating controls and we set off on a path of destruction, knocking down most of walls on the house before we turned our attention to the barn. Here's where our lack of engineering prowess revealed itself as Tom was bright enough to raise the bucket hoping to knock it over, but we went through it and part of the barn fell on us (Tom was driving, the rest of us were standing on the rear trailer hitch). A couple of us got knocked off by the falling lumber, and Tom started to back the bulldozer up trying to get out from under the barn. We barely got off to the side before Tom went whizzing by in reverse - we're lucky we weren't crushed by the tracks, no shit.
When we were all clear of the barn, those of us that were nearly @died during the backup incident started yelling a Tom cursing him out for nearly killing us. He had a short fuse, and that pissed him off, so Tom promptly spun the bulldozer away from the barn, pointed it north in the general direction of a lake that was on the property, lifted the lever that controlled the engine speed, slammed it into gear and jumped off the damn thing. The last thing any of us saw was a bulldozer cruising over the hill, bucket mounted at chest height, with only God knows what in its path. The rest of us took one look at each other, yelled "Oh shit" and scrambled for the getaway car.
While the act of knocking down the old house & barn was certainly mischievous, it didn't really do any property damage as those buildings were slated for demolition the next day. However, the runaway bulldozer is still something I can see chugging north over that hill if I close my eyes some 46 years later. I have no clue where that bulldozer wound up, but the incident didn't make the Omaha World-Herald so we were left to assume nobody died and it either found the lake or a big Cottonwood tree, etc. and came to a rest.
