I've heard of playing with mercury from broken thermometers from lots of folks your age. Thinking about it always makes me shudder. Chemical hygeine has come a long way. Folks used to smoke in organic labs (it's how we discovered one of the artificial sweeteners, I can't recall which offhand though, it made a cigarette smoked in the lab taste sweeter).
Duck, it was different. My brother and I were in grade school. My father would bring home vials of the stuff with droplet disensers - made to dispense the right amount of mercury with the amalgam that was put in a jitterbug in order to make old style fillings. He would bring these bottles home and we would take them to school and sell the drops - 50 cents or something like that (we were little businessment even then). Everyone was playing with thse drops in their hands. One day I dropped a vial and the droplets skittered all around the floor. Today they would have likely closed the school and called in hazmat teams, but instead, all the kids were scurying around trying to pick the stuff up - as... they were worth money.
My brother cranked up a little business, he found bags of cotton candy for a dime each, brought them to school and sold them for a quarter. It got to the point here he was bringing shopping bags of the things to school. Finally the parents started complaining and my father was called into school. The principal was angry but it was all my father could do to hide his pride at my brother's money making spirit.
Hell, we had ounces of "sticky wax", that when balled up could stick to anything, kids were throwing them or blowing them through straws. There were tiny balls stuck to the walls, the blackboard, the chairs.
Sometimes it was fun to be a dentist's kid. I wonder what my lifetime load of mercury is. I've been eating stuff to try to get it, out and all the lead I must have absorbed from making bullets for my grandfater (every time I went to visit him, he wouldn't say a word to me until i had molded a couple of hundred bullets or balls) Who knows how much lead I got.