The Crazy Childhood Of MythBusters' Jamie Hyneman

MythBusters' co-host and engineer Jamie Hyneman may come across as rather smart, innovative, and somewhat reliable. He doesn't seem like someone who did anything too unruly in his past and played by the rules like a good school kid. Case in point: Hyneman once said in an interview that it took him a long time to feel at ease in front of the camera and chat with random people on the street. "You have to remember that I'm a guy who is happiest in a dark room just thinking," the engineer said. "I'm not a sociable person. I don't like to talk."

Hyneman's past, however, is anything but boring, as it turns out. The engineer fled his home when he was 14 years old — long before he came across MythBusters' co-host Adam Savage and became popular. In a candid interview with Blast magazine, Hyneman revealed what he was actually like as a child. "I was a problematic kid, to be sure. I left home when I was 14 and hitchhiked all over the country," he said. "But science, explosions, and the stuff we are known for now was not part of the story then. I just have a wide range of interests, and the more pyrotechnic ones ended up being part of the chemistry of what works for the show."

So, why did Hyneman leave his home as a kid? He'd managed to upset his parents because of his "unruly behaviour," as explained by The Christian Science Monitor. Hyneman later revealed why he was the way he was."We didn't have any neighbors for miles, so we were left to our own resources," he told the Northeast Valley News. This meant doing whatever he could to avoid boring chores, and experimenting with household items. "If I was mowing the lawn, I figured out that if I repeatedly ran the mower into the tree that something would break and I would no longer have to mow the lawn because the lawnmower was broken." Understandably, his angry parents decided to discipline him and were considering sending him to reform school.

The 14-year-old old was having none of it. The enterprising Hyneman took matters into his own hands and made a run for it. He was gone for six long months until he ended up in a juvenile detention center in California and his parents took him home.