This second piece is generally about my playtime memories of 45 Mountainview Street in Springfield MA. We moved there, closer to the wealthy people, around 1971. I think we moved on up the social ladder, at least in terms of housing. I can recall the empty kitchen and I think I was pretty much in the way while the older folks were moving. The house cost my parents ~$20,000 and sold for $50,000 in 1996 and $159,000 in 2005. We lived there from the time I was about 5 until just before I entered High School circa 1980. When I originally wrote this in 2000 I made a map of the house and that helped jog my memory a bunch. I have changed the text very little so a lot of it reads like I had 10 minutes to write it down.
Childhood Memories - Boredom and Strange Pastimes
The yard was our playground. We played hide and seek, throw the ball at the other guy, jail, cowboys and indians, snowball fights, tag. Generally it involved running.
Our version of hide and seek had an added twist in that if the hider could get to home base, typically the steps on the front porch, without being seen by the seeker, they wouldn’t become the seeker. It sucked to be the seeker because it was tough to watch home and look for those people hiding at the same time. It could get frustrating finding everyone at home and discovering that you were “it” for the 5th time in a row. It got worse if the boundaries agreed upon by everyone extended beyond the yard in question. I remember that sometimes the boundaries included all of Westernview St. AND Mountainview St! Of course, any neighbor’s yard was included in the hiding places.
Throwing the ball at the other guy takes a bit of justification and explanation. The basic idea was to run from the guy who had the ball so that he wouldn’t hit you with it. This is a bit different than “kill the guy with the ball” where you merely jumped on the guy who had the ball in hand. This kind of thing often took place around the house’s perimeter and you found yourself circling and counter-circling the house many times. The grass was not happy with us tearing frantically around the house. Anyway, the ball was usually a tennis ball and not something hard like a baseball. Still, a tennis ball whipped at you by someone 8 years older than you packed plenty of sting, especially on the skin or the face or the game-ending eye. What can I say? We were violent. The good thing about parents then was that they accepted that children will be children and they were just happy if you didn’t lose a limb. Even that would have been OK because you generally had two of everything.
Jail was about running and screaming “free” at the top of your lungs. I recall that this game was played a lot at recess at school and we played it at home as well. The game would oftentimes start off with everyone following the rules but then it would degrade into a frenzy of normally well-behaved children taking advantage of their anonymity. The object of the game was that one or two people would guard the jail from the rest of the bunch. The guards would tag people and put them in the jail until the others could free them. You would free someone by touching the jail or the person in jail, without getting tagged by the guards, and yelling “free” as loud and as annoyingly as you possibly could. This would frustrate the guard to no end. Eventually, either the guards got lucky and caught everyone or, more often than not, the guards would stomp off totally demoralized because the mass mentality took over. You see, this game required the players to be on the honor system. I followed the rules (I always did because I was an anal little kid) but the instigators would get tagged and claim not have been tagged and they would free everyone. All of a sudden they had some sort of forcefield on or something. Then the otherwise good kids would follow suit (most were sheep) and the sinning began. A volley of “free” “free” “free” would overwhelm the guards and the game generally ended.
Cowboys and indians doesn’t take much explanation. You would use anything that vaguely had the shape of a gun or a bow and pretend shoot at each other. The honor system dictated that if you got “shot” first that you would fall down dead (dramatically, of course) for a period of a minute or so before resuming the game. Unfortunately, dying left you at a disadvantage because as soon as your time of death was up you were typically re-killed by someone just waiting for your 60 seconds to be up. If you were dead you usually stayed dead with periodic bouts of consciousness.
Snowball fights could be dangerous and I didn’t really like it too much (or getting hit by a ball for that matter). Nice soft snow was OK, I guess, but New England snow tended to be icy and icy snowballs meant heavier snowballs which meant that they hurt more. Plus, they had the added bonus of being very crystalline and those crystals left good patches of scraped skin on you. I suppose I really didn’t like it because I wasn’t any good at it. Seemed to me that everyone else could make snowballs faster than me. I chalk that up to me being anal (again) about the shape of the snowball.
A lot of my time was spent alone or with just my brother John in the yard. I made many a tent under the tangle of vines in the back yard. I can remember making a particularly bad trade (in the minds of my family) of my penny collection for some Tinker Toys in one of my vine tents. So sue me for wanting Tinker Toys. I had pennies but Tinker Toys were gold to me and my friends always seemed to get the cooler toys. So I was a barterer. My ancestors were French Canadian so some pelt swapping must be in my genes.
Sometimes we would make tents out of old blankets in the back yard. We would string a rope from somewhere to somewhere and then throw the blanket over the rope. Needless to say, the tent was not mosquito free because it was open on the ends. Occasionally we tried to sleep in the tent overnight but the mosquitoes were villainous and generally we did not. Sleeping during the day was not out of the question, however, and I can only wish for time today to be able to blow a whole day relaxing and reading and sleeping in a tent in my back yard.
Another pastime was digging. We often dug in between the Nisenkier’s garage and our own. Just dug a hole, sometimes 3 or 4 feet deep and just because. Originally, of course, the thought was that if you dug deep enough you would reach China. As we got older we realized that China was too far and, besides, you would melt in the Earth’s core before reaching China. Sometimes I dug in the back yard and I once found a couple of coins. One was a 1905 (or so) nickel and another was an old penny, from 1911 if I recall correctly. So there was gold to be found if you dug enough. Another take on this activity was filling a shallow hole with water and burying pennies or dimes in the resulting mud only to see if you could find it again. Sometimes you had a sifter but usually you used your fingers. This activity took place near the hose spigot which was near the lilac bush in the back yard. I remember Mike occasionally doing the burying like a dutiful big brother.
Although this has nothing to do with playing or pastimes I have to mention one somewhat disgusting memory because it is too vivid to let go. In the back yard was an old garbage pail. You see, when we initially moved in we had two pickups. One was trash and one was garbage. Thus the garbage pail. This was an inground covered swimming pool for the week’s garbage which the garbageman would take out and empty. Fairly soon after we moved in, this service stopped and you were supposed to just throw your garbage in with your regular trash pickup. However, my stubborn mother refused to believe that this golden tradition had changed and for a short while she kept tossing garbage into the pail. Needless to say, if you opened up the cover the smell was deadly. It was a condo for maggots. I cannot think of anything I have seen since that is more disgusting and I am almost too embarrassed to tell the story. Almost.
Occasionally I was a gardener. I would get bouts of ambitiousness (as I still do today) and find myself planting or weeding or trimming. Once I planted a potato in a small plot just out the back door. The plant grew nicely but I had the bad habit of regularly digging it up and seeing how big the potatos were. None of my potatoes ever got larger than an egg but at least they tasted like potatos and I was proud of that fact. This plot, the round one in the back yard, and the one on the west side of the house were surrounded by rocks. Hence the name “rock garden”. I often rearranged them and tidied them up. You had to be careful, though, because you would lift the rocks and there would always be termites and plenty of centipedes. Centipedes still creep me out. The roses on the side plot were always out of control but sometimes I trimmed them. If I was particularly ambitious, I would clip the hedges. Unfortunately, they ran all along the side of the house and into the front yard and it always turned out to be a very tiring job. The hedges in the back which supported the vine nest were only touched once. When I was older, I took it upon myself to rid our yard of the vines and spent a good part of a day removing the nest. When it was all done we could readily see the neighbor in back of us and they could (probably to their digust) see us. Today, the hedges in the back have been replaced by a wooden fence and the rose garden has been removed and replaced with grass. Boring.
I should point out that we had one “fatter” hedge in the front yard which was always a challenge to jump over [In 2000 it was ridiculously tall - check out the above photo]. If we thought we could jump something we would try. I wiped out plenty trying to jump that one. Not only was it about four and half feet high but about as wide too. Unfortunately there was a difficult choice to be made by the jumper. You could jump from the sidewalk side and get plenty of running distance and potentially land safely on the front yard grass. However, the height was higher because the sidewalk was low. This made it more difficult. Now, you could jump from the other side and not have as high to jump but the problem was that you didn’t have a lot of room to get a running start and, if you wiped out, you ended up scraping the hell out of your skin on the the cement. It was problematic but a challenge. Today, the fat hedge is about 8 feet tall!
When chalk was available we would play “hopscotch” but this was only done in the driveway towards the back and out of sight as much as possible. No self respecting boy would play hopscotch so it was a secret pleasure for the most part.
The most dangerous and, of course, most fun thing to do was to climb the maple tree in the back yard or climb onto the garage roof. You really couldn’t climb the tree very easily from the ground because the first branch was about 10 feet up. Luckily for us and unluckily for my mother’s nerves the roof of the garage was easily accessible by a telephone pole conveniently placed up against the back of the garage - almost as if someone had planned it. And to make things even more ideal, this telephone pole had built-in pegs for climbing it! No doubt the telephone company (the infamous Ma Bell) thought that no one would dare climb their poles and so they didn’t have to worry about people getting electrocuted at the top. Anyway, we had no reason to go to the top and, to tell the truth, I was always terrified of anything involving electricity so you weren’t going to catch me any higher than was needed on that pole. So we would climb up onto the garage roof and gain easy access to the maple tree. You could go pretty high. I imagine that I climbed at least 35 feet up in the air. This is an interesting point because I was never very thrilled with heights. Maybe 35 feet just wasn’t high enough. I do recall climbing up a tree on Forest Street that put me about 50 feet up and that was definitely testing the limit of my mettle. Mom was never very happy seeing us up in that tree or on the roof and she made her ire known. The beauty of being up there was that if she was really pissed and you thought you were going to get spanked or belted you could just wait her out because there wasn’t any way she was coming up after you. The roof was a good hiding place too because she couldn’t see you if you were on the sloping side of the roof on the back of the garage and laying on your stomach. Another thing we did up there was jump over to the Nisenkier’s garage roof. Morris Nisenkier was never really happy about that and we tended not to do it too much, especially if it was nearing the time when he would get home. And another reason he and my Mom didn't want us up there was that the shingles were fair game. One of our favorite activities was tearing the shingles off and tossing them. They went FAR. It was kind of like throwing a boomerang that didn’t come back to you. Very destructive and I’m surprised the Nisenkiers didn’t kill us for that little activity. Getting down from the roof was also an event. Would you climb down or jump? You could climb back down the telephone pole, shimmy down the maple or risk breaking the legs bones by jumping to the ground. Usually we jumped.
A specific side story to this roof-climbing activity comes to mind. Once when my brother Ken was babysitting I climbed out onto the roof of the pantry from the back bedroom. No big deal to me other than the fact that I hadn’t ever been on that roof before. Well, Ken did not like this at all when he discovered where I was. He dragged me in through the window with the requisite amount of Ken Poulin yelling and gave me the belt hard. I was scared shitless. Mom had given me the belt before and Dad never had the opportunity that I can recall. So Mom’s version of the belt seemed very tame compared to Ken’s version. Oh boy was he pissed. I’ve been scared of him ever since. All right I’m not exactly scared of him now but there is still a wariness floating around in my noggin.
As we were hurting for things to do, we often made up games and improvised when possible. Since we were lacking a slide John and I took our toboggan and turned it upside down to reveal the shiny, smooth surface. On its own, it did not have much of a slant so we decided to lay it against the back stairs. Voila! A plebeian slide. I don’t remember how many times we successfully slid down the makeshift slide but I DEFINITELY remember what stopped it. A sliver. Not just a sliver that you might hope will work its way out in a couple of days but a honking big sliver that would spike a bird through the heart. I couldn’t have been in more shock had it been through a major organ. I had slid down the back of the toboggan and about midway down I stopped. I stopped because a loose piece of wood became unloose by wedging its way into my buttocks (or should I say buttock). I began howling and the kids who were playing basketball in the driveway seemed to not hear me. At least that is how I remember it. John was probably scared but I’d bet that he was secretly happy too (we had a love/hate relationship back then). Eventually, my brother Jerry dragged himself away from the game and realized what had happened. He helped me off the toboggan and into the house where he proceeded to pull out a piece of wood about and inch long and about a quarter inch round. I think that seeing the dagger made me cry more and actually feel the pain. Funny how that happens. Anyway, my mom brought me to the doctor’s (after arguing with Jerry who wanted to bring me to the hospital because it was closer) and I was taken care of. Toboggans make me wary.
Our garage was like a local community center for me and my friends. We did lots of things in there, legal and otherwise but mostly legal. As far as I can remember, the only thing that was illegal had to do with fireworks. Heck, even that isn’t illegal in some states so what’s the big deal? Anyway, we had a pool table in there which took a serious beating over the years. It was effectively a useless table by the end but it served as a centerpiece to our activities. I remember that one of our hobbies/money-making/bored-out-of-skulls ideas was collecting cans. The garage served as the weigh station for the bags of cans we hauled home. We never took them in to get money (the 5-cent deposit hadn't been invented yet) because a) we didn’t know where to and b) we were probably too lazy after a long day of collecting the cans. We were just happy if we collected more that the opposing team (another sad little game). In retrospect we were providing a valuable service to the community in cleaning up the area.
The garage was filled with stuff my mother considered valuable (she couldn’t throw away anything) and stuff we considered essential. We had bike parts and pieces of wood which would be put together in various forms to make some mobile unit and then dismantled because our engineering skills and lack of proper tools made for bad design. We had this one bike frame which we were continually recycling into a barely workable bike. It was originally gold, I think, and we ended up painting it blue. You would get a wheel from a friend or something like that and you had a complete bike (probably bargaining for the part). This bike had one particularly frustrating trait, though. The chain would ALWAYS fall off. Arrgh! Also, there was no chain guard and the leg of your pants would get caught. It used to piss me off to see my friends (and strangers) with their new bikes, their Huffys. All perfect and shiny with their good chains and breaks that worked. And of course there was only one bike and three of us vying for its affections at the same time. “It’s my bike”. “No, it’s mine!”. “That’s my wheel ‘cause I got it from Joey so it won’t work if I take it off”. Arguments like that would frequently occur.
The wood was used to make “go carts”. We were perpetually trying to engineer the perfect go cart with the crappiest of wood, whatever nails we could scrounge up (typically previously used) and oftentimes no axles for the wheels pirated from our old Red Flyer wagons. We might have made one decent go cart in all of our attempts.
Underneath the east window of the garage there was a fold down work bench which served nicely for projects. However, you wouldn’t be caught dead sitting at the table for fear the multitude of spiders would find your legs. I don’t remember how or why but we ended up with a wild brown rabbit and Mike made a very nice cage for it on this table out of, you guessed it, the crappiest of wood and scrounged-up nails. He used window screen to cover it and the rabbit seemed happy enough in there. However, he had a habit of nibbling through the screen and wood and he soon took off without saying good bye. I was devastated and somehow or other I convinced someone, probably Ken, to buy me a rabbit. It was white and black and he was a bit more amenable to the cage, I think. I don’t really remember what happened to him but I couldn’t have had my rabbit for very long. I do remember that we had him in the attic of the house one time and he disappeared. Turns out he managed to get under the floor boards and we all tried to lure him out for the next 3 days. Mike pulled up a board or two in a closet and the dumb rabbit eventually made his appearance. Let me tell you that those rabbits were only good at one thing. Pooping. Pooping curiously perfect spheres with the consistency of a Tootsie Roll, I imagine. I brought my rabbit into my bedroom and he left a trail of them around the room. The cage in the garage often had a colony of them and cleaning that was not a desirable chore because the urine which was added to the mix made it smell soooo good.
Another little pastime involved playing army with army men. These things were about an inch and a half tall and extremely flammable. I mention this because lighting them up was one of things we liked to do. As if that wasn’t enough, we added to the excitement by covering them with model airplane glue. That stuff, in addition to being a likely carcinogen, was great for getting the men burning. In fact, I wonder why people don’t bring it camping to start their fires more easily. Anyway, it was a sick little game but it was better than doing drugs.
Here is the combined driveway for 51 (left) & 45 (right) Mountainview St. as it looks in 2017. It is very similar to how I remember it, right down to the small square property marker at the middle beginning of the driveway. We used to climb the crooked Japanese Maple to the left. It doesn't look like it's grown at all! The hedges in front are gone. I don't remember the tree behind the Japanese Maple so it might have been very tiny. Imagine playing baseball with an actual baseball in this space. First base was near the "new" tree and second was the property marker. Third was about halfway down the driveway on the right. The Nisenkier's poor garage (never actually used as such) has a car in it.
The driveway was also a community gathering place. It was unusual because our driveway was a connected to the Nisenkier’s so it was quite wide. It was a good place to play baseball…at least if you could hit straight. Joe Nisenkier was a pitcher for Classical High School and he and his brothers often had games in the driveway. My brother Jerry was friends with them and Mike wasn’t too young to be annoying to them so the games had plenty of people. Also included in the older group were the Paynes and Tranghesees from Westernview St. We younger kids were a general nuisance but they were nice enough to let us play once in a while. We were, as in gym class sports, the handicap. The amusing thing about playing baseball in the driveway was that they still used a hard baseball even though the houses were on either side of the “field”. If you tipped the ball to the right you smashed the Nisenkier’s dining room window and if you drove one slightly to the left you would break one of the windows on our house. If you managed a home run, you’d run the risk of slamming it into the house of an elderly couple across the street. Often you would tip the ball up and over the Nisenkier’s garage and someone would have to climb the fence to retrieve it. Also, the outfielder who stood in the middle of the street would have to tell everyone when it was OK to pitch the ball because no one wanted to hit a passing car. But these are minor details. The important thing was that home plate was in front of the Nisenkier’s garage, first plate was just near a rose trellis about 2/3 of the way down the driveway, second was a 6 by 6 inch property marker embedded at the end of the driveway and third was underneath the landing outcrop on our house. The pitcher stood at a predetermined spot somewhere in the middle of the “diamond” unless of course you were too young to reach the plate in which case you were allowed to pitch from closer. Unfortunately, being closer meant that line drives were more apt to hit you in the balls. It was the chance you willing to take.
Another driveway sport was hockey. This was street hockey without the street. Joe Nisenkier liked slapshotting at me and John when we were in the goal. Get this picture in your head. A high school guy taking slapshots at 6 year olds…with a hocky puck. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hit us but he sure took great pleasure in terrifying us and the puck made an awful sound as it hit his garage (the Nisenkiers had to replace a garage slat because of this). My brother Mike and Chaim Nisenkier liked to do this too. Occasionally they would use a tennis ball but that sure didn’t feel too good when it hit. You see, slapshotting a tennis ball seemed to be OK just like throwing a tennis ball at your fellow human being was OK.
Basketball was my favorite sport because the chances of getting hurt were much lower. At least you had the option of not getting into the fray. The Nisenkier’s basketball hoop was attached to their garage and it was probably close enough to regulation height. They and my older brothers tended to play a form of checking basketball. The harder you could check your opponent into the garage door as you went up for your layup the better. That wasn’t really fair to John and me because they had about two feet on us. We were always getting slammed. It was best to take your shots from outside and trip the guy with ball when you were nowhere near the garage. That was the best strategy for us. I got pretty good at shooting but Joe was amazing.
I am reminded of one unrelated activity story which has ties to the driveway. On the Nisenkier’s side they had a small area of grass. One day I saw my mom gazing out of the landing window. I caught her looking at Lavek Nisenkier who was all oiled up and suntanning himself on the grass in a pair of Speedos. My mom just giggled, made some annoyingly adult comment and continued on up the stairs. I was disgusted at the time but I guess I can excuse her now.
We did not always use the Poulin/Nisenkier driveway for entertainment. I can remember some street hockey games in front of the Tranghese house. They had the nets and as long as you had a hockey stick you could play. I was pretty good at that, I think. We also played a game of dodging the frisbee. This involved two throwers standing at opposing ends of the field while the rest of the people, the dodgers, stood between the throwers. The throwers would throw or skip the frisbee in order to hit the dodgers (there’s that hitting aspect again). If you got hit you became the thrower. As much fun as throwing the frisbee was, I felt that the dodging was the more fun activity. I was always good at that and, in those days, I was a skinny target so I was hard to hit. Another version had the dodgers running from the base of one thrower to the base of the other without getting hit. The beauty of this was that if the frisbee got away from one of the throwers you could run back and forth between the bases, thus accumulating “laps” and becoming the king of dodging. I was good at this too because I was fast. An alternate version of this running game involved the throwers throwing a baseball back and forth. We didn’t intentionally get hit with the ball if that was what you were thinking I was going to say. No, the throwers would lob the ball in the air so that we had time (maybe) to run to the other base. If it was done correctly by the throwers, the ball would come down into the other throwers glove and he would have time to tag you “out”. This dwindled the field of runners until only one was left as the winner. If he had the opportunity, the thrower, or should I say the catcher, would do his very best to prevent you from reaching the base by pushing you away until the ball came down. Since our games were in the street, we were regularly interrupted by cars and a real challenge was to get in a shot or a lap before the car actually got to you. This is why, today, I smile when I see kids playing soccer in the street. I always patiently wait for them to get their last shot in.
Another driveway sport was hockey. This was street hockey without the street. Joe Nisenkier liked slapshotting at me and John when we were in the goal. Get this picture in your head. A high school guy taking slapshots at 6 year olds…with a hocky puck. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to hit us but he sure took great pleasure in terrifying us and the puck made an awful sound as it hit his garage (the Nisenkiers had to replace a garage slat because of this). My brother Mike and Chaim Nisenkier liked to do this too. Occasionally they would use a tennis ball but that sure didn’t feel too good when it hit. You see, slapshotting a tennis ball seemed to be OK just like throwing a tennis ball at your fellow human being was OK.
Basketball was my favorite sport because the chances of getting hurt were much lower. At least you had the option of not getting into the fray. The Nisenkier’s basketball hoop was attached to their garage and it was probably close enough to regulation height. They and my older brothers tended to play a form of checking basketball. The harder you could check your opponent into the garage door as you went up for your layup the better. That wasn’t really fair to John and me because they had about two feet on us. We were always getting slammed. It was best to take your shots from outside and trip the guy with ball when you were nowhere near the garage. That was the best strategy for us. I got pretty good at shooting but Joe was amazing.
I am reminded of one unrelated activity story which has ties to the driveway. On the Nisenkier’s side they had a small area of grass. One day I saw my mom gazing out of the landing window. I caught her looking at Lavek Nisenkier who was all oiled up and suntanning himself on the grass in a pair of Speedos. My mom just giggled, made some annoyingly adult comment and continued on up the stairs. I was disgusted at the time but I guess I can excuse her now.
We did not always use the Poulin/Nisenkier driveway for entertainment. I can remember some street hockey games in front of the Tranghese house. They had the nets and as long as you had a hockey stick you could play. I was pretty good at that, I think. We also played a game of dodging the frisbee. This involved two throwers standing at opposing ends of the field while the rest of the people, the dodgers, stood between the throwers. The throwers would throw or skip the frisbee in order to hit the dodgers (there’s that hitting aspect again). If you got hit you became the thrower. As much fun as throwing the frisbee was, I felt that the dodging was the more fun activity. I was always good at that and, in those days, I was a skinny target so I was hard to hit. Another version had the dodgers running from the base of one thrower to the base of the other without getting hit. The beauty of this was that if the frisbee got away from one of the throwers you could run back and forth between the bases, thus accumulating “laps” and becoming the king of dodging. I was good at this too because I was fast. An alternate version of this running game involved the throwers throwing a baseball back and forth. We didn’t intentionally get hit with the ball if that was what you were thinking I was going to say. No, the throwers would lob the ball in the air so that we had time (maybe) to run to the other base. If it was done correctly by the throwers, the ball would come down into the other throwers glove and he would have time to tag you “out”. This dwindled the field of runners until only one was left as the winner. If he had the opportunity, the thrower, or should I say the catcher, would do his very best to prevent you from reaching the base by pushing you away until the ball came down. Since our games were in the street, we were regularly interrupted by cars and a real challenge was to get in a shot or a lap before the car actually got to you. This is why, today, I smile when I see kids playing soccer in the street. I always patiently wait for them to get their last shot in.
In addition to the usual childhood torture ritual of burning ants alive with a magnifying glass, we had the added bonus of having what are called Antlions living in the dirt (dirt is being very generous – more like sand) on the driveway side of our house. These critters were THE COOLEST bugs around. They would build a funnel in the ground and sit with only their pinchers above ground, waiting for an unsuspecting ant to fall into the funnel. The funnel was a bit of engineering beauty because the harder the ant tried to climb up the slope of the funnel, the more the sand would slip him back down towards the pinchers. As an added bonus, these bugs threw sand up at the ant, thus further knocking them down. Oh, such evil should not be admired. We took advantage of the pits of death and helped the Antlion along by dropping ants into the pit. Sometimes I think we gave them too many ants and were just pissing them off.
A yearly ritual around July 5th was collecting all of the unexploded fireworks around the neighborhood. We did this so that we could collect the unburnt gunpowder still inside the unexploded munition. In retrospect it was a very stupid thing to be doing. Not collecting them but opening them up. At least it took some courage and I’m glad to say that I wasn’t a TOTAL scaredycat. And at least we didn’t have the intent to create bombs or anything terribly destructive. I suppose today you would get arrested and interrogated by the police for doing what we did but back then it was the poor boy’s way of enjoying an otherwise expensive celebratory event. Our intent was to pile up the gunpowder in as big a pile as possible, create a reasonably long wick and then light it and watch it go poof. It was a lot of work for about 2 seconds of utter joy. There really wasn’t any danger involved except maybe if you tripped and fell with a match in your hand into the pile. Even the potential for danger in that is questionable as the pile was rarely any greater than an inch or two in diameter. The real danger lay in the peeling of the unspent firecracker. I imagine that the razor blade that we used to slice open the firecracker could have caused the gunpowder to go off in the somewhat contained space of the still raveled portion of the firecracker. I also believe that I knew this back then and took the risk. What a man. Probably the only risk I’ve taken in my whole life.
The list of dumb things we did could probably go on but, for now, my brain is drained. I am pleasantly surprised I remembered so much.
A yearly ritual around July 5th was collecting all of the unexploded fireworks around the neighborhood. We did this so that we could collect the unburnt gunpowder still inside the unexploded munition. In retrospect it was a very stupid thing to be doing. Not collecting them but opening them up. At least it took some courage and I’m glad to say that I wasn’t a TOTAL scaredycat. And at least we didn’t have the intent to create bombs or anything terribly destructive. I suppose today you would get arrested and interrogated by the police for doing what we did but back then it was the poor boy’s way of enjoying an otherwise expensive celebratory event. Our intent was to pile up the gunpowder in as big a pile as possible, create a reasonably long wick and then light it and watch it go poof. It was a lot of work for about 2 seconds of utter joy. There really wasn’t any danger involved except maybe if you tripped and fell with a match in your hand into the pile. Even the potential for danger in that is questionable as the pile was rarely any greater than an inch or two in diameter. The real danger lay in the peeling of the unspent firecracker. I imagine that the razor blade that we used to slice open the firecracker could have caused the gunpowder to go off in the somewhat contained space of the still raveled portion of the firecracker. I also believe that I knew this back then and took the risk. What a man. Probably the only risk I’ve taken in my whole life.
The list of dumb things we did could probably go on but, for now, my brain is drained. I am pleasantly surprised I remembered so much.