Childhood Memories…Not Quite Like This

Thought this was hilarious and should share, its a long read but well worth it…

For all those that had a bow and arrow, BB Gun or liked to blow
stuff up as a kid, this will bring back many memories and some good
laughs…enjoy!!

For all young bow hunters

Life as a child…

Around age 10 my dad got me one of those little badass compound
bow beginner kits. Of course, the first month I went around our
land sticking arrows in anything that could get stuck by an arrow.
Did you know that a 1955 40 horse Farmall tractor will take 6 rounds
before it goes down?

Tough sumbich.

That got boring, so being the 10 yr. old Dukes of Hazard fan
that I was, I quickly advanced to taking strips of cut up T-shirt doused in
chainsaw gas tied around the end and was sending flaming arrows all over the
place. Keep in mind this was 99.999% humidity swampland so there really
wasn’t any fire danger. I’ll put it this way- a set of post hole diggers and a 3
ft.. hole and you had yourself a well.

One summer afternoon, I was shooting flaming arrows into a large
rotten oak stump in our backyard. I looked over under the carport and see a
shiny brand new can of starting fluid (ether). The light bulb went off.

I grabbed the can and set it on the stump. I thought that it
would probably just spray out in a disappointing manner…lets face it to a 10
yr old mouth-breather like myself ether, really doesn’t “sound”
flammable. So, I went back into the house and got a 1 pound can of pyrodex (black
powder for muzzle loader rifles).

At this point, I set the can of ether on the stump and opened up
the can of black powder. My intentions were to sprinkle a little bit around
the ether can but it all sorta dumped out on me. No biggie… 1 lb pyrodex
and 16 oz ether should make a loud pop, kinda like a firecracker you know?

You know what? Screw that I’m going back in the house for the
other can.

Yes, I got a second can of pyrodex and dumped it too. Now we’re
cookin’.

I stepped back about 15 ft and lit the 2 stroke arrow. I drew
the nock to my cheek and took aim. As I released I heard a clunk as the arrow
launched from my bow. In a slow motion time frame, I turned to see my dad
getting out of the truck…

OH [censored]! he just got home from work. So help me God it took 10
minutes for that arrow to go from my bow to the can. My dad was walking
towards me in slow motion with a WTF look in his eyes. I turned back towards
my target just in time to see the arrow pierce the starting fluid can
right at the bottom. Right through the main pile of pyrodex and into the can.

Oh [censored].

When the shock wave hit it knocked me off my feet. I don’t know
if it was the actual compression wave that threw me back or just
reflex jerk back from 235 fricking decibels of sound. I caught a half a

millisecond glimpse of the violence during the initial explosion
and I will tell you there was dust, grass, and bugs all hovering 1 ft
above the ground as far as I could see. It was like a little low to
the ground layer of dust fog full of grasshoppers, spiders, and a crawfish
or two.

The daylight turned purple.

Let me repeat this…THE FRICKING DAYLIGHT TURNED PURPLE.

There was a big sweetgum tree out by the gate going into the
pasture.

Notice I said “was”. That son-of-a-[censored] got up and ran off.

So here I am, on the ground blown completely out of my shoes
with my thundercats T-Shirt shredded, my dad is on the other side of the
carport having what I can only assume is a Vietnam flashback:

ECHO BRAVO CHARLIE YOU’RE BRINGIN’ EM IN TOO CLOSE!! CEASE FIRE.
GODDAMNIT CEASE FIRE!!!!!

His hat has blown off and is 30 ft behind him in the driveway.
All windows on the north side of the house are blown out and there
is a slow rolling mushroom cloud about 2000 ft over our backyard. There is
a Honda 185s 3 wheeler parked on the other side of the yard and the
fenders are drooped down and are now touching the tires.

I wish I knew what I said to my dad at this moment. I don’t
know- I know I said something. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear inside my own
head. I don’t think he heard me either… not that it would really matter. I
don’t remember much from this point on. I said something, felt a sharp
pain, and then woke up later. I felt a sharp pain, blacked out, woke
later….repeat this process for an hour or so and you get the idea. I remember
at one point my mom had to give me CPR so dad could beat me some more.

Bring him back to life so dad can kill him again. Thanks Mom.

One thing is for sure… I never had to mow around that stump
again, Mom had been bitching about that thing for years and dad never did
anything about it. I stepped up to the plate and handled business. Dad sold his
muzzle loader a week or so later. And I still have some sort of bone
growth abnormality either from the blast or the beating.

Or both. I guess what I’m trying to say is, get your kids into
archery. It’s good discipline and will teach them skills they can use
later on in life.

Thanks for posting. Brings back a lot of memories. Thankfully I still have all my extrementies too.

First time I was going to light up a 1 pound can of FFF black powder I figured I would just use a little black powder for the “fuse”.

My digits are very happy I tried a little pile prior to going full bore.

Fun post Mike!

In my own defense, i never did anything like that!
But close from stories my brothers and sisters still tell.

Good read Mike,,,Half way through I started laughing and my guts hurt by the time I was done and I’m still laughing as I type this, it reminded me of my early learnings.

I remember my black powder experience not knowing how big of an explosion it would make or the rush from first time tryouts. We had a few thick walled heavy paper tubes from christmas I think and I figure those paper tubes etched my mind so I wouldn’t forget incase I was to use them later. My dad was a captain in the army reserves and used one of the tubes wrapping copper wire around it making a radio out of it, maybe he brought them home from somewhere.

One of the guys I went to school with had a father that loaded his own shells, rifle and shotgun. At the time my friend and I didn’t know that there were diffrent burning times in all powders, and at the time we didn’t care, it was gun powder. With the stash of various cans his dad had and we were looking at, all with diffrent colored labels too, the lights started to go on and we got the bright idea to make a home made bomb.

This was long befor there was anything like to swat team or a bomb squad to make us think this may not be legal or safe, but we didn’t care because it was cool. We both hunted and fished with our dads and knew what loud sounds were so makeing this home made bomb was no big deal, the bigger the flash the more sound it would make but we thought we knew enough to make it and take it somewhere where the police wouldn’t hear it.

My friend said he would take a little from each container so his dad wouldn’t notice it and I said I’d go get the thick walled paper tubes.

We met across the highway where we used to shoot rabbits with our pellet guns and started to make this bomb. Around this area there were small business and one had various round wooden knock outs that we discovered fit very tightly into the end of this paper tube. So we put one of these knockouts into one end and filled this tube up almost solid with all these diffrent kinds of powders. The other end we were going to do the same but we needed a slow burning wick or fuse so we could light the fuse and be able to run atleast a block away befor this thing went off.

We found a piece of cloth and though if we used this as a fuse it might work good enough to set our bomb off.

These wooden knock outs had laid outside for a long time and one had a crack in it so we decided to put this piece of cloth through the crack and into the powder. Well we did and everything went together good, got both ends in and the powder inside, all was good up to this point.

We lived quite a ways from where we were going to set this off so we figured we wanted to watch it if it made a big explosion and be able to run quickly back to the house. We both talked it over to decide wheather or not this thing was going to be so loud the police would come. We decided that everything was safe as far as the police went but we wanted to see it explode from a distance incase we had to run so we wouldn’t get caught.

We found an old 55 gallon barrel and a pallett and set the pallet on the barrel and put our home made bomb in between the pieces of wood in this pallet so it wouldn’t roll off, so we could see it explode. We didn’t want to stand close to this home made bomb to light it so we found a dead weed stem about 6′ long and got that burning. My friend was already 50 yards ahead of me and I lit the fuse.

For my own safety I ran faster then any rabbit I had ever seen and we were both probably 150 yrds away and stood and watched this thing for probably 10 minutes and it didn’t go off.

We though aww heck it was probably the fuse. We took one step back twards the bomb to relight it and it went off,,,and I mean big time. We watched this pallet get blown into splinters and part of it was on its way to jupiter. The 55 gallon barrel went sideways and we took off running. We got home and heard all kinds of sirens and I think the firetruck on the SW side of town was even involved…

Me and my friend didn’t go anywhere the rest of the day because we were too scared, what would you expect for 14 year olds. My friends mom came down the next day and said, did you hear that explosion yesterday and my mom said ya, it sounded like it was just across the street and I wonder what happened. In all actualality it was 4 blocks away.

Two days later after school we went back to that spot and seen this 55 gallon barrel that was severly dented in at the top and it was full of holes from the wood splintering and pieces of the pallet were 100′ away. We never knew how much power this paper tube full of shotgun and rifle powder equaled but it was about 2″ across and about 16″ inches long. Talking about it later we figured it was probably equal to about a stick and a half of dynamite, at the time Boy was that fun,,,would I ever do it again, heck yes.

Disclaimer;;;never ever do this with a friend or by yourself, its just too dangerous and too many things can go wrong hurting or killing someone.

That one needed a disclaimer before reading . My gut hurts now. That was hilarious.

Oh the stupid things we did and learned from! Both repairing (more like re-building) my neighbor’s garage due to a fireworks mishap and nearly burning my hands off from a potato cannon of which I took out another neighbor’s picture window each got my rear end beaten so bad. But, my dad thought that cannon was pretty cool and bought me a pack of wicks so i could show him how far it could launch them. Great memories Thanks for the good laugh!

Heres another one you guys. You know how some young guys got more bal-s of steel then sense. My cousin Gary and I were going to the local hockey games here in town and we got to talking about,,,whats the dumbest things you ever did.

The one that topped it off for me was, at 13 years old one of his neighbors showed him a quarter that he laid on the Union Pacific railroads tracks that was flattened. WEll Gary said he had to have one of those too and this is how he did it.

He got a quarter and a pair of channel locks to hold it with and laid along side of the railroad tracks holding this quarter with the channel locks until the train ran over it…. The was the Union Pacific railroads tracks thats now all high speed ribbon rail and the trains do 70 with 150 coal cars trailing behind. This was 50 years ago and the trains didn’t do that kind of speed but still the guts involved.

I asked him if he was afraid and he said hell yes but he wanted a flattened quarter. I said why didn’t you just lay the quarter on the tracks and go search for it after the train passed by. His answer was when he got a quarter that was alot of money to him, Damn!! and he didn’t want to loose it. I said after its flattened you couldn’t have spent it anyway,,,his answer was that he didn’t care it was still alot of money,,,Damn!! I said what happened to the channel locks and he said he knew enough to hold the very edge of the quarter so it would flatten and wouldn’t hurt the channel locks,,,Damn again!!

I should tell you a story about my uncle Lawrence that was a gun powder piromanic.

Here goes about my Uncle Lawrences affair with gun powder.

My uncle Lawrence was a gifted boy and graduated from highschool at the age of 15. Our whole family hunted back in the days when the guys went hunting befor Thanksgiving dinner then again at Christmas, so everybody hunted even some of the women. Everybody knew what gunpowder was and it especially excited my uncle Lawrence. He wasen’t just curious he was intelligently curious.

He decided one day to make a cannon. He looked around for a few days and found a piece of 3 inch black pipe and somehow made an end for it. He had his cannon now and got the gunpowder from somewhere and took his 6′ long cannon down by the river to shoot it.

This was in the middle of town right by the river but he didn’t care because he though he could get away with it. He put the gun powder down the barrel and made a wad and wick from something and put those inplace. He said he really didn’t know how it was going to work and hurredly laid this cannon across the railroad tracks from the lower end where he lit it and the higher side that was pointed at the time out across the river, pointing twards Quaker Oats.

He loaded everything and put a whole coffee can of rocks down the barrel. He said he wanted to see all these rocks hit the water and thought that would be cool to see all the splashes, this was at 15 years old.

Well he lit the fuse and hurredly ran down the tracks aways and the cannon rolled off the high side of the tracks but the fuse was too low to go back and point it in the right direction which he had origionally intended.

He wasen’t worried about it pointing the way it was, away from him for his own safety but what he didn’t see was this cannon was now pointed at all the windows in the side of this 2 story all glass windows of the Vigortone feed building a half block away.

Yep it did,,,it went off without a hitch and blew most of the windows out of that whole side of that factory with what he said was a roar. He said he had already started running befor the cannon went off and made it home safely,,,for the day.

Well the next day the police knocked on the door as they knew Lawrence was probably the one most likely that did it. He admitted that he did it and Vigortone offered him a summer job to repay them with work because he didn’t have any money so he went to work for a couple years to repay them.

When the bill was paid off they gave him a fulltime job and he worked there until the factory burnt down and the heads of this company thought all was lost because the mixing instructions were all on paper for all of thier various feed mixes. Not all was lost because lawrence over those couple years had memorized them all, dozens of them I guess. So they reprinted all the mixing formulas that he rewrote and from a young guy that loved his gunpowder, kinda strange how things happen sometimes.

Thanks Mike for bringing back a few good memories for me too.

Randy

LOVE THE POTATO GUN TOO

nobody could believe the power of that thing

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That one needed a disclaimer before reading . My gut hurts now. That was hilarious.

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Ditto. I laughted so hard my eyes watered.

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That one needed a disclaimer before reading . My gut hurts now. That was hilarious.

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Ditto. I laughted so hard my eyes watered.

I once shot my little brother from over 100yds with a pump action BB gun. I was standing in the driveway and chad was playing at the end or the street. When I saw him I grabbed my trusty crossman BB gun pointed it skywards fired and a few seconds later I watched Chad crumble to the ground turns out a bb will break the skin on the top of your little brothers head from over 100yds lol.

Spent many summer days tossing aerosol cans into the fire pit and watching them explode! (Butane and spray paint being the best bang for the buck!) Couple dumb things I look back at doing. First, sitting around the fire tossing .22 shells into the fire with only a piece of plywood as protection. I can only assume the lead melted before the primer went off. I’m thinking well over 500 rounds in that session. The other one was taping a pinball to the business end of 12 gauge shotgun shells. Then throwing them straight up in the air. When they fell to the pavement – BOOM!!! Man we were lucky no one ever got hurt there. We taped down well over a hundred .22 rounds to the train track one time. Sounded like a full auto going off when the train went by! Ahh the good old days when no one at the Ben Franklin ever thought twice about selling ammo to kids.

-J.

I know a guy that filled beer bottles with gas, set them next to the camp fire then shot them with his bow…..
DT

I wish I would have been there too see that Jon, Pretty darn cool at that age.

Where in the heck can you buy those curve ball BB’S Tim.

Talk about a light show Deer!

Hey Mike and everyone heres another story.

When I first met my wife back in the late 70’s we had too move to Texas to work because the economy got bad up north here. We moved there and we rented this trailer house in a mobile home court. The guy that owned the trailors name was Gus.

Gus was a nice guy and a welder and we got to talking about all the fire ants that were in this area, the whole area was covered with fire ants and thier mounds were in everybodys yard, along side the roads, they were everywhere and very hard to get rid of.

At this time gus was a welder and had his own welding truck and would hire out to the companys that needed welding done.

He said he was working at one of the local companies welding and lunch came. So he sat outside one of the double garage doors and started to eat his lunch. He had to go to the bathroom and layed his sandwich down on his lunch box and left to relieve himself in the bathroom in this factory.

He said when he came back his sandwich was covered with these fireants and that made him mad. So his solution was he took his acetelene torch, unlit, and held it into one of the openings of this fireant tunnel and colony. He said it continously ran while he ate another sandwich which was about 15 minutes, filling all the chambers and tunnels of this ant colony.

He then said the buzzer went off to go too back to work and he said it was get even time then and lit the acetlene torch and placed it in the entry hole of the ant colony.

His next statement was it was like the hands of god reached down and grabbed the factory building and the ground it sat on and shook it, concrete, factory walls and all. He knew it was all this acetelene going off in all the tunnels and chambers that ran underneath the factory floor. He said the guys working in the factory hit the doors running while he was still outside.

He said all he could do was act stupid and act like everyone else and yelled what was that? He said they never figured out it was him that detonated this tunnel and ant colony.

He said it got rid of all the ants but there was still a few around.