In the summers of the mid-60’s, a bunch of us teenagers would get together on just about any given day and do something even if it was dumb, foolish or just plain ignorant. With each different group of kids, seems, I was always one of the bunch. But on this particular day Pete and I had decided to make us a gun, I’m not talking about any ordinary gun, but a big gun, like an eight gauge shot gun.
Now Pete lived across a couple of hills from me. Pete’s dad reloaded shotgun shells for his own personal use and maybe sell a few on the side. And beings it was close to the 4th of July, we had access to all kinds of powder that we could blow up things, and in this case make a muzzle-loading gun out of a one inch piece of pipe. About three foot down this pipe we’d put this ninety degree elbow to make something like a pistol grip, with another four inch piece to hold on too. In the middle of the elbow we’d drilled a hole just big enough to thread a fuse of a firecracker thru with the remainder of the firecracker staying inside of the barrel. This was going to be our igniter.
We always did something during these muggy summer days and this was not to be any exception. So with what seems like hours of engineering, we come up with this plan for the shotgun. Called a couple of the other guys, but just couldn’t get anyone else involved in our new project. Wendell, who just lived down the street had to do errands for his parents or he’d been there with us.
Rummaging through a scrap pile, we found the pipe that we needed, and run down to the hardware store and bought the elbow. We were ready… Had to saw the pipe twice for the two sections, and did it in a way that both had a threaded end that we could screw onto both sides of the elbow, making the handle.
Must have broken three of Pete’s dad’s drill bits trying to drill that little bitty hole in the middle of the elbow, so I had to run home to secure what my dad had in stock. It worked, we got it done and hid all our broken evidence.
We had a time trying to figure out how to stop-up the pistol grip end so when it was shot, it wouldn’t blow out both ends. Decided we stuff some cork up the short end, somewhere close to the bend and then pour concrete down what was left to make a solid stopper. We soldered some sights across the top of the barrel, and now we had us a gun made that was equal to anything Smith & Wesson could come up with.
Moving on down our assembly-line, we now had to produce the powder to set the soon-to-be famous gun off with. Like I said it was early July, and we had stacks and stacks of firecrackers, and commenced to unraveling at least fifteen of those nickel packs and making a pile of that silver powder that would come close to filling up a coffee cup.
Not really sure if that was enough, we then took about half of cup of black reloading powder from Pete’s dad’s machine that he used to make the shells, and we were ready.
Taking a three foot piece of thin wire, we threaded it down the barrel and out the tiny hole. Tied the firecracker on the wire and pulled it through. Started pouring in all that mixed up powder, and cramming down the barrel a wad of tissue paper, we now had to load the buck-shot in. Well …. We did pour in about two handfuls of buck shot, but thought that might not be enough, so finding some bolts and screws, we thru them in too.
Now ready, Pete and I had to figure how we were going to pull this fiasco off, and which one of us had the lucky position to do it. We drew straws and I don’t know if Pete won or lost, but it was up to him to shoot this monstrously of a gun, or may be that I should call it a cannon.
The one thing we both figured out was that no one could hold it in their hands. That gun must of weighed ten or fifteen pounds and was way too heavy. So, propping it up in the fork of a tree we lite it and took off for cover.
You know, with such of a short fuse, wasn’t much time for that, but we run as fast as those teenage legs could carry us.
Hey…When that thing went off, or maybe I better say exploded, we were no more than thirty feet away, and felt and sounded as if it was directly under us. I’ve never heard such a sound as that in my entire life. No, not even until this day, and I was in the military!
After picking ourselves up off the ground, looking back, the tree was mostly gone and a small crater in the ground. What have we done? Wasn’t long before the neighbors starting calling and we were busted, but still alive (couldn’t hear anything for at least week).
Don’t know how we made it out alive, but I think we both learned something that day that will never be forgotten.
God takes care of IDIOTS.
Don’t want to start bragging here, but I do believe that Pete and I invented the ‘pipe bomb’ that year.
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Now, since I got a little ahead of myself, I’ll go back to my freshman year.
Back in these days, it seems like we always had stuff to do. Whether it was lying under the apple trees and seeing all the pictures in the clouds, or riding our skate boards, which was a new thing in the mid-60’s. We always had something we were doing. When it snowed, which it did often back then, we’d ride our sleds.
In our community there were two pretty good size hills. All of us kids, and there was a bunch of us, would get together and go up and down them hills all day long. I mean, we’d ride those sleds until our feet were starting to turn black, and we couldn’t pronounce our words any more ‘cause we were frozen from the inside out- or maybe the outside in, it was hard to tell.
But we had fun, and there must have been about 25 of us kids. One of the hills that we liked to sled on was on Foust Carney Road. Now Foust Carney Road was steep, and it had a long straight run on it where a person could really pick up some speed. We got the brilliant idea to get together and build us a sled jump near the bottom of that hill. Since, we couldn’t build it in the road; we had the bright idea that we would put it on top of this really deep drainage ditch just off to the side of the road. You know, if you put 2 or 3 kids on the same sled, that thing could really fly far coming off that ramp. Of course, there were kids flying off in every direction. And being over the ditch, just gave it an extra mystique about what could happen.
It’s a wonder any of us made it through the mid-60’s. Ain’t God good?! Especially to dumb teenagers. Anyway, on a night before a school day when it was below freezing, we’d take garbage cans full of water and pour them out down that hill. That was so the school bus couldn’t make it up that road to pick us kids up. You know, I think we got out of a couple of extra days out of school due to that genius plan.
Now there were a bunch of times that me and a group of us guys would go fishing. Now when I say we, I mean mostly Fuzz and Jimmy and me, but we always seemed to have one or two other fellers with us too. Anyway, a group of us would go fishing, and sometimes hunting down at the river next to Bull Run Steam Plant, on Melton Hill Lake.
It was a long haul down there, must have been about four or five miles. It sure does seem, looking back that everything we did as kids was about three or maybe five miles away from home.
So we’d have to get up ‘bout 4 o’clock in the morning, tiptoe around real quiet so mom didn’t get up and sneak out the door. It would take us three hours to get there, hunt or fish all day, and then have to walk all the way back home in time for supper.
You ever noticed how much farther it was going home than it was going when you started out? You know, I think it’s still that way.
Sometimes we’d camp out, you know, since we were all men now. The good part about camping out was somebody would always bring beer. Maybe even a half bottle of some kind of whiskey or whatever we could sneak out. We sure did always manage to have some kind of fun, or at least looking back at it……… yea, we DID have fun. Wow! I still remember all those sun-burns we got too, staying out there by the water all day long ever day drinking beer when we had it, and horsing around. And man, on them days that we camped out there, when we did what I’ll call “sleeping”, which was more like we’d fall asleep around 5am and wake up when the sun was beating down on us so that our skin would start sizzling (that’s how we got them bad sunburns actually). Well, I tell ya one thing, it wasn’t any fun getting up the next morning. Especially havin’ to walk all the way home feeling like we’d been run over by a train and dragged all the way back by our shoelaces. We didn’t know which way was up. Seeing how back then, the code was we all had to be up by the crack-of-noon.
No wonder it was always farther going home. But this was what we called fun, and we were good at it.
In 1966 or maybe it was 1967, on New Year’s Eve, it started snowing. It snowed all day and was still coming down hard as it turned dark. You know how kids are about the white stuff. We loved it, especially me I think. Somehow we all had this sense about the times we were to meet together. It was usually in my backyard.
That night, just after dark, about 15 of us were standing around talking and kicking snow, when we had the idea to build a snow man. The snow was already about 8 inches deep.
It took about 3 minutes to roll the bottom ball to 4 feet around. Started getting pretty heavy at this point, so a couple more pitched in, and it was soon 5 or 6 feet around. Hey, that’s no small snow ball. Three or four more kids jumped in, and at this point we had to get our reserve stock, which meant the girls. Pushing that sphere of snow up and down the yard was no easy task. It had to weigh more than a ton at this point. But we didn’t stop, the rest came to our rescue, and we would push and shove, but determined, we kept going. At 8 feet there was no more making that thing move. We had to stop whether we wanted to or not.
Now we had the task of rolling out the middle ball and then the head. The next snow ball was about 6 feet around, but it was way too big to pick up, even with all the kids standing by. We were whupped, but determined. All fifteen of us kids got in there and couldn’t picked that bugger up. So, out of necessity, we had to cut it back to about four and a half feet. We got it!
The next ball was only about three feet, and with six of us boys we got it up there. Now came the time to dress him up. We took buckets of snow, and formed an arm on each side of him. The arms were probably eighteen inches in diameter, but we packed them in. Put the trimmings on and mission accomplished.
I know all these figures add up to fifteen feet, but it was so heavy that it squashed down to Thirteen feet tall. Let me tell ya, it was a big snow man, and I mean big. Huge was probably a better word, and it was impressive for sure.
That snow-man, or I might just say snow mountain stayed next to our house until school was out.
We’d played in that snow day in and day out. After getting tired of the man look, we knocked the top off, and hollowed the bottom ball to make an igloo out of it.
It was fun.
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There is not much I can brag about in my teenage years. Don’t know if I couldn’t do anything right or I just didn’t care if I did, but I did make really good grades in High School.
When I turned 16, my Dad told me: “if you want to get your driver license, you’ll have to make the Honor Roll or you’ll wait ‘till your 18”.
I sure wasn’t going to wait until I was 18, and since I was good at figuring things out, I made a plan. I’ll cheat in school. So the ideal was to make a cheat sheet, hide it in the inside of my London Fogg jacket during a test and ace the thing.
That’s exactly what I did. I’d take a lot of notes during class, “cause every teacher will tell you what’s going to be on the test. She’d say something like; “this is something you’ll want to remember” or “pay attention to this”. Every teacher will put emphasis on the subject she’s talking about if it’s going to be on a test.
That was when I learned that when I write things down, I wouldn’t forget them. I never did use a cheat sheet, but I sure did make a bunch of them. I’d just make ‘em and throw them away.
I did get my license at 16, my sophomore year.
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One more thing I did was, I poled vaulted on the track team of Clinton High School. I held the school record for many years, maybe still do.
But I might as well not get too excited cause the truth is my friend Jimmy and I practiced together in a pit we built in my backyard. Jimmy was a whole lot better than I was, but I couldn’t get him to go out for track. I always knew in the back of my mind that if Jimmy was on the team I wouldn’t have even had a shot, and at least wouldn’t have held the record that’s for sure.
OH WELL, since he didn’t, at least to all the kids who didn’t know how I got so good at it, I was the best in our school. Well, best on the track team anyway.
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In my junior year of high school…. I met this really pretty girl. She was a sophomore, and the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.
Her name was Jonnie. Jonnie and I went together for 2 or 3 years. Her parents didn’t think I was the best choice for their daughter, don’t exactly know why but I reckon most dads don’t think anyone is good enough.
We had lots of fun together, and let me tell you, we were dancing fools. Our school had 2 dances a week and we went to every one of them. Dancing was dancing back then. Remember the Hully-Gully, The Twist, The Locomotion, The Jerk, and the Alligator? We knew ‘em, and we were good at all of them. Boy-o-boy, those days were fun.
Hey! This was happening year ‘round. All summer, even when there wasn’t any ball games, as well as all winter, during ball season.
Well, it was about this time, after graduating, and Jonnie was now a senior, that us boys got together, and did a really stupid thing. Remember Dynamite Road?
There was a shack about half way down it, that rumor was; had dynamite in it. So, since we were men now, and been driving for a few years. We decided we’d cut the chimney off of it, and just see what was down that hole. One night about mid-night, with our saw in hand, we snuck up that road, turning off the lights in my 1948 Ford. Creeping about 10 miles an hour, having to stop every few minutes, to turn the lights back on, to see if we were still in the road.
It took a while to get there, but we made it. Stood on the roof of my car, I sawed the metal rain guard off the chimney, and looking down, I couldn’t see a thing. Nobody brought a flash light. (Yeah, they had already invented them, even in those days). So, we went and gathered a hand full of brush, so’s we could make us a torch. I’m writing this, so I guess you figured it out. WOW! There was dynamite in there, in facts it was filled to the top. I’m talkin’ box after box. WOW!
We were out just to have something to do. We certainly didn’t expect this. We hit a gold mind. But, thought I might as well get down from the top of that building, seeing how I still got the torch in my hand. See, I told you we weren’t little kids any more.
There were 5 of us, Wendell, Pete, Jimmy, and I can’t remember if it was Ronnie or Fuzz. But anyway, we got back into that old jalopy of mine and heading back down the road, with lights on, and making plans. We had to decide what we were going to do with all of that high powered explosive.
The next morning most of us got together to figure out what we’re going to do with all that destructive power. Finally after a couple of hours of debating, we come to a census. All of us would go to Point 19 (that was a fishing spot on Norris Lake), and blow us up 2 or 3 thousand pounds of mouthwatering fish. You see, the water was over 40 feet deep there, and all this could happen without making a sound. We had sugar plums and candy cane dancing through our heads for sure.
The next night, we all met at the Old Hickory store and restaurant. This was where Foust Carney came out on Clinton Hwy., not, but a few hundred yards from Dynamite Rd. Excited and getting close to midnight, we drove up there with lights out, and ready to make our mark on the fishing industry.
BUT, When we got there, crow bar in hand, we found that someone (the owner I’m sure), had taken that gigantic lock off and the building was completely empty.
How could this happen? All our dreams were blown up. No fish to sell, no fame to be had. We had certainly lost all our bragging rights.
Ain’t God good?
Heaven was the only One that knew what was about to happen to us. I am certain that God saved 5 young kids, I mean men, from being blown into pieces too small to be found. Not to mention, whoever else we might have taken with us.
Ooooo- Weeeee