Firecrackers
Scott Mclean
Now for our ventures into explosives.
It started out small with the purchase of firecrackers in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
I already touched on Steve lighting some in a restaurant restroom in Eureka. Mom immediately confiscated them but didn’t get them all.
We had shelves of canned fruits and vegetables in the basement. On the top shelf we found a box of various fireworks that had evidently been bought by Uncle Gale, or Gingo if you prefer while we still lived in Tieton. I don’t know why they had not been discarded. Big mistake!
We tired of just having them go boom and started experimenting. We would stick one in a mostly rotten apple and light the fuse. Soon this devolved into throwing the apple grenades at each other. Of course the neighbor kid became a target.
You would think he would learn after half a dozen exploding apples.
We then went on to trying to get each other with various kinds of poop. Dog piles and cowpies became exploding land mines of a disgusting nature! We tried to get the neighbor kid again but he was finally getting wise.
He wanted to get in on our wrist rocket wars badly. Not smart because he sucked with that slingshot and we were quite proficient. We offered to let him play one afternoon and even gave him a bucket of crab apples for ammo and a hard hat to wear with his fort being an apple bin.
We had filled a good sized Dairy Queen cup with fresh cow crap and stuck one of the larger firecrackers in it. I kept his head down with a steady barrage of crabapples while Steve ran up, lit the fuse, and dropped the crap bomb in the bin. The neighbor came out slightly green and smelly.
He never asked to be a part of crabapple wars again.
His mom complained to our folks and Mom remembered the fireworks on the shelf. She put them in the burning barrel and set it on fire. Our poor dog was never quite the same.
Things got more interesting when I started shooting black powder firearms a few years down the road.
Yes, we were a little on the ornery side. We were McLean boys duh!
More later.