A trip down memory lane

quickslvr982

Beeing a youngster(17) i always enjoy my dads storiess he shares about his youth- jumping trains ,firecrackers, hanging out at local drug stores listening to the old timers. I ask you to look back on the old times and share anything about hunting ,fishing, fireworks, or just life when there were a little more freedom. thanks very much....

dheffley

Well, I grew up in a small Texas farming community. We were poor but didn't know it. My brother and I could walk out to the highway (two lane asfault) and pick up enough pop bottles between home and town to buy a soda when we got there. On a summer weekend, you could pick up enough bottles to buy a box of 22 shorts. They were actually cheaper back then. 50 rounds would last the week if dad was around, or an afternoon if he had gone to town and didn't know we were "waisting" ammunition. That would keep us pretty busy, but the same old thing every day would soon grow old.

Once we found two boxes of mason jars in the barn covered with dust and dirt. Not realizing that "everything" in the barn was covered with the same dust and dirt, we figured that they must not be any good. We immediatly took them to the creek and shot them. They would break! Much more fun than shooting sticks, twigs and rocks. We would have been OK if we hadn't gone back and ask mother if she had any more "old" jars we could shoot. Spent the rest of the summer earning enough money to pay for the jars.

The next summer, we topped the previous one. We lived about a mile from an old cementary. When they dug a grave, they could only dig about three feet before they hit a layer of rock. They had a shack on the property just behind the church that they kept dynamite in for blasting the rock. Now I don't know about you, but around there, digging a grave was a very interesting thing for us. Almost as good as watching the cars come down the road with their lights on to bury the dearly departed. We would spend the whole morning watching the men dig the grave and set up the tent.

They would always make us go out by the road when they blasted the rock for our own safety. We were always taken back by the sight of the broken rock. Once we even saw a partially exposed casket and skeleton when they tried to dig a new grave right next to an old one.
Anyway, on this day they let us watch them drill the rock, set the blasting caps, and pack the dynamite. They then taught us how to connect the generator and even let us push the plunger to set off the explosion.

BIG MISTAKE!!!!!

The next afternoon, we managed to put 5, half sticks of dynamite around the drive shaft of an old car that my grandfather had pushed off into a wash. We taped it to the drive shaft using two full rolls of masking tape and moved off to one side for the experiment.

BOOM! 1939 Chevrolet all over the pasture! FIRE! Dear God! FIRE!
Fire everywhere! Summer dry pasture land on fire! Cows! Oh No! The cows!

After the Volunteer Fire Department and neighbors from every house around got the fire put out, my father asked us where the generator came from, and who's bright idea this was. My 12 year old brother took the blunt of the punishment as I was only 6 and it was his job to watch out for me. We had to work at the church and cut the cementary grass for one year to repay them for the dynamite.

My father never left us unsupervised again. If he was going to town, we either went with him, or mother had to sit outside and watch us do out chores until he returned.

After that, the old men in town called us "big kaboom" and "little pop".

What were we thinking?

Save, research, then buy the best.Join the NRA, NOW!Teach them young, teach them safe, teach them forever, but most of all, teach them to VOTE!

idsman75

When I was a young'n my buddies and I got ahold of a very large mattress-sized piece of construction styrofoam from the construction guys working on the Lake Street bridge in Minneapolis. We would take that big piece of styrofoam down to the Minehaha river and rode it until we reached Minnehaha Falls. We would sit and tell stories and jokes and shoot bottle rockets and toss Lady Fingers into crevaces under bridges that we passed under. Those were fun summer days.

By the time we were in high school we would make gunpowder and propellants at home. We successfully manufactured a few mediocre bottle rockets and even got them to pop by embedding a small firecracker inside of them. One of the guys was originally from Texas and would bring up cases of saltpeter that he could pick up over the counter down there when he visited family in the summertime. The homemade fireworks and things that went "bang" were a blast but the smoke bombs we made.....wow!