As kids, we always found interesting things to keep us amused. More often than not, the things were very simple in nature. I think that’s one reason behind the statement most everyone who knows me eventually makes to me. They invariably say, “It sure doesn’t take much to entertain you, does it?” That is very true indeed, as I can indeed be amused by the littlest, simplest thing. One example was with rubber bands. I could see how most people would naturally assume at this point that our fun was primarily concentrated in having rubber band fights. However, this would be only partially correct. Indeed, we did have many rubber band fights, but our major entertainment was in another use. Bob J., our family friend, had a very large quantity of rubber band powered toy rockets stored in cardboard cases at the Berlin Heights International Harvester Dealership called “Hartley’s.” It’s the present site of the Berlin Heights Police Dept., since Hartley’s went out of business years ago. The big barn behind the building is still standing where all the cases of toy rockets were stored. We always heard he “started some kind of a business” that failed and had all the toy rockets left over because they didn’t sell.  One of the 2 neat things about “going to see the Jones’es” was we got to ride the tandem bicycle and the other was to maybe have Bob go over to the barn and get us a few more free toy rockets!  The rockets were plastic, came in various colors, and had a black rubber nose cone. They were unique in that when you shot them in the air with the big rubber band launcher, they would float back to terra firma with a parachute. The parachute was plastic and all were colored lavender or light purple. They were really fun to mess around with and we always wondered why they didn’t sell on the open market. Perhaps one reason was that there was “some assembly required.” You had to tie all the string parachute shroud lines, tie the small thin rubber band “timer” for the parachute flap door, tie the main parachute line to the extended tail, assemble the launcher, etc. If Bob would have sent the rocket parts overseas to be assembled in some $1.00 per day “sweat shop,” then he would have been a millionaire and wouldn’t even have associated with “commoners” like us. (Hey! I wonder if all the cases full of rockets are STILL in that barn! Hmmm…I’ll let you know!).  Once and a while we would convince their oldest son Tom to “stage a commando raid” with us and grab a whole case or 2 of rockets! Since we didn’t need all the big thick rubber bands for the “launchers,” we used to play with those separately. One neat thing we used to do was to use them as high-powered ammo for our rubber band gun. We loaded it with 5 or 6 of those big thick rocket launcher rubber bands and called it “a shotgun load.” It really packed a punch and was especially effective for use to “shotgun shoot” our sister Sue. One of the REALLY cool things we did with all these big, thick, long, and powerful bands was to attach several of them together to make one long attached strand. (See below to see how we attached them).  We had one long strand made of scores of bands. To the best of my recollection, it was around 10 FEET long! We went outside and stretched it what was probably 30 or 40 FEET or longer! One of us would then let it go and it would surprisingly slowly shoot toward us and whiz past with a “FFFFFFTTTTWHOOOSHHH” sound! We had a lot of fun taking turns letting go; we even tried to let go at the same time to see what would happen. Usually, when we did this, it just shot toward the middle of us and ended up in a big wad. So, without “stretching” the point, THAT’S how you can have fun with rubber bands!