| We had (and still do), a fascination with pyrotechnics (things that blow up). It has run in my mother's (Dorothy) side of the family. In fact, one of our cousins (Rick), has a demolition business east of Cleveland. In the early 60's we could still go to our local grain elevator store and purchase a gross of cherry bombs for $3.25. The box was marked "FOR FARM USE ONLY", presumably to scare birds out of corn fields and such. No problem, most of the time we did use them on our farm, and a lot of birds did fly away from the resulting sound. Since MOST (well... ok ALL) of our uses were NEVER for their intended use, we were always subconsciously afraid that we would get caught by the Feds for "NON FARM USE" and get thrown in jail and put in the same cell with the people who got caught tearing off mattress labels or using prophylactics for other than "Prevention of Disease Only". One day Len and us went to our neighboring cousin's Fruit Farm to their really neat pond which was back off the road about 1/4 of a mile. Of course, we took a good supply of cherry bombs (in case we saw any birds in Joe's corn field). We had some great cherry bomb fights there! The object of one game was to throw a cherry bomb at whoever was in the water. You had to duck under water before it exploded as it floated on the surface or you may have gotten your nose blown off, or your "eye put out" as our mothers would warn us as the consequence of ANYTHING we did which was fun. Usually when MY turn came, Len and Tim would alternately throw a continuous volley of cherry bombs at me. In those days I learned to hold my breath longer than a Japanese pearl diver! We also loved to bury a cherry bomb in the soft mud just above the waterline and watch the mud fly and the smoke ooze out of the resulting crater seemingly for "hours". On one occasion after Tim lit the fuse of one, for some unknown reason he decided to stick it into the mud AFTER lighting it. It exploded just as he lifted his thumb from the ground and the resulting explosion caused a deep blood-spurting gash in his thumb. We ran to the nearest house which was where Pat, another one of our classmates lived. His mother saw it and panicked as all mothers do and immediately shoved all of us into her car for an emergency trip to the doctor. Tim had several stitches put in his thumb. Oh... did I mention that ALL of us were clad ONLY in our underpants and were covered from head to toe in slimey, smelly mud! The thing we learned from this experience was to always take clean underwear with us to the pond so we wouldn't be embarrassed the next time we had to go for stitches, or "horror of horrors", have to go to the doctor to have our eye put "IN" ! |
