Things go boom Tom Smith

If they had this when I was a kid, we would have been a lot safer.  In our day (the ‘sixties in the sticks) we relied on coffee cans filled with gasoline and firecrackers.  Occasionally the sacred cherry bomb or M-80 would make an appearance.  Most popular targets were elaborately constructed models of airplanes, tanks, or cars.  This was also the age of the model craze, when all good boys were supposed to construct models of Dodge Chargers, Corvette Stingrays and any WWII bomber.  I pretty much sucked as a model builder, not having the patience or the dexterity.  Globs of dried airplane glue dotted all my efforts.  But they were good for blowing up.  Sick boys would attach explosives to frogs, though I only heard about this, and never saw it.  Generally, this is why I am somewhat skeptical of the late blogospheric call for more free time for kids, especially boys, to roam the woods and do what they will.  We did what we would, even though we were somewhat supervised, and a lot of what we did was quite dangerous, not in the romantic boys will be boys sense, but in the, third degree burns covering 70 percent of your body sense.

I recall that John Nash’s best boyhood friend killed himself accidentally while trying to construct a homemade bomb, or so I read in A Beautiful Mind.  Stories of that sort would percolate about in boy culture, the victim invariably being a kid from one of the junior high schools we deemed populated by “hoods.”  I think the distinction was that good kids would blow up models with firecrackers and gasoline, while hoods would on to using matchheads, and seemed to have an endless supply of cherry bombs and M-80s, which they also flushed down toilets, which sometimes resulted in entire schools crumbling to the ground, at least according to the stories.  But then the drug revolution or whatever you call it hit, and the hoods became freaks and were too stoned all the time to engage in their traditional activities.  That’s the end of this oral history lesson.