Summertime, When The Living's Easy

Well, June sure went fast. I didn't get anywhere near as many posts of stupid crap my dad has done as I wanted. I'll wrap it up with three summer stories.

Number One:

When dad was a kid he grew up in Silverton. He did lots of stupid stuff. One story he has told only twice is one I like quite a bit. About the time he was in Jr. High one of the Silverton Police officers was shot and killed. This was in late May. By the beginning of June all three remaining officers had quit. There was apparently some concern on the part of the remaining officers that they would be shot also and they just up and quit. The result is that for most of June Silverton had no police.

Nowadays Silverton tries to sell itself as a nice, clean town with several Bed & Breakfast establishments as well as that money pit every tax payer in Marion County is on the hook for - The Oregon Garden. Back then in the early fifties it was nothing more than just another Oregon mill town.

Dad and his friends were out riding their bikes around, with .22 rifles strapped to the front handle bars. They came upon a bridge. The bridge was over a small ravine with a creek about 20 feet below. The bridge connected the driveways of about fifteen houses with a county road.

So what do you do when you're twelve, it's summer, there's a bridge in front of you and there are no police? You and your friends get some 2x4s and a large pry bar and you tear down the bridge. That's right, they worked for about an hour and slid the county road end of the bridge along the shoulder of the road until the angle was too much and down into the ravine it went.

Hahahaha. Good times. Good times. Let's go buy some fireworks.

Three days later they went back and the bridge was back up. This was completely unacceptable to the set of values held sacred by all twelve year old boys and these boys had no choice. Back to work and an hour later it was back down at the bottom of the ravine.

The following weekend the boys went back and (you're not going to believe this) the bridge was back up.

Now a twelve year old boy can only be pushed so far before he pushes back. One of these guys said, "hey, my dad has some dynamite at home. Let's blow this piece of shit up once and for all. I'm tired of all the work we keep putting into this." No one present could argue with logic this solid. Off they went.

Within an hour they had two sticks of dynamite stuffed under the county road end of the bridge and the fuse was lit. They all raced off down the hill like demons on thier Schwins. They were down the hill and around the corner when it blew. Dad said it was one of the largest explosions he ever heard before he got an all expense paid trip to southeast Asia in the early sixties.

I asked him what happened to the bridge. To this day he doesn't know. Not one of these guys had enough guts to go back for over a year. By then a new, more permanent bridge had been built.


Story Two:

When dad was in grade school my grandparents bought him a big bag of fireworks. This is back in the day before Oregon went all pyro-Nazi on us and you could still buy stuff like roman candles, bottle rockets and M-80s. Dad was out having some completely unsupervised fun with his fireworks when a Big Kid came along.

You all remember what it was like to be under driving age when someone more than three years older than you showed up. They were a Big Kid and you did what they said or you'd get a pounding. At least that's the way it was in Silverton in the forties (and Turner in the eighties for that matter).

So a Big Kid came along and asked what fireworks my dad had. Dad gave him some deliberately vague answers. The Big Kid said he had some exploding gravel. Wha? Exploding gravel? Nu-uhn. So the Big Kid produces an entire jar of otherwise normal looking gravel. He takes out a few pieces and puts them on the ground then takes the cigarrette out of his mouth (hey, it was the forties and everyone was expected to smoke, even kids) and somehow lit the gravel. Dad says he wasn't sure exactly which part of the gravel had been lit since the Big Kid crouched down to light it in a way which obscured Dad's view. The Big Kid stepped back and BAM! the gravel exploded.

It was at this point that Dad got the offer of a lifetime. You see, as it turns out the Big Kid needed to get rid of all of his exploding gravel since an entire jar of it weights quite a bit and he still had to walk all the way home. Then out of the blue the Big Kid got a crazy idea. What if Dad traded his nice, light bag of fireworks for some of the exploding gravel. Dad was a little leery. Then the Big Kid, in a move of Corleonian wheeling dealing, made Dad an offer he couldn't refuse. How about that little, tiny bag of fireworks for this whole big jar of exploding gravel. Well dad was no fool and he jumped on it.

Dad spent the rest of his afternoon in my gradparents' driveway trying to set gravel on fire.


Story Three:

When we were growing up Dad was never stingy about buying us fireworks. But since we live in Oregon our choices were fairly limited. This was the late seventies and early eighties and all of that whistling, screaming crap they have now wasn't really around. But you could buy all the smoke bombs, sparklers and those stupid snakes you wanted. Remember those snakes? Do they even sell those anymore? So one Independence Day we were outside wanting to light off some fireworks. Dad said, "no, wait until it gets dark." So we waited. And waited. And waited. Finally it was dark enough.

Dad loaded up a bunch of matches in his shirt pocket and grabbed a box of sparklers. We each got a sparkler and Dad lit them all. Whee! We thought that sparklers were the best. You could wave them around in the night and leave green, fading marks in the night which were actually just the light from the sparkler burning a hole in our retinas.

Now these were the old-schools sparklers that were sulphur, phosphate and magnesium compounds wrapped around a piece of wire. Did you know that when they burn, these old sparklers get up to 1,500 degrees? Good old fashioned fun.

So dad lit our sparklers and sat back. Somehow, and no one knows exactly how, the match in Dad's hand didn't go out and came into contact with his pocket which now had not only the remaining matches, but also the box of sparklers.

If you think that one sparkler being waved around in the dark to make the letters t, e, and d is a breath-taking sight, then you should see what happens when a man in his late thirties has a shirt pocket and goes from 98.6 degrees to 1,500 degrees in a matter of seconds. Mom had always told us that Dad never danced. Mom's full of crap.