One Independence Day on the farm when we were kids we scored an almost full case of Black Cat firecrackers. Now Black Cat was the leader in youth pyrotechnics at the time. We were envious of those kids who could afford quality firecrackers like Black Cat while we were relegated to lower rungs with our little cheapies.

But my older cousin bought the case remnants, and we had to decide what to do with them. Do we just pop them all at once, or do we make them last for a long time?

Or do we make a statement?

I remembered my Mom tossing an empty kitchen match box, so I ran to salvage it from the trash can.

That was the perfect base for our planned bomb!

It was like a factory line. Four or five of us would each grab a firecracker, pull the stem, and blow the gunpowder into a pile.

The cousin in charge swept all of the powder into the kitchen box and twisted some fuses together. He then taped the box shut with duct tape.

But there was still a lot of powder left – over half actually.

I sneaked into my house and saw the other almost full matchbox tucked into the cute tin dispenser on the wall. I figured that the box was redundant since the tin was doing all the holding. So I emptied the matches into the dispenser. Yeah, I guess the box was somewhat useful since matches didn’t want to stay in. So I grabbed the matches that fell out to play with later.

My cousin stuffed this matchbox full, stuck a fuse in it, and taped it shut like the other one.

The Sunday afternoon came when we were going to show the world our might!

We lived out in the country, but there was a concrete parking pad next to my cousin’s house. We placed one bomb dead center.

Cousin did the honors while we hid behind trees or garage. He ran to meet us and we prepared to shield our eyes from the hopefully resulting mushroom cloud.

When the powder caught it fizzled, sparked, and produced an enormous plume of smoke. But no explosion. Still it was cool to see that big cloud right there hovering above the pad.

Lesson learned. Cousin said he should have taped it tighter.

So, we placed the second dud in the center of the pad and lit it. This time we did not run away. We were going to play in the smoke.

This time when the powder caught there was an explosion, and it was louder than we ever imagined! It knocked every one of us down, and we were so caught off guard that we had no idea what had happened.

A grown up, either parent or uncle eventually came running to us.

“Didn’t you hear me calling you?” was what I lip read since the only thing I could hear for the next 15 or 20 minutes was a high-pitched squeal in my head.

We gave up fireworks after that. Well, until Christmas came along anyway.

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Categories: What was I thinking?