YOUTHFUL INDISCRETIONS. (Extractions from the Geode Kid Free Club)
“From that mineral book
(Most likely
“Minerals of California” by Olaf Pabst - 1938)
(https://archive.org/stream/mineralsofcalifo00pabsrich/mineralsofcalifo00pabsrich_djvu.txt)
I found big mines in the most unlikely places all around the Bay Area. I remember the Leona Heights City Park where one of many tunnels at the Alma pyrite mine was hidden behind a solid wooden park bench. It had been sealed up, but that didn’t keep kids from digging a way in. The tunnels were dangerous and the old timbers were sagged and splintered. They dug so much out from under the hill that it collapsed leaving a crater called the Devil’s Punch Bowl with a large vertical shaft behind the rim of it called the Bottomless Pit.
Though I lived only about 5 miles from this rather big mine, I never heard anything about it until I saw some small brassy crystals about 1/8 inch size my first friend in the 5th grade had found. Michael Rahm had been selling them in small vials as “Golden Crystals” for a buck and when I went over to his house, he showed me enough of them to fill a hundred vials.
He denied any fraud, but we were talking about getting rich because he said there was an acre of them and we could take the Broadway Terrace bus and get a punched transfer ticket from the driver for a free to the High Street bus.
I was never interested in pyrite and passed it over in the mineral book, but I went home and looked it up. There was not much about pyrite in it except for one of a few exceptional deposits. One was this large deposit mined about 1900 to make sulphuric acid. By 1949, houses were being built nearby and Michael said that we could get a ton by screening the tailings in the creek. Definitely, there were no environmental issues in those days except for the black, slimy mud flats by the Bay Shore highway below Berkeley. It was made of sewage and really stunk at low tide.
The only foreign objects in the deep black mud were those that would float, hundreds of old tires.
Michael and I took the High Street Bus to its end and walked a short way and came to that “acre of gold.” It was a large white and yellow fluffy sulfurous mine tailings filling a small canyon below which nothing grew near the acidified creek. The pyrite reacts with air and water discharging sulfurous acid into the creek and coating everything the creek water came into contact with a rusty brown iron oxide. This is true with many mines I have visited in my life. Many iron and copper deposits are covered with a dull brown and gray layer called a gossan and prospectors know that by digging through the oxides and carbonates, they will find the unweathered in-situ sulfide ore bodies of many elements. Pyrite and its polymorph, marcasite, are the worst for immediate toxic effects on aquatic life.
More dangerous to humans are long term elements such as mercury. The ore, cinnabar, is mercury sulfide. It is more resistant to oxidation, but the presence of mercury anywhere these days brings out the National Guard!
Of all the mines I visited, my favorite was the New Almaden and Guadalupe mines (now at the edge of San Jose).They were the largest mercury mines in America. Cinnabar was heated in a retort and the pure silvery liquid mercury was recovered as a distillate while the sulfur burned off and SO2 went up and out of the stack! I wandered through miles of tunnels and took risks like thinking I could be the last person get one more specimen without caving the place in. I pried out a nice chunk of pure cinnabar weighing a few pounds from a vein running through a pillar of rock left there to keep the top of a room from caving in. There must have been a thousand bucks worth in that vein, but the pillars were there first.
Before I left home for good, I had found so many mines and ways to make money hidden near my home, a place I thought for the first decade in my life as dull. My biggest money makers would be mercury and gold. I learned how to use the topographic coordinates such as sections, Township, Range and the map (Page 7 for September, 2005) names in that mineral book. I carried that book and maps which I bought for 25 cents each in 1950. My Aunt Monnie encouraged my interest in minerals and going to college. She also had me join
the East Bay Mineral Society which took monthly trips to digging areas.
The first field trip I went on was for the Berkeley Hills blue agates, see the September 2005 Maps. Within five years I had discovered a ton of mining history around where I lived which made life far more interesting and profitable for me and my other three school cohorts who joined up first as a club when I graduated into Claremont Junior High School.
My mining years actually began in the fifth grade. Michael and I now had thousands of pyrite crystals which he continued to sell. When I found some malachite and azurite coated rock in the San Leandro rock quarry, I took it to Michael and he was excited. He ground it up into a powder and put it in a beaker with some acid.
He put an iron nail connected to a dry cell “battery” and put a wire from the other terminal in and the nail turned metallic brown with copper. Michael had two other geeky friends and
we formed a company called The Rham, Lee, Devon and Colburn Mining Company. Later, Lee and Devon left and two others were to join.
It was Michael who introduced me to chemicals. We used to go to the University of California and go through the garbage cans outside the chemistry building to get glass apparatus. We got a lot of good glass beakers, flasks and glass tubing. If a beaker or flask got so much as a tiny chip in it, it was thrown away. One day, Michael and I wandered over to the chemical shelves in a classroom. There was no class and the room was empty and Michael grabbed a small bottle of mercury and half a quart size bottle of potassium chlorate.
“POTASSIUM CHLORATE!” he yelled, I told him to hush up. “Oh yeah, its okay, that professor who kicks me out is here in the morning. After about four, everybody is gone.” “What’s so great about that?” I asked him about that chemical, “That’s one of the ingredients in matches, I wanted some after I made a rocket out of match heads,” “You made a rocket out of match heads?, I made a rocket out of a match and it flew across the classroom. The teacher sent me to the principle and she hit my hands with a leather strap, but I never thought about using match heads for rocket fuel.”
“Oh,” Michael recalled, “I remembered that, in fact I cut match heads off about a hundred safety matches. I stuck them in a tube I rolled up out of a Life magazine cover and taped one end up. I taped fins to the rear, but the damn thing flew all over the place, but it flew!” “You mean it flew like that CO2 cartridge you punched with a nail?” I reminded him. “Well, yeah, but it flew longer,” Michael added. “That’s a lot of match heads,” I said, “Yeah, it was, so I soaked about a thousand matches in water until the heads dissolved off. Then, after the paste dried out, I was grinding it into a powder with a mortar and pestle and it exploded,” “Oh, is that how you burned your hand?” It was still bandaged. “Yeah, that was not smart, but with this, I can make a controlled batch from separate chemicals.”
After I moved from my semi-mansion to a more modest middle class house on 5267 Shafter Ave. (due to my father divorcing my mother), I had to walk to school two miles in the opposite direction. About the time I got into Clairmont junior high. The walk was a mile closer, but the kids were mean.
It took me only my first semester to discovered I was absolutely no good at sports. I was the last to be chosen for a team. One day walking home from school, I was met by three bullies, one held a baseball bat over my head and told me to kiss his shoes. I complied and they thought it was so funny. But, I was merely different, so different I don’t know how I stayed out of jail.
I called Michael up and he bought over some potassium chlorate, sulfur and magnesium dust. We folded the end of a toilet paper roll, filled it witha mixture of these chemicals and made a fuse out fire cracker powder in a soda straw. “Now, go set it off in their back yard and call me when it goes off.” “Okay, then what?” I asked curiously,
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“Give me his phone number and I’ll take care of the rest,” “Rest of what?” “I’ll tell his mama what I will do next if her son ever beats up my friends again.” There was a dog in their back yard, so I had to sneak by their front room window and put it under the small staircase all these 1920s tract homes had, about five steps attached to a small porch entrance. All these houses had similar front lawns, about 20 x 15 feet with a walkway to the sidewalk. All I expected out of this toilet tube bomb was about what I expected from a standard issue cherry bomb. Michael had miscalculated something. The explosion was larger than I expected and I expected that the police would be called.
I called Michael and told him that it gave off a bigger bang than I expected, he said “Well, you wanted something impressive, didn’t you?” “Well, yes ah, but it probably blew up his porch,” “HIS PORCH? You put it under his porch?” “Yeah,” I answered “there’s a mean dog in their back yard, so I had to do it somewhere,” I answered meekly, “I put magnesium dust in it for a flash effect,” Michael said and followed “I didn’t know you were going to put it under a house,”
“Well, that’s alright, go make that phone call,” “Are you sure?” “Sure I am, I never hated anybody before, but I hate him, I really hate them all, those god damn bullies, yes, go use a payphone and warn his parents that you will blow his house to hell if her son ever beats up any of my boys.”“Okay, I’ll go do it right now, but you better hide any chemicals you have!” Michael warned me.
About that time I had a small lab sprouting in my garage. I had been experimenting with rocket fuels, but getting potassium chlorate was hard to do. I did not have the guts to walk through a university schoolroom and pick what I wanted from the shelves. Instead, I would offer a student a buck for a one pound bottle full. At the time I hit that bully, I had a weak but workable rocket fuel I was testing in a bazooka device. It was a mixture of powdered zinc and sulfur. Shot from a 4 foot length of 1 inch electrical pipe, they would travel about 100 feet horizontally. I had a small ignitor charge of match head powder in a nozzle which was formed by bending the paper tube around a pencil then taping it. A six volt battery was used to ignite the rocket. Two copper wires were connected to a door screen wire which was inserted into the igniter charge. It instantly glowed the second the circuit was closed. My rockets were all made out of slick magazine covers rolled up around a ½ to 3/4 inch wooden dowel depending how big a rocket I wanted to make. The front of the rocket was folded over on four sides and taped solidly with masking tape.
I had made some other friends in my new neighborhood, about two blocks south of Shafter Avenue near Clifton Street.
They were as crazy as I was. They also had a problem with this same bully. When Bob Hausler heard about the bully getting blown up, he asked me to shoot a rocket at the house. I told him that I wasn’t going near the place. “You don’t have to,” Bob said, “my friend John lives over on the next block and if you go to the backyard of his house, you’ll see a point blank target,” “I ain’t going to do that, I mean the cops will be watching,” I protested,
Bob said “There ain’t no cops, John said that no cops showed up.” Then Bob said “I’ll do it then,” “Oh no, I’ll do it, then you phone the place and tell them that your friends got bullied too.”
At night we had a clear view of the house.”Damn, it blew the window out!” I whispered. I was scared, but Bob had insisted “Shoot it through the window!” “What? Not me! You do it. You know how to use this, I mean like we did in the rock quarry?”I asked, “Well, all I do is aim at the house and touch these two wires, right?” “That’s it, just get rid of the battery and pipe, I don’t know anything about this,” “I’d love to do this!” Bob said as took the loaded pipe, aimed it and touched the two wires and SSCHHWOOSH, the rocket flew straight through the front window!
These shenanigans in the 1950s weren’t so uncommon. Kids were stealing dynamite if they couldn’t make
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it. Some lost their fingers. One wealthy kid took two of my bombs after I had warned him that he would blow his hand off. He took them anyway and put one in a sand trap in the Claremont Country Club golf course, blew his hand off and ran to my other friend’s house whereupon the poor mother opening the door immediately passed out. There was little left but tendons. The next day it was all over the radio, important news anchors of that day were leading with the story that this boy had blown his hand off with a cherry bomb. It had more megatonnage than a cherry bomb, but that was the cover story by which we all stood. No indictments were ever handed down. After he got out of the hospital, I saw himin school. I had no idea how he felt, but whatever happened, made a man of character out of him.
I thought he might punch me in the nose, but he walked over and said “Hey, man. Don’t feel bad about this, you warned me and it was myfault.” The two bombs he took from me that night were one quarter stick of dynamite each.
Michael had made the lead azide which was the detonator and firecracker fuse lead to the detonator. We only tested these bombs in the rock quarry below the golf course. My quartet of characters all knew that the fuse was too short to light and get away. The way we got the firecracker fuse to light, was to trail out a couple feet of toilet paper, light it and run. What Larry did was to hold one bomb in one hand while trying to light the fuse of the other directly after sticking it in the sand trap. As he tried to light the fuse with one hand, he pulled the match away to see if the fuse was lit. What he didn’t realize was that the hand holding the match had made contact with the fuse of the bomb he was holding in his other hand.A lot of kids had some sort or other of respect for me. Some wanted to buy my rockets and bombs, but I never sold any. I had found a better way to make money while I was in school.
So, we might ask, how was all this financed? By gold and mercury, the latter of which is also known as quicksilver. It was mostly quicksilver that financed these Tom Sawyer-ish adventures and unbelievable as they apparently were, they are true. We did things at abandoned quicksilver mines the EPA would vomit over. All my comrades were selling silver pennies for a dime and I had dozens of brown pint reagent bottles stacked on my desk at home. Each weighed about 10 to 15 pounds. I had found an older friend, a peer of many years who worked in his own quicksilver mine. George Kirk was one who kept my interest in mines, minerals and dynamite going.
He lived near the corner of Bascom Boulevard (?-the old Los Gatos to San Jose highway) and Shannon Road, only about half a mile from my Aunt Monnie’s house. Aunt Monnie never thought he would amount to much, she thought all prospectors were dreamers. However, she curiously supported my going to his mine to help him, to let me be myself (within the confines of Emily Post during company or dinners out).
I first met George when I was hiking along a ridge above Guadalupe Creek. There was the Guadalupe quicksilver mine near the northern end of the ridge. About three miles south I saw a man on a dozer digging into a hill above the old San Mateo mine. He was getting off his dozer for lunch and I cautiously approached him. I had run ins with old Burrell who was working the Guadalupe mine. But, George was friendly and he sat talking with me about why he was digging above the old mine. “Well,”he started, the old timers came and dug tunnels intothe cinnabar veins. WhenI went in the mine about 100 feet below, they had started stoping up. You know what a stoping is?”“No,”I answered and he really seemed to like to have someone to talk with about mining, “When you hit a hot spot, sometimes called a glory hole, that is where it is very rich. They will take timbers in and build a box-like structure and start drilling and blasting upwards.
This makes it easy because the ore falls into or is carried to a hopper. Then, the man with the ore car runs it under the hopper, pulls a handle that opens it and the ore spills into the car. He then runs the car outside to another hopper that feeds the ore into the retort.” I was fascinated talking with a man who really knew what he was doing. “How does
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a retort work?” I asked him, “Its really nothing much more than a steel pipe about fifteen feet long over a brick firebox with steel plate doors on both ends. See that one there, it has about a 45 degree angle and a smaller pipe coming out of the top. You pour the ore in the top, put the plate over it and shovel dirt on it so the quicksilver doesn’t escape.
Then you light the propane burners and the cinnabar boils off and goes up the small pipe. The small pipe runs through a bigger pipe where water runs and cools the inner pipe so the quicksilver condenses and runs out into an iron bucket.”George was finishing his sandwich and added, “Then, we pour it into these steel flasks, each one must weigh 76 pounds, I don’t know why 76 pounds was chosen as the standard, but that is how I deliver it to San Francisco,”
How much can you get for a flask full?” I asked, “Well, we got into this war in Korea and that caused the price of quicksilver to go up to about $180.00 per flask.”
“How did you know that there was cinnabar still here, why didn’t they mine it out?” George drew in a big breath like he was about to give out a big secret, “Well, son, they were mining all around Mine Hill, even dredging out Almaden Creek for big cinnabar nuggets when one day someone took a walk to the top of the hill and found cinnabar lying all over the top of the ground. When word of that got out, all the under-grounders ran to the top and many got rich. But, they left a lot in the stopes while all attention was drawn to the vast deposits on Mine Hill, so I just find an old mine and there is usually some good ore left.” Then I asked him the question that would enhance my pyrotechnic knowledge. “What do they use quicksilver for?” “Well. Son, they used to use a lot during the gold rush, you put a little quick in a gold pan and it picks up anything that is metal, like gold dust, nuggets and silver too. Today, they make mercury fulminate and that is used in ammunition detonators.” I put mercury fulminate into my long term memory as a possible addition to my lab.
As George got ready to leave, I asked him if I could dig out some cinnabar. He simply said “Help yourself,”and he drove off. Cinnabar had a hypnotic effect on me. I liked the hefty little red nuggets I found in Almaden Creek when Aunt Monnie took me to see the museum in New Almaden.
There were stories about the Spanish being the first to mine any cinnabar.
It was said that the first miner “roasted” some cinnabar in his gun barrel. All this started in the 1840s so it was going to be a great time for selling quicksilver when the gold rush started. Most of it was sent on boats across the length of the San Francisco Bayon up to Sacramento where it was sold to the gold miners. As a result, the New Almaden on Mine Hill would become the second biggest mercury mine in the world, second only to the Almaden mine in Spain.The pit George dug was about 20 feet deep. He had opened a flat vein about eight feet long and it broke off in chunks about an inch thick, some of the pieces weighed ten pounds! This was the biggest pure piece of cinnabar I ever saw and I knew that Michael would be impressed.
He was also into rocks, but I think the first thing he would want to do is put some in a flask, connect it to a glass water jacket still, heat it over a Bunsen burner and watch the silvery droplets collect in the inner spiral condenser. I collected about fifty pounds of cinnabar and rode my bike down the Guadalupe Creek Road and another four miles up and over Shannon Road to Aunt Monnie’s house. I showed it to Aunt Monnie and told her that it was cinnabar or quicksilver ore George said it was mercury sulfide. She just said that my Uncle sold mercury at his drug store in San Francisco for constipation in the early 1900s!
I kept going back to see George, but not only as a side trip when I visited Aunt Monnie. I started hitchhiking down there to visit George directly. He had picked up a partner who was as mellow as he, and they had leased an abandoned retort up on top of Mine Hill and were hauling rich ore up there to roast in it. There was a big rotary furnace and hundreds of feet of condenser pipes fitted together with U shaped connectors. There was an old rotary
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retort just hidden at the lower left of the photo shown below. but George didn’t use it. Instead, there was a strange upright retort about six feet in diameter hooked up to a few of the U shaped pipes. There was a small pipe coming from the bottom of where the rest of the pipes had been disconnected. >>>>>>>>>>
What I saw was impressive, there was a steady trickle of quicksilver pouring into a steel bucket with a beaker-like spout. When the bucket was about half full, George slipped another under the silvery trickle and poured the “quick” into a standard 76 pound when filled iron flask.
After one was full, he screwed what looked like a pipe plug into the top of the flask. “There’s another ready for market,” he said after screwing the plug in with a wrench.
George had close to a dozen flasks ready to go.
“I suppose we’ll have a truck load ready to take to Frisco next week,” he said to his partner, “How many is that?” I asked, “Well, we can get about twenty five flasks in my pickup, been a good week wouldn’t you say?”he said to his partner, “Yep, not bad for a week go-around,” he said. “What’s a go-around?”I asked, “That’s mining, hauling and roasting, ore’s been so good lately, we will ship out in a week.”“Wow, that’s a lot of money, ain’t it?” “You bet, at a hundred eighty bucks a flask, we will get fortyfive,”
“Forty five, you mean forty five hundred, you made four thousand five hundred all in a week?!”I was stunned at how easy it was to process the ore, just heat it. “Its been a good year, ain’t it, George,” his partner said smiling broadly, “Yep, it sure has!” They looked so excited, I thought they were going to throw their hats in the air.
I had a question. “Did you ever hear of the Mount Diablo quicksilver mine?” I asked George showing him my California Minerals book, “Yes I did, but they had to shut it down because it was too hot at only 900 feet,” “Well, my mother took us to Marsh Creek Park for Easter and this mine was only about ten miles away. I begged my mother to take me there and she did. I asked the watchman if I could look for rocks, he said okay, but to stay out of the tunnels. I dragged a pair of mine car wheels across a field and he didn’t care.” George said “That’s one hell of a nice guy, its a wonder he didn’t fill your butt with rock salt,” “Rock salt?” “Yep, won’t kill you, but you’d never forget it. Some of these miners up here would shoot and ask questions later, if they could,”
“I guess he was just a nice guy,” I said, “Well, maybe he was watching for vandals, or as you said, people going into the hot tunnels, now that’ll kill you, you could breath quicksilver fumes and get salivated, mercury poisoning.” George said in a serious voice. I was surprised about that, because my Aunt Monnie had told me about using mercury for constipation, “Is it really poisonous? My Uncle Dario had a drug store in San Francisco during the earthquake and he sold it for constipation, and you say its poisonous?” “Well, son, in those days you never knew what was in them snake oil medicines,” “Oh no, my uncle was a pharmacist, you know my Aunt Monnie, it was her husband,” I felt I had to defend my uncle’s reputation.
“No, I’m not saying he was doing wrong, there were a lot of mistakes in medicine in those days, I’m sure your uncle was just doing his best, like he has to fill prescriptions the doctors write,” “Oh, I understand you, I mean I am glad you told me this. I got some cinnabar out of Guadalupe Creek and a friend in school was heating it to get the quicksilver out,” “Now, there is where you have to be careful, its mercury fumes that do most miners in,” George said with authority. But, now this was not the point of my interest, mine was a mine, the Mount Diablo mine. I had seen something unbelievable at that mine when my mother took me there. There was a rotary retort there about 5 feet in diameter and about fifty feet long inside a large corrugated tin building and it looked
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like it hadn’t been idle very long. There were slick steel rings around it, one with gear driven by an electric a motor.
The high end of the retort was connected to two large iron feeder pipes which in turn were connected to two long wooden condensing tubes that ran for about 100 feet up a hill.. There were stacks of smaller diameter about ten feet high at the upper end. These wooden condensers were about four feet in diameter.
Below the steel feeder pipes, the wooden condensers entered what looked exactly like big wooden wine aging tanks and that is what they probably were. These tanks must have been ten feet in diameter and a bit taller. Like one would see in a wine tank, there was an wooden oval hatch door held on by a large screw in the center. They were wedged tight by their larger inner diameter when the screws were tightened. And they were big enough for a person to crawl through. And that is exactly what I wanted to do.
I unscrewed the hatch and this black powder wafted out. This powder was an inch thick on the inside of the hatch. It also lined the tank and no doubt the length of the wooden condenser tubes. When I touched the sooty material, droplets of quicksilver trickled out. I was to say in the least, excited. How much quicksilver was in all two of these huge condensers. I got a shovel and prodded the condenser tube where it entered the “wine” barrel.
Quicksilver ran out in small streams, I mean a lot, so much it scared me. I quickly pulled the hatch shut and screwed it tight. I knew that when I asked that watchman if I could look for rocks for my collection, it probably didn’t extend to cleaning up what looked like hundreds of bucks worth of quicksilver. When I showed him my
Minerals of California book, he was impressed and just said to stay out of the tunnels. It was my last act that emboldened me to revisit this mine to get some quicksilver and that was dragging those heavy pair of mine car wheels to the road to the complete indifference of the “watchman”! Now, I had a question for George Kirk.
“George, I can get some spilled quicksilver from the Mount Diablo mine, can you sell it? He answered that question by grabbing an empty flask and handed it to me and asked “Is one flask enough?” I was without words. All I could say at that point was how much did he want to do this. “Oh hell, I don’t know. I like your industrious attitude, I will throw it into the mix, I don’t need money.
”Imagine that, Aunt Monnie was incorrect. George Kirk was not your ordinary get rich dreamer prospector, he was just a very kind and patient man. Now, I had some plans to make with my comrades back at school. The closest friend I had that I could trust was Paul Bondshu.
We never called each other by our first names. I was known by my comrades as Colburn, Paul was Bondshu and Frank Brown was FBI and Michael Rahm was X-21.Bondshu, was a track star in school, but had to drop out due to epilepsy. He was a jock without friends. Ironically, I would get poisoned cleaning quicksilver out of sink traps in the old ivy covered brick deserted chemistry labs at the University of California. I was using a standard 500 milliliter glass flask with a two hole rubber stopper.
A short glass tube was inserted into one hole with a rubber hose long to reach the bottom of the sink traps. A similar glass tube and hose inserted into the other hole of the stopper which served as the suction hose. I was the sucker.
Besides quicksilver in the bottom of the sink traps, there was a variety of toxic aromatic hydrocarbons like acetone, methyl ethyl ketone and benzene. There were other deserted labs I did not enter. They had a string tied across the doorway that simply said RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER, which I didn’t.
As I was sucking out these traps, I could smell and inhaled some of this stuff, fortunately the quicksilver was heavy and stayed in the bottom of the flask. Apparently, some agent caused me to have an epileptic type of seizure in hy history class. Dr. Haydis, my history teacher, did not like me because I couldn’t remember as well as most kids.
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I got Ds from him, but after I got sick in his class, he felt sorry for me and gave me a B. After that, my mother took me to a doctor for an EEG brain scan to see if I did. The results were inconclusive. I met Bondshu one day chopping wood from felled eucalyptus trees growing behind the California College of Arts and Crafts while I was slicing Berkeley Hills iris agates on Dr. Dawson’s new Highland Park 16" diamond saw. I gave this kind jewelry class teacher a slab once in a while which were very rare
(see GPS coordinates on SEPTEMBER 2005 MAPS (Page 1of 4 - FIRST HALF).
I stepped outside with the iris agate slabs to put them in a bucket of soapy water. Bondshu was putting chopped limbs on his bicycle basket and hauling them somewhere three or four at a time. I asked him what he was doing with them and he said he was using them in landscaping and erosion control in peoples gardens. Then, he stopped and stood there speechless, just looking at me like he had seen a ghost, then he asked in a shaken voice, “Are you, you the kid who, ah, did you get sick in Dr. Haydis class?” “Yes, I passed out from something, like the school nurse said I was in convulsions. I think I got poisoned, ah . . .” he spoke up, “I saw them take you out of his
class, there was blood, oh I’m sorry, but I. . .”
There stood this boy with an axe in his hand. He looked a little like a weight lifter with a shock of bright red hair which set off his bright blue eyes, then they filled with tears. Then he stammered “I thought I was alone, I mean I am lonely, I got epilepsy, you know, just passing out like you did and I got kicked off the track team. I guess I shouldn’t be talking like this. I try to keep it a secret, but I don’t always know when its going to happen.” A moment of silence passed and I said “I’m Robert, I never knew about this. I thought I was alone too, but the doctor says it
is not that rare,”
“Hi, I um, am Paul, I can’t even go to school so my mother is going to teach me at home and I am going to get a diploma and I will run again. I am fast, do 50 yards in less than six seconds, yes I’m going to beat six seconds and . . .” Words flooded out of his tortured repressed mind. He had found another likewise tortured mind, he was no longer alone. “What are you doing?” he asked, “I’m washing iris agates I dug in the BerkeleyHills”I held one up to the sunlight and wiggled it. “Wow, that looks like what prisms do, I never saw anything so beautiful!” He had momentarily changed the subject, but I could feel that he needed a friend.
Bondshu’s soft demeanor belied his muscular stature. We talked a while and I said that we should look at medical books about epilepsy. “I don’t know anything about medical stuff, do you?”Bondshu asked, “Well, maybe we could go up to the public library and find something about this. I have a friend, Michael Rahm. He is a chemistry genius, I think he would understand medical stuff, he sure knows how to make rockets and bombs,” “Bombs?!” Bondshu exploded with surprise, “Yes, we test them in the rock quarry,” I said pointing to the big pit that used to be
the Superior Rock Quarry. It was not more than 100 yards from the building at the art college where I was cutting iris agates. There was a cyclone fence around it, but like all kids will do if they can, dig an access hole under it. There was a 150 foot cliff just behind the fence, but a big chunk had broken off and slid 50 feet down vertically so clean that the eucalyptus trees on it were still upright. There was talus debris where we could slide down into the quarry.
“Oh, so you are the mad scientist blowing things up down there,” Bondshu said, “You know us?” “Hell yes I know you, I was down below you where they dump trash. I was looking for radio parts for one of my friends who is a radio ham. He won’t go down there, but I do and one day I heard an explosion and saw you two running up the slide and crawl through the fence, but I didn’t know that it was you,”Bondshu said. “Do you live near here?” I asked,
“Yeah, just a couple of blocks, I used to go to Rockridge school,” he said pointing across the street, “I never saw
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you before,” I said, “Well, its these god damn fits, I pass out then get bullied about having fits and just keep to myself. One day I punched one of them in the face, bloodied him up pretty good, and got expelled from school for breaking his nose.”
Bondshu put his axe down and asked me a question about some type of person I never to this day have found out what it meant. “Are you the Black Mariah? I heard bullies talk about that science guy they call the Black Mariah,” “I never heard that one,” I answered “but bullies do call me the mad scientist because we blew a bully’s house up and they leave us alone now,” “Wow, I would love do that, but all I can get are 5 inchers and cherry bombs, but nothing like that explosion I heard in the rock quarry, where did you get those?,” “We make them, say, would you like to see my lab?” I asked him, “You have a lab like a scientist and you make those bombs? That’s impressive!”
Bondshu looked full of enthusiasm. “Sure, I’d love to see this, let me take these limbs over to my neighbor and I’ll be back in half an hour, that okay?” “I’ll be here, yes I’d like to have a friend as strong as you look, I bet you could kick any bully’s ass!” “Alright, I’ll be right back!” Bondshu was smiling like he probably seldom did in his life. He had been born with epilepsy and I know how bad that would be going to school and never knew when such a terrible seizure would hit.
Bondshu was back in half that time. He was smiling with enthusiasm. “Where do you live?”he asked, “Oh, just cross Broadway, a jog one block up College Avenue, down Clifton Street four blocks and just across the tracks on Shafter Avenue.” Bondshu replied, “Oh, so you live on the other side of the tracks, oh, I’m just joking,” he said with a mischievous grin,”“Oh, I do now, but I used to live in the rich district on Bayview Drive (?) just off Broadway Terrace until my father left my mother, but I like living with my father gone, he used to beat me, he beat me when the next door neighbors found 21 rocket casings on their roof when they had it repaired, he just didn’t like anything I did, he said I would amount to nothing chasing rocks.” “Did you say rocket casings, do you make those too?” ‘Yeah, but I could never get them to go as high as the ones we buy in Chinatown, lets go, I’ll make one when we get to my house.”
It was all down hill riding our bicycles, the last two blocks were level then we crossed the old Sacramento Northern electric freight train which was still running when I left home in 1955. “I never knew there were tracks running down this street, look at that white line and cars parked so close to the tracks, do they run trains down here?.” Bondshu had probably never ventured more than a few blocks in his life given his epilepsy. I explained the white line and all the neatly of parked cars just inches inside it and against the curb. “Yeah, trains run here and if somebody is parked over the line, the train would hit the cars. When the conductor sees a car over the line, they stop and blow their loud horn at seven o’clock in the morning and wake the whole neighborhood up. Then they have to wait for the guy to move his car so the train can pass. Sometimes they have to wait for a tow truck if the owner doesn’t show up. Here’s my house, just park in the garage and we’ll go into my secret lab under the house.”
We had a basement where my mother had a washing machine and a big double sink. I had built shelves along one wall to display my rather large rock collection. Bondshu looked at some big fossil clams called pectin cravicardo.
They look exactly like Shell Oil Company’s sign logo. I had dug them on some of my hitchhiking trips to Shell Ridge just southeast of Walnut Creek, a small country town about 15 miles east of Oakland. I sold some to a paleontologist at the University of California.“Where did you get those big, ah, I guess scallops, they’re stuck in sandy looking rock,” he added, “Those are fossil clams, I dig them near Walnut Creek and sell them to Professor Ham at UC, the same
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university I get my lab glass and chemicals,” “What, you sold rocks at UC?!” Bondshu was clearly impressed. My bedroom was elevated about four feet above the basement. The back door had one short wooden staircase going up to the kitchen, another five steps of concrete at a right angle went down about four feet yielding the small basement about 12 feet on each side. Most of the rest of the house was over 3 foot high a crawl space of dirt behind a level concrete retaining wall. I had hidden the crawlspace with one of those roll down bamboo curtains.
Just behind the corner of the basement toward the wooden stair case was a carefully disguised pathway to the inner concrete footing that held the backdoor to kitchen staircase. At the juncture where the staircase met the kitchen was a large pile of dirt which concealed whatever one might want to hide under it, indeed. There was no evidence that would lead even the best investigator to do more than look. Under the staircase I had excavated a hole about six feet deep and as wide as the staircase, about 4 feet. Under the last stair was a shelf with an assortment of laboratory glass and chemicals that would freak-out Homeland Suckurity!
Bondshu was fascinated with the rocks. I went to the left side of the bamboo curtain and pushed it aside and invited Bondshu in, “Promise to keep this a secret?” I swore Bondshu to secrecy and he looked behind the curtain and said, “Your kidding me, there’s nothing but dirt,” I answered his skepticism “It looks that way because I use a whisk broom behind me going in and out. Come on, its only a few feet in, just to that cement that holds the stairs up.”
Once in, I carefully pulled a 1/4 inch plywood board aside. It had just enough dirt to conceal a squeeze through tunnel I had dug under the footing which opened to the comfortable small lab. Once Bondshu had crawled through, I turned the small shaded light fixture on and Bondshu was without words except “Jeeezusss!!”
After a few seconds of silence, he asked “What is all this?” I rattled off a dozen names, though I knew he wouldn’t know what the glass and chemicals were, “Well, here on this shelf is some red phosphorous, this is yellow phosphorous, but youhave to keep that under water, otherwise it would catch fire if it dried out.And these two cubes here are sodium and potassium metal, you don’t want to keep them in water, they would burn and explode if you put them in water, so that is oil you see them in.
Over here are jars of zinc dust, magnesium powder, sulfur, that black powder is charcoal. The most dangerous is sulfuric acid, it will turn your skin to charcoal!” “Wow!”Bondshu gasped. Then this is what makes most of my rockets and bombs work, potassium chlorate.We tried salt peter which is potassium nitrate, but it is no good for rockets. Michael said it would explode if you put it in a pipe, but I don’t want to hurt anybody, so I use toilet tubes for giant firecrackers and rolled up magazine covers for rockets,” I concluded holding up a couple of Life magazine covers. My mother keeps asking me why I tear covers off of her magazines and when I tell her I make rockets, she just throws her hands in the air and mostly complains about stinking up the house with burning sulfur fumes.”
Bondshu interrupted, “You said you have salt peter?” “Yeah, this here,” the bottle had KNO3 written on it, Then he asked me for some potassium nitrate and gave me a strange reason for its use, “Can I have some of that?” “Why, you want to try it, I mean I can’t make anything but flares and I don’t want any pipe bombs made. Did you want to do that?” I asked. Bondshu replied assuredly that he wasn’t going to make bombs. “I want to spike the punch during the prom.” A prom is a big social dance party before graduation at schools. They are usually held in the gymnasiums where everybody is dressed up in suits and their finest dresses. There is a long table set with cookies, crackers, dips and sauces and a big punch bowl. I had heard of spiking punch with alcohol in college proms and fraternity parties, but why potassium nitrate, so I asked him, “What will that do, get them high?”“Oh no, my dad told
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me that officers put it in sailors’ food before shore leave so they cant get boners and get clap from whores.”
I was flabbergasted. “What ah, what is clap? I never heard any of this,” “What, you don’t know about that, clap is gonorrhea, if sailors cant get boners, they can’t s**** a whore,” I scratched my head and got it, “Sooo, you want to wreak a party?” “Yeah, my sister is a cheerleader and I don’t want her to get knocked up,” Bondshu cautioned me “What’s knocked up mean, drunk?” Then Bondshu, who was once in the jock cliques before his seizures made hima pariah, made me an offer. “Can you teach me this stuff and I will get you hip.”I had no idea what hip meant either. “Okay, but no pipe bombs, just paper ones and rockets. We could mine the goals in the football fields, but only with highway flares,” “You can do that?” “Yes, but I need to make some money first.” Bondshu offered his financial source. “I get 75 cents an hour mowing lawns, not much, but I could make twenty bucks a week.”
I reached over and grabbed a small bottle of quicksilver and handed it to him, “Wow!, Bondshu said, “that’s weird, it looks like metal but its liquid like water and its heavy, what is it?”“That’s mercury, miners call it quicksilver, here, let me show you an experiment.” I took a penny out of my pocket and poured a little nitric acid into a beaker with water in it. I dipped the penny in just for a few seconds until it was shiny and like new. I wiped it off and Bondshu said “That’s neat, they look new.” But, when I rubbed some mercury on it to impress him by making it look like a newly minted 1943 steel penny, but he knew about this “Hey, so you are the guy selling pennies for a dime”“No, I didn’t,” and explained “It was Michael who did that, the quicksilver on the penny is worth more than the penny and probably more than 10 cents. And, I know where we can get pounds of it, maybe hundreds of pounds.”
Then, I sat there in the lab with Bondshu for quite some time telling him about George Kirk, my quicksilver miner friend and all of the quicksilver over at the abandoned Mount Diablo quicksilver mine. “George said he would sell all the quicksilver I can get and we can get a hundred and eighty bucks for a 76 pound flask,” “But, I can’t drive, do you have a car yet?”“No,”I answered, but we could hitchhike over there, I think its only about fifty miles. I know we could get 76 pounds in about four quart jars,” Bondshu’s bright blues were popping out like Frank Sinatra sapphires, “You mean we can make a hundred eighty bucks every weekend?” “Pretty sure of it, I was out there and saw it. There’s that watchman there and he didn’t stop me taking those mine car wheels out right in sight,”“You mean those iron wheels by your rock collection, man, those must weigh a hundred pounds!” “They were heavy, it took me an hour to drag those over the field, my mother was honking for me to hurry up and the watchman never came out of his house. He only told me to stay out of the tunnels. I think he just stays in his house getting drunk all day.”
Bondshu sat back staring at my chemicals and lab equipment, mulling over the feasibility of hitchhiking way over there. Bondshu broke the silence, “That’s a hundred mile round trip, what if we can’t get a ride, I mean I’ve been to Mount Diablo and Marsh Creek Park and there’s not much traffic.” I thought for a moment and proposed a plan. “If we ever get over there and can’t get back, I’ll bet you that I can ask the watchman to let me use his phone and I’ll call my mother. She will come get me, she has a new Pontiac and wants to teach me to drive,” Bondshu lit
up, If your mother will rescue us that’s a good plan, but I can’t let my mother know where I am going because of my fits, that’s the only thing I worry about too, I guess.”Then I reminded him about my mother picking us up in any event.
Then Bondshu agreed. “Okay, lets do it,” “Well, there is one more thing we have to be careful about. That stuff is like a jar with a big lead ball in it, I mean, even though its liquid, its so heavy you can’t bump it very hard or it will burst the jar. My mom has an old leather suit case my father had used in Germany and blankets to rap the jars
in. If you can get something like that, we can carry a lot.” Bondshu had little compassion for his mother and simply
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said, “I’ll borrow my mama’s”
. . .
The last haircut I ever got was in 1957 when I started hanging the beatniks after getting fired from a short service station job for firing a rocket across the street at another service station. We were always goofing off at night after our bosses went home. It was shortly after the Russians launched Sputnik and memories of making rockets when I was in junior high school were in mind. I wanted to make a rocket. I went into the store room where the boss had a large carton filled with boxes of safety match books. There were so many I thought the boss would never miss them. I cut the match heads off of about five hundred matches and poured them into a Life magazine cover rolled up into a 3/4 inch tube. I put a pencil into one end tube, crimped a nozzle around a pencil and taped it up. I poured a trail of match heads several feet out from the nozzle and lit it. I didn’t think match heads would make a good rocket, but was I in for a surprise. The trail of matches burned up to the nozzle and the rocket shot across the street right into the lube bay of our competitor and not quite out of fuel, it hit the wall and shot back out and landed under one of their customer’s car. It scared them so much that I thought they might call the police. They called my boss instead. He was there in five minutes.
He told me what stupid thing it was. I admitted that it was and I said I was sorry and that I would never do such a thing again. I told him I had it left over from the 4th of July and that I was all excited about Sputnik.
He said that rockets were illegal and I knew it. I thought that was going to be about it, but the kid working across the street bought the expended rocket over. My boss knew that this was no ordinary fireworks rocket. He shook it in front of me and burnt match heads fell out. He pealed the tape away from the folded front end and unwrapped the Life magazine cover and a handful of match heads fell to the floor. Without saying a thing, he went into the store room and saw the headless match sticks I had failed to conceal prior to launch. He came back with them shaking in his hand as he instructed me to come to come get my last check in the morning.
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. . .
Sorry I am late in sending this. As I hope all you know, I have had an intractable and total computer crash or whatever. I will get this out and clean of viruses by writing this to a CD, make sure it is clean. Then I can write it to my new Adobe Acrobat Writer and send it to you. I hope this happens in the next few days. Then, I can get started on my next episode when I land in Haight-Ashbury circa the first of March, 1967. When you get this episode, you will know that we are ready to explore and explain the world we are taught to live in and the Earth that it consumes.
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. . .
“I didn’t know you could weld,” Wade said, “Oh, when I was in Oakland, in school, there was this art teacher at the California College of Arts and Crafts and he let me use his diamond saw to cut iris agates. They had an oxygen gas welding outfit and I built a lot of stuff, some art, but my favorite was my three wheel rocket cart,” “A what?” Wade was puzzled, “Oh yes, I welded
1/4 inch rods to fit a frame around three wheels, the single wheel was up front. I put my rocket engine and fuel tanks on it and lit a piece of toilet paper under the engine nozzle. Then I turned the oxygen tank on and BAM BA BA Ba Whaaaa, off it went on a wire tied to a post in the middle of a black top school play yard.”
Wade seemed doubtful about this true story. “You used oxygen? What was in the other tank?” “Oh, I used gasoline,” “And how did you pump get the gas into the engine?” Wade was now sincerely curious. “That was the beauty of it, it had no pump. I drilled two holes in a bell reducer, near the front of the nozzle so the oxygen line met the gasoline line at an angle, the same principle as perfume atomizer squirt bulbs. It worked, but it made so much noise the neighbors called the cops. It would only run about twenty seconds before using up all the oxygen and as soon as it finished, we ran off before the cops came.” “So, what did you make the engine out of?” “Oh, we used regular pipe you buy at a plumber’s shop, I used a 4 by 2 inch nipple, a pipe cap at front and the bell reducer from 2 inch to 1 inch as a nozzle screwed on the back. Then I’d go buy oxygen, about 2000 pounds per square inch, the gasoline was siphoned from a vented tin can I welded together.” “Wow,” Wade exclaimed, “It’s a wonder you didn’t blow your
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head off!” “Oh, we tested the components behind a big rock in a deserted rock quarry first.”
Wade had finished dinner and he went over to his overstuffed chair. “So, the cops never caught you?” “No, they almost did once, there were three of us and I guess one of the neighbors saw us coming. I think they called the cops before we had it all set up. About the time the engine lit up, the cops were there. But, they didn’t come after us right away at first, they just watched the ten foot flame shooting out of the rocket. I guess they were afraid of getting blown up, they just stared. But, after the fuel was exhausted, Frank Brown and I grabbed the cart and tank and we
ran like hell, one cop chased my other school comrade, Paul Bondshu, who just happened to be on the track team. I will never forget what that cop chasing him yelled to the other cop who was reluctant to chase us at all, “Boy, can that son of a bi##h can run! We all got away, luckily that cop chased the wrong guy.”
“Well, Paul, that’s quite a story, Wade said rubbing his chin,” I wondered if he really believed me so I followed up with, “I know that must have sounded like a wild story, but its true, I mean you might find plenty of reports about explosions at the Oakland police department between about 1951 to 1954, I was lucky that I was never caught!” “Ho, I believe you! I don’t think anybody could cook up a story like that, its just lucky you didn’t blow your head off!”
“Well, Wade, I only had one accident and that one only blew up my bicycle wheel,” “How did you do that?” he asked, “I tested a mixture of potassium chlorate, charcoal and red phosphorous in a 1 inch pipe about a foot long with a cap on one end. The other end was open. I was trying to make a giant flare.”
I took a drink of coffee and continued, “Well, I took this to the quarry and tested it twice. It threw a flame up about twenty feet. Then I put the pipe outside a two story mom & pop grocery store with an apartment upstairs. This was on the corner of Clifton Street and Shafter Ave. The store owner had a son who bullied me in school and I wanted to scare him off. I pushed the pipe into the dirt between the sidewalk and building so the flame would shoot up to the second story window. It was so successful I was eager to go show my allies what it could do.”
Lena was slowly washing the dishes. I thought she might be getting second thoughts about my sanity. “I hope I’m not scaring you Lena, “Oh no, its just amazing you are here to tell it,” Wade stepped in, “Well, he is pretty good around dynamite,” I continued, “So, I wanted to show the new weapon to my comrades. I rode my bike over to the next block and parked it in the middle of the street just north of Clifton Ave. I phoned Bob Hausler and told him to come over to Glenn’s house. I put the pipe between the bike wheel spokes and said watch this! I dropped a match down into the pipe and BANG! It had exploded.
My bicycle wheel was bent clear out of shape and the pipe was gone. It blasted me deaf! I knew I had to carry the bike back to my house a block away and hid it in my greenhouse (I collected barrel cacti). I knew this time that the cops would come to my house. Now, you might find this part hard believe, but I’ll even give you my address where this all happened, if you want to check it out.” “Oh, I believe it,” Wade assured me.
“Okay then,” and continued, “when I started experimenting with solid rocket fuels, some of my rockets would explode, not dangerous because I used cardboard tubes. But, I got paranoid about the cops taking my lab away. So I went into the craw space behind the basement of my two level house at 5267 Shafter Ave. and began digging a hole about 4 feet wide by 8 feet long. I dug it down six feet. So, essentially, I had a secret room between two concrete footings that held the back stairs up. I dug a tunnel under the inside footing and put some plywood over the opening.
If there was danger of the cops coming, I could cover the trap door over with dirt in seconds and all of my exotic chemicals were secure. To satisfy the cops, I had a diversionary lab in the garage that was just impressive enough so that if the cops raided it, they would be satisfied and wag their finger at me, and that’s all there was about that.”
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“Where on Earth did you get all those chemicals, you said red phosphorous. .?”
“And yellow phosphorous,” I added. Then I ran off a litany of other chemicals, “And sodium and potassium metal, magnesium dust, potassium permanganate, strontium nitrate for red colors, sulfuric and nitric acids and a lot of other stuff came from the University of California, you know, give a student a buck and he will get you a pound of anything.” I hesitated a second, then remembered the pipe explosion and continued “Oh, I just remembered one more thing, that pipe that blew my bicycle up, Bob Hausler found it in his back yard a few weeks later and showed it to me. The end of the pipe where the cap was had blown open, it looked like a metallic daisy, the end was split and furled out. The pipe cap was never found.
Bob lived a block away on the next street over! At that time I didn’t have the guts to go see what it did to the street it blew up on, but two weeks had lapsed so we both bicycled quickly over and found that the city had filled it with asphalt. The diameter of that patch was two feet wide! It was likely that the pipe cap had buried itself in the dirt of the crater we estimated to be a foot deep! I never messed with phosphorous again!”
“Well, Paul, that’s quite a story, maybe someday you will write a book about this,” “Yeah, I guess I could, but I want to write about thundereggs first.” About that time there came a knock on the door. Lena answered it and this fellow in a neat suit asked if they had any vacancies. Lena answered in an apologetic tone of voice “Oh, I’m sorry, were all filled up.” After the door closed, Wade asked her “What did you tell him that for? We have vacancies.” Lena responded, “He was too well dressed, those kind take long showers and it’ll run our septic tank over.” “Okay, that’s your business,” Wade responded and turned to me, “I run the second hand store and Lena runs the rental spaces. Our problem in Palo Verde is leaking coming in from the cotton fields and that slough across the road, its hard to keep the septic tanks pumped out.”
That was about the most novel excuse I ever heard to turn a renter away, but Palo Verde
did have a real water problem. Drinking water was bought by tanker from Blythe and all those 100 to 200 gallon tanks everybody had on their roofs were filled. Lena warned me about the water, “Now, don’t you drink the tap water, it’ll give you the trots!”
There was always humor around this not so upscale retiree town and all the people are kind. I can remember the first time I used the urinal in Kenny’s communal shower and restroom, there was a sign over the urinal:
PLEASE DON’T PUT BUTTS IN THE URINAL,
IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT
. . .
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