I received a gift !

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.