Fireworks

Share this page

we had 5' retaining wall at the end of our driveway and being on a main street we would put the bottle rockets into the fence and fire them into cars as they passed by.

When we were younger, 4th or 5th grade, we would melt the bottle rocket into one of those cheap plastic boats, put GI Joe on the boat and light the fuse - GI Joe would shoot across the pool and boat would blow up and we would jump in to rescue him.

I never hurt animals with the fireworks, and slapped any friend who suggested we blow up a frog or something. we just tormented neighbors that pissed us off and they knew it was us because we always drove our bikes around their house the next day. Like the woman who hit me, I was 11, with a broom across the back as I held her son down when he wanted to fight me. I explained to her what I was doing and she called my mother so I shot bottle rockets at them the next couple of nights, bouncing them off the house from the woods.
 
Mark_Henderson said:
This would be much more frowned upon today with more safety concerns for kids, but I was heavily into fireworks growing up in the 70s. We did that with roman candles and shot bottle rockets at each other, putting the sticks in the holes at the ends of whiffle ball bats and aiming them like rifles.

There was an incident with bottle rockets and a bull frog, which I'm not proud of today (and felt guilty about at the time). It was the other kids' idea, but I went along with it.

One great episode that was somewhat Animal House inspired, was when a friend and I left school early and walked home. Then, when our school bus was approaching, we lit smoke bombs in the middle of the intersection and ran behind a row of pine trees, where we'd lined up about 8 packs of bottle rockets on the branches, aimed into the intersection with the fuses turned up, and we ran our lighters down the line and shot them all off. The poor old lady driving the bus slowed for the smoke and then floored it and took off when all the bottle rockets were pinging off the side of the bus and blowing up.

Come to think of it, we did the same thing (without the smoke bombs) to a mailman from the top of one kid's roof when we were in 9th grade.

My final fireworks event was Sophomore year in college. There was a "medievel society" with about 8 members who would stage "jousts" in the middle of our quad, using (I'm not kidding) umbrellas as swords. They called their female members "wenches".

I like to think I'm good about not judging eccentric people, but when my roommate and I were walking back to our dorm and saw this and realized that I had a gross of bottle rockets under my bed that I'd bought during the summer, this was too good a comic opportunity to pass up.

We lined up 48 bottle rockets (4 packs) on the ledge of our 2nd floor window aimed right at them and they were blowing up literally a foot over these kids' heads. They all dove to the ground in a panic and other kids who saw it were laughing their a$$es off. It was perfect until I went to shoot some more bottle rockets at the jousters and when I stood up in the window, the head residence counselor for the quad was standing right below, looking up at me. I got written up and had to have a meeting at the Residence Life office for that.

One of the kids on my hall knew one of the medieval society members and got him to come to lunch with us one day (didn’t realize who I was) and the guy from my hall, who was a funny kid, started asking him about the medieval society, pretending like we were interested, and eventually asked him if anyone had “ever used warfare from another era” against them. Nearly spit out my food, but kept a straight face. It turned out they had “declared war” against us, but hadn’t figured out who we were yet. Later, we joked about further war communiques and battle actions we might pursue in the war, but we never followed through.

I actually have a bunch of other fireworks stories and was way to into horsing around with them (and prank phone calls) when I was growing up, but it ended up being harmless and a lot of fun.
Click to expand...


And yet you seem such nice young man. :spock:

Go figure ROFL


Cheers, BostonTim
 
mikiemo83 said:
we had 5' retaining wall at the end of our driveway and being on a main street we would put the bottle rockets into the fence and fire them into cars as they passed by.

When we were younger, 4th or 5th grade, we would melt the bottle rocket into one of those cheap plastic boats, put GI Joe on the boat and light the fuse - GI Joe would shoot across the pool and boat would blow up and we would jump in to rescue him.

I never hurt animals with the fireworks, and slapped any friend who suggested we blow up a frog or something. we just tormented neighbors that pissed us off and they knew it was us because we always drove our bikes around their house the next day. Like the woman who hit me, I was 11, with a broom across the back as I held her son down when he wanted to fight me. I explained to her what I was doing and she called my mother so I shot bottle rockets at them the next couple of nights, bouncing them off the house from the woods.
Click to expand...

The frog incident was a one time thing for me. It's no excuse, but we moved a few times when I was a kid and my original friends when I was growing up would never have suggested/wanted to do that. The thing with the frog was gruesome and stuck with me. A little girl lived in the house next to the pond and she'd seen what we were doing (unknown to us) and went and got her mother. Then, when the horrified mother was shrieking and screaming at us with the girl at her side, we ran in six different directions.

Did any of you mess around with delayed fuses on the fireworks (we did that a lot)? We'd cut away the wax from the middle of a birthday cake candle and tie the fuses of a pack of Thunderbomb firecrackers to it (think the packs ranged from 16 to 100 firecrackers), or melt crayons on the fuses. Another, less reliable way was to unwind a bottle rocket fuse, scrape out the gunpowder with your fingernail, and then roll it up tightly.

This theoretically allowed you to be with other people, looking like an innocent party, when the fireworks went off. It usually worked, except one time on Halloween, I was trying to be slick and use the unwound fuse method to shoot bottle rockets at someone's front door from the bushes in front of their house. I thought I'd seem like an evil genius to my friends when I was with them asking for candy and then the bottle rocket fired out of the bushes at us.

I definitely amused them, but not in the way intended, when I took two steps out of the bushes, and then the bottle rockets shot out, hit above the front door, and blew up. The most embarrassing part was that I did not outrun Mr. Sandler, or maybe did, until I tried to run into the woods behind the houses and tripped over an old stone wall that was covered in leaves. I'm not sure what he ever did with that bag full of fireworks, but they became his property then.
 
Mark_Henderson said:
The frog incident was a one time thing for me. It's no excuse, but we moved a few times when I was a kid and my original friends when I was growing up would never have suggested/wanted to do that.
Click to expand...



No big deal. We all have skeletons and moments we regret (but you know this). Experiencing the ugliness of real violence and evil is how most kids learn to abhor them.


Cheers
 
Mark_Henderson said:
The frog incident was a one time thing for me. It's no excuse, but we moved a few times when I was a kid and my original friends when I was growing up would never have suggested/wanted to do that. The thing with the frog was gruesome and stuck with me. A little girl lived in the house next to the pond and she'd seen what we were doing (unknown to us) and went and got her mother. Then, when the horrified mother was shrieking and screaming at us with the girl at her side, we ran in six different directions.

Did any of you mess around with delayed fuses on the fireworks (we did that a lot)? We'd cut away the wax from the middle of a birthday cake candle and tie the fuses of a pack of Thunderbomb firecrackers to it (think the packs ranged from 16 to 100 firecrackers), or melt crayons on the fuses. Another, less reliable way was to unwind a bottle rocket fuse, scrape out the gunpowder with your fingernail, and then roll it up tightly.

This theoretically allowed you to be with other people, looking like an innocent party, when the fireworks went off. It usually worked, except one time on Halloween, I was trying to be slick and use the unwound fuse method to shoot bottle rockets at someone's front door from the bushes in front of their house. I thought I'd seem like an evil genius to my friends when I was with them asking for candy and then the bottle rocket fired out of the bushes at us.

I definitely amused them, but not in the way intended, when I took two steps out of the bushes, and then the bottle rockets shot out, hit above the front door, and blew up. The most embarrassing part was that I did not outrun Mr. Sandler, or maybe did, until I tried to run into the woods behind the houses and tripped over an old stone wall that was covered in leaves. I'm not sure what he ever did with that bag full of fireworks, but they became his property then.
Click to expand...
oh that was not intended at you, we had kids who would torture animals - blow up frogs and other things he caught, Throw cats in the air by their tail, kick dogs and so much more - they are in prison or dead.

different level that your one time deal, I apologize for the confusion, I did not mean it that way. I just didn't want to be associated with those kids in my neighborhood so I refused to allow that one act to happen.


yes all that stuff and the fact I was never caught only shows that I could run a straight line and let the branches snap off me as I went through the briars allowing the legs to get cut but never get caught.

One cop would just yell "Mikiemo I know it is you" and I would stop and walk up to him to get an earful on the days they arrived prior to my making it home.

same cop took my keg on a Friday night (one minor in the house) and had my older brother called me the next day from the officers pool party to tell me how good the beer was.
 
mikiemo83 said:
oh that was not intended at you, we had kids who would torture animals - blow up frogs and other things he caught, Throw cats in the air by their tail, kick dogs and so much more - they are in prison or dead.

different level that your one time deal, I apologize for the confusion, I did not mean it that way. I just didn't want to be associated with those kids in my neighborhood so I refused to allow that one act to happen.


yes all that stuff and the fact I was never caught only shows that I could run a straight line and let the branches snap off me as I went through the briars allowing the legs to get cut but never get caught.

One cop would just yell "Mikiemo I know it is you" and I would stop and walk up to him to get an earful on the days they arrived prior to my making it home.

same cop took my keg on a Friday night (one minor in the house) and had my older brother called me the next day from the officers pool party to tell me how good the beer was.
Click to expand...

Beer of course is one of the key components in the police officer's benefits package. I have a dear friend, retired Boston Detective, who started out on patrol a zillion years ago patrolling in Southie. He owned two wonderful Marlborough Street properties and we rented the third and fourth floors of his home building (he had the first and second) from him for several years back then. When he had night shifts (most of the time when he was a newbie) he'd be regularly hitting all the beaches (L street, M Street, Carson, Pleasure Bay, etc.) and coming home with tons of beer. Only problem was way too much Budweiser. Oh don't get me wrong, we drank it. ROFL. Why couldn't it have been better beer?

Cheers, BostonTim
 
mikiemo83 said:
oh that was not intended at you, we had kids who would torture animals - blow up frogs and other things he caught, Throw cats in the air by their tail, kick dogs and so much more - they are in prison or dead.

different level that your one time deal, I apologize for the confusion, I did not mean it that way. I just didn't want to be associated with those kids in my neighborhood so I refused to allow that one act to happen.
Click to expand...

I didn't think you were calling me out, just that it's something I've always felt bad about. We had one of those twisted a-holes in my neighborhood that threw someone's cat in a storm drain. Though, it was cool that a bigger, older kid beat him up for it.

The only other time we targeted animals with fireworks was putting packs of Thunderbombs in gypsy moth nests, but we saw that as a public service.
 
Mark_Henderson said:
I didn't think you were calling me out, just that it's something I've always felt bad about. We had one of those twisted a-holes in my neighborhood that threw someone's cat in a storm drain. Though, it was cool that a bigger, older kid beat him up for it.

The only other time we targeted animals with fireworks was putting packs of Thunderbombs in gypsy moth nests, but we saw that as a public service.
Click to expand...
we would burn those nest, not as a public service but so we could play with fire.

and I would let my kid do some of the stuff, if like us, he would get away with it. That will not happen today. :(


funny thing is I live in that neighborhood now and those same parents all like me today, they stop by when I am doing yard work and shoot the poo for as long as they want - I love listening to the old timers share their stories and try to never rush them
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top