Fireworks and Demolitions

In Platte, Grandpa Jobe held that there was nothing wrong with blowing stuff up. I don't mean real stuff; just garbage and things that would be thrown away anyhow. I was born in 1941, therefore too young to remember the "WAR YEARS" when very little was thrown away, but by the time I was ten and up, there was a surplus of stuff just begging to get itself blown up.
In those days, just after the war, demolitions experts in the form of young kids were plentiful and fireworks were really SOMETHING!!! Not like the wimpy crap that they call fireworks today. We had M-8Os which we knew for sure had the explosive power of an eighth of a stick of dynamite. They could do some REAL damage and were fun. There were a wide assortment of lesser firecrackers, but the M-8O was the desire of every kid. Why go halfway?
Grandpa seemed to know a LOT about detonations for an avowed pacifist. He had missed WW1 by one day. He was actually on a ship in New York harbor when the war ended. AN officer took it upon himself to hollar out, "War's over, men! Get off this boat and go home." Grandpa says it looked like rats jumping off a sinking ship. It was years later that Grandpa got his discharge papers. He was too old for WW2.
He taught us a very valuable lesson in science--water can't be easily compressed. He got a metal basin and filled it halfway with water. On this he floated a soup can lid. While Mike or I held an inverted coffee can, Grandpa lit an M-8O, quickly placed it on the floating soupcan lid and then the coffee can was hurriedly set over this so the bottom of it rested on the bottom of the basin under the water. BLAMMMMM!!!!!!!!!! That coffee can shot up so high it nearly disappeared. Water sprayed out in all directions, and the neighbor dog forgot how to not pee in the house. What a glorious sight!! We chased after the coffee can as it fell split wide open and the end rounded perfectly by the explosion. Grandpa called this Kaiser Bill's hat.
Needless to say there was a great scavenger hunt for coffee cans and soup cans and whatever others we could adapt.
Another thing we did, and all these years later, I still think I thought it up, but memory is strange. We searched out a half-inch black metal pipe in Grandpa's basement. We could use any length from 12-16". As he was a mechanic, he had every tool known to man. Putting the pipe in his vise, we bent it at a right angle at one end forming a handle and had a pistol shape. We then flattened the handle end with a hammer against his vise. If truly inspired, we would wrap this flat handle with duck tape to form a fist fitting handle. Yes!!! It was called DUCK tape!!! Only goofs and sissies called it duct tape. This flattening also served to avoid the dreaded "blow-back" which cut down on the force transfered to the projectiles.
Then we used a metal drill bit to make a 3/8 inch hole in the long end near the handle. Next was the tricky part. we had to drop an unlighted
firecracker fuse first down the "barrel" and try to fish the fuse out the hole we had drilled. This took a lot of effort and messing around. A lesser person would have given up! Finally!! Then we had to drop in the "ball" just like in a muzzle-loader gun. What fit perfectly and every boy had a bunch of was marbles. It was too hard to come by "steelies" which were ball bearings, so we decided to use "glassies". They fit perfectly when rolled down the barrel coming to rest against the back end of the firecracker.
I held the firecracker gun straight out for safety, Mike would approach reverently with the glowing punk and light the fuse. WHOOOMPP!! The glassie shot out, hit one of the Elm trees removing a nice chunk of bark and making a very satisfying thunk.
"WOW!!!" That was great!! My turn now." Mike hollared. We repeated the routine, but this time the glassie shattered into thousands of particles and merely imbeded themselves in the tree. About nine of ten shots were like that, but the one in ten that ripped off bark was fantastic. Unfortunately, our Grandpa, while praising our ingenuity, violently (for him, the pacifist), spoke of nature's best work being destroyed. Something about Joyce Kilmer and a famous tree poem. I did learn how to carve away damaged treebark, apply a dressing of thick tar, and suffer the ultimate punishment from grandpa--the dreaded "STINGBAT." Remind me sometime to tell you about them.