As Independence Day approaches, I am reminded of the near misses of disaster of my young life in the early 1970’s of Hollis, Oklahoma. At the least I would have had some tough life lessons. If things would have really gotten out of hand, I might have been playing a harp up on the clouds for the past 50 years. Gasoline, gunpowder and bored pre-teenage boys tend to produce a lethal mixture. Two incidents come to mind.

Near Disaster #1. I flew solo on this one. We lived a couple of blocks north of Main Street in Hollis. We had a fairly good sized back yard, with a storage shed in the back, in which my dad had his re-loader for shotgun shells set up. I couldn’t help but notice he had a nice cherry red 5-gallon tin of gunpowder stored in there. I had recently watched the movie The Alamo in which John Wayne (Davey Crockett) heroically grabbed a cask of gunpowder and a torch…and then staggered into the gunpowder storage room (with a lance through his gizzard) to blow it to Kingdom Come to deny the Mexican army the use of it. I got the idea that I would replay that little scene one weekday morning of summer vacation. I have no idea why I would have thought there wouldn’t have been awful repercussions from the act, but I obviously got it in my head it would all work out just fine. And fire, explosives and gasoline were involved, (my three favorite things at the time), so I went with it. Anyway, I got some paper…poured some gunpowder into it…twisted up about a 24 inch “wick”…buried it into the round little opening on the top of the 5-gallon tin of powder and lit it up. I didn’t want the nosey neighbor lady to see me doing it, so I did it all within the confines of the little shed room. As I raced away to mid-back yard, it occurred to me that maybe I should have thought the process through a little better. So I raced on a little further to the water hose connected to the house “for just in case.” If it would have blown, I’m sure that it would have dismantled the shed, and rattled or broken every window within a 12 block radius. Luckily, it didn’t blow up, but rather erupted in a six-foot spray of fire as the container whiz-banged, tumbled, sizzled and fizzled all over the shed’s floor and walls. It caught lots of things in there on fire. But luckily, I had my trusty garden hose handy, and reduced the tragedy to minimal damage. After it all cooled down, I grabbed the evidence (gunpowder tin) and ran to a dumpster behind one of the downtown businesses and buried it deep. I forgot all about it until quail season came along later that fall, and my dad was perplexed as he looked all over the place, and repeatedly asked everyone in the family as to what happened to his gunpowder. “What in the heck! Where did that go? I know I had ordered a new 5-gallon tin that I hardly used at all at the end of last bird season!”

Near Disaster #2. My older brother played a role in this one. Directly to the east of our house was a vacant Nazarene Church. A new church building had been built several years before, and the old vacated building stood empty at the time. We got this idea from another war movie. In this particular one, Russian soldiers in World War II concocted “Molotov Cocktails” by filling glass bottles with gasoline and putting a rag in the top, lighting them up, and then hurling them against German fortifications. Looked like fun! My brother got an old pop bottle, filled her up…put in the gas soaked rag, struck a match and let her rip against the brick side of the vacated church. It erupted in an impressive fireball. Beautiful! Unfortunately, there was a second story window that had been knocked out, and there was still a curtain hanging. As there was quite a bit of breeze that day, it was fluttering in the wind outside the window. Yup. Fire took that curtain in a split-second. Once again the garden hose and a ladder from the shed came in handy. My brother grabbed the ladder, I turned on the hose. He ran it over and doused the window down before the fire spread. Once Independence Day rolled around, mere firecrackers and pop bottle rockets just didn’t have the appeal of our homemade firepower. My mom always worried concerning my imagination regarding explosions. Seems she had a distant cousin that started small by burning down a vacant lumber yard, and then moved on to bigger things by burning down the “Big Dipper” wooden roller coaster at Springlake amusement park in Oklahoma City. Luckily, I must have missed out on her cousin’s “pyro-gene”, as the desire to blow things up went away when summertime jobs came along to fill up my time a few years later.