Coldshooter
Member
Growing up in Indiana had some advantages which were probably not totally unique but do leave fond memories even though I have not lived in Terre Haute or Indiana since January of 1977. The summer of 65 or 66 was the year of the bicycle cannon. We would take 1/4 or 1/2 inch tubing mount it to our handle bars and use as a launcher for shooting bottle rockets at each other. Like most arms races this one escalated to capping the end putting in a firecracker and hurling small rocks at each other. Firecrackers were of course not legal which only meant they cost more and took a bit of time to find. A good black cat would fire a small stone enough to leave a welt. One neighbor kid (nameless to protect the guilty) got a whole pack of roman candles taped them to his handlebars and came after us. Unfortunately for him Pat was as sharp as a loaf of bread. He had turned the fuses toward himself to make it easier to light which caused the flaming balls to fire directly towards him. We had heard him laughing as he came down the dark street on a late August evening and then the flaming balls started, fired up his shorts and Pat never had the presence of mind to jump off. He was a sight semi on fire screaming and going about 25 miles per hour. Two elderly neighbors sitting in the cool of the evening just went back indoors and closed the door without a word. Just a day or so after that one of my buddies fired a ten penny nail through the picture window and there was a sudden scarceness of tubing, tape, firecrackers, and matches among all of us. I still have all ten fingers and both eyes. Learned this without the internet even. In the summer of 1967 we hit gold when we found an empty O2 cylinder like the home medical type maybe 18 by 4 inches. We were able to pool our funds and purchase some 4F black powder from Poff's Sporting goods which came with the usual warning don't let me hear about what you do with that stuff. We got the valve off the cylinder and filled it with the power added a water proof fuse (a perk of growing up around coal miners) then hiked out to the Milwaukee Trestle lit the fuse and tossed it into the Wabash River. The next few seconds are kind of shaky which could have been a result of the concussion but I'm fairly certain we could see the river bed in 8 feet of water which closed up as it went down stream. Then there were more carp than I knew existed floating on their sides. See I bet Hoosier kids couldn't do that stuff today.
