Well, its Terry’s fault really for putting pears and targets into the same sentence those two things reminded me of a story. I had to comment over there at Possumblog but its only fair that after dropping such a teaser, I tell the whole story.
The year is 1974, the place, my folk’s back yard in the center of the town of Alliance Ohio. I had just graduated high school. Its summer, its hot and the pear tree in the back yard has been dropping pears in the yard making a mess of things. The primary characters in this story, besides this scribe were my girlfriend, (who occasionally leaves comments around here as “BJ” and is usually referred to as the XSU), and at least 2 of my younger brothers. Tim and Mark were certainly there, I don’t recall if Pete was involved.
A little geography lesson is required in here someplace. Our house is an older place and bordered on one side by an alley that passed completely through the block. All of our parking was behind the house and off the alley and the alley from either direction was our driveway. At least we thought so. My brother Mark still owns and lives in that house BTW and it has kept him busy fixing and improving things.
Anyway, since this was 1974 and we did not yet have an internet connection or access to the World Wide Web, we knew nothing about PVC pipe potato cannons. We didn’t have any of those new-fangled electronic sparkers or multi-barreled rigs that came around with the advent of the internet. Instead, we had hand cannons! Ours were made from soda cans with the ends cut out and taped together end to end with our dad’s duct tape. (You knew duct tape was going to get into this story, didn’t you?) The can on the bottom didn’t get the ends removed, just a nail hole punched through the bottom and the normal zip tab hole in the top.
IMPORTANT SAFETY DISCLAIMER! These cannons were made from soda and beer cans back when they were still made from steel! Do not try this with aluminum soda cans! Serious injury might result. Just go drink a 6 pack of Slim-Fast, it still comes in suitable steel cans! Or experiment with PVC- its far superior.
Alright, that said, these cannons were normally about 4 or 5 or 6, 12 ounce cans tall. If you worked at it, you could carefully expand the rim of the top can big enough to load a tennis ball just to the depth of that first can. After that, with a splash of lighter fluid squirted in the bottom can through the nail hole and then evaporated through vigorous swinging of the whole contraption for a few seconds and a second person to strike the wooden kitchen match and hold it ever-so-carefully at the same draft hole, you could launch a tennis ball for two blocks!
Or the cannon would split apart at the tape seams.
Whatever the result, the entire process resulted in loud booms whenever the lighter fluid vaporized at the insistence of the match. Flames shooting out the top were pretty normal. It was possible to shoot a brightly colored green tennis ball straight up completely out of sight if you had a table to support your cannon vertically. And these fun little toys generate a bit of recoil, as you might imagine, so hanging on to one required some real determination.
Ok, you can probably see how these hand cannons were perfect toys for teenaged boys… Noise, flames, dangerous chemicals, things blowing up, what’s not to like?
So, there we were, the bunch of us, just hanging around the house on a quiet Sunday afternoon and complaining about the bees that were gathering over the rotting pears under the tree. “Hmm, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Yeah! Go get a hand cannon!” While the pears did not fit as snugly as a tennis ball in the top of the can, they did make an ever so satisfying splat when they hit the street at the far end of the alley. In fact the pears made a fantastic juicy mess when they expired after a 60 yard flight! What fun! What terrific entertainment!
And our fun probably went on like that for 30 minutes or more. We all took turns holding the cannon and lighting and laughing and generally just relocating the mess in our yard into the street at the end of the alley.
Right up until the police cruiser turned up the alley… We grabbed our soda cans and everybody bailed into the basement through the stairs at the back of the house. “Maybe he won’t see us…” So I peaked out. The patrol car came half way up the alley, skidded to a stop and blocked our driveway access. “Hey! He’s got his gun pointed at our house! They both have their guns drawn!”
Hmm. Guess I ought to go out and see what the nice policemen want… Being the oldest, I headed out, trying to look sheepish, harmless and most of all, unarmed. “Can I help you officers?” Wow, look at that- both ends of the alley are blocked with patrol cars and there are serious looking policemen with shotguns pointed down our way.
“Show your hands! Show some ID!” Ok, I did that just as requested. “Where’s the shotgun?” “Shotgun, officer?” “Yes, the shotgun! We got a report that there were people shooting pears with a shotgun and the mess at the end of the street seems to support that call!”
Oh, so that’s what this is all about… “No sir, we don’t have any shotgun; that would be dangerous! Why, we’ve just been playing with these taped together soda cans…”
“Show me!” “Yes sir, you see we just squirt the lighter fluid in here, swing it around, hold the match…” “And that’s how the pears got in the street?” “Yes sir, do you want me to show you?”
“No! I want you to stop immediately with those cannons! No more in the city limits- none, nada, don’t you dare disrupt the peace and tranquility with those things again!”
And the six policemen put away their guns and three squad cars went away, leaving us to a quiet summer Sunday afternoon. Shooting the pears into a pond outside of town was never as much fun as it was that day in the back yard.
