Christmas Time Fun on the Farm

When Christmas came around, shooting firecrackers was what I enjoyed the most! These days they call them fireworks but in my day they were called just plain firecrackers.

We lived about five minutes’ walking distance from a beer joint called Dobbins’ Place. Mr. Dobbins always had a good supply of firecrackers on hand and whenever I had a few cents to spend, I’d walk over and buy whatever I wanted. There were the usual Black Cat packs of 50, 100, or 500 per pack, but the ones I really liked were the larger ones considered pretty close to dynamite. There was a red one about two inches long and ¾ inch thick called the “red buster” and one called “the silver salute” which was about three inches long, bright silver, and sported a double fuse just to make sure there was no misfire or “dud.”

My three cousins would come to visit and we would go out into the pasture and commence to blowing up everything imaginable. One favorite was to put a firecracker into a fresh cow pile or cow patty – almost like putting a candle on a birthday cake. You had better run quick after you lit that fuse! You could tell which ones didn’t run fast enough because they were the ones who had the most cow poop splattered on the backs of their t-shirts!

Another favorite was to stick the fuse through a small nail hole in an empty tomato can, stomp the can tightly into the ground, light the fuse and watch that can go sky high when that cracker went off.

The fuse in the “red buster” was real thick and even water proof. We would throw them into our stock tank and watch the water blow upwards. What fun that was although I don’t think the fish enjoyed that too much.

And, there is more to this “Big Bang” story. As we walked away from the stock tank we came upon an old abandoned truck chassis and cab, sitting there in a ditch. My dad had taken the axle and tires from it to make his house-moving dollies. He had set the junked truck up on concrete blocks and it had been sitting there for years. I unscrewed the cap to the gas tank filler tube and told my cousins that I bet if I threw one of my “silver salutes” into that old gas tank, it would make a loud noise.

I proceeded to do just that. After I lit that double fuse and dropped it into the filler tube, I took off running. It took a little while but finally we did hear a loud bang like I had predicted. The only problem was there must have been a little gas left in that tank even after all those years of sitting idle. The gas tank was located under the seat of that old truck and when that mini-bomb went off, it lifted that truck clean off the blocks and it landed a few feet away plumb on the ground. My cousins and I took off running for home, never looking back.

I guess my dad never noticed that the truck had been moved or maybe he figured that pesky bull of ours had rubbed against it hard enough to knock it off. Only my three cousins and I knew what really happened.