It was the early years of highschool, grade nine back then and I would drop by my friends house to listen to some Animals and Stones tunes. More than not, his younger brother was always tinkering with some sort of science project. Well, this one time though, his tinkering caught my interest.

He said, "I want to build a rocket.".

Hey, I am keen. I knew what he was talking about and I knew where to get what he needed to make the solid fuel for the rocket.
There was a train track just down the road from where we lived. As a kid,
I and my Bluetick hound 'Toby' spent many a time exploring, going the back route along those tracks to get to some farming fields. Every once and awhile, I noticed on the track bed small yellow piles of fine powder. Sure enough, that powder turned out to be Sulfur. I guess when the freight cars came into the train changing yard that was down a ways, the stopping motions would jar loose the fine chemicals from under the hopper cars. On one of my excursions I managed to collect a gallon paint tin of sulfur.

So we had the sulfur, but we needed charcoal.

We used the wood stove in my father's backyard garage. I figured, that if we placed some small pieces of wood inside a tin peppered with holes and then in turn place the tin in the stove we would get our charcoal. The result was good. The charcoal pieces along with what we could scrape up from the stove ashes were pulverized with a hammer and sifted.

We got our charcoal powder.

Salt Peter was the next item on the list. I got it from an IDA Pharmacy that I knew of, up on Sunnyside. The drugist had a good stock of reagents and fine chemicals for over the counter sales.
The place helped me a number of times when I needed to get chemicals for my chemistry set or any other sundry items like litmus paper.

Well, we had everything that we needed to get started.

My friends younger brother managed to scrounge up a one foot section of one inch pipe with a threaded cap on one end. We had to go to a hardware store to get another cap for the other end. We managed to find a fine drill bit and drilled the cap end. We found out the proper proportions to make up our powder and mixed the 6 parts Salt Peter, 1 part charcoal and 1 part sulfur. We packed the pipe level to the end and did it very carefully. I got some fuses from "four inch firecrackers" and "cherry bombs" that I had left over from the previous year. Tied them together to make a six inch length and threaded it through the cap hole. Screwed the cap onto the pipe end, tightened it with a pair of pipe wrenches and we were ready.

We went out into the backyard and into a small little nook field that was adjacent to all the other backyards of about seven houses. We were well hidden from view and safe to continue with our
little experiment. I placed the pipe standing up against some wood construction debris and supported
with a couple of stones. I had the matches, so I got the honors. While my friend watched at a distance from behind a large downed tree trunk, I fumbled to strike a match to light the fuse.

One, two... finally the third one lit.

Pfssst!!!

I was off and running like a jack rabbit, headed for the tree trunk. I threw myself over and crashed down beside my friend, my heart pounding in my ears.

Nothing!

Both of us popped up our heads to see what had happened. There it was, still proped up against the wood construction debris. Waiting invitingly.

You going to check it out ? No!!!!
You go ? No way!!!

We left it for about ten minutes while both of us suggested ideas for the reason it had not gone off.

We were disappointed and it was back to the drawing board. We took our little rocket back to his father's basement workshop to do something different. This time I decided that I would take apart a cherry bomb, remove some of the powder and use it as a primer at the top end. We reassembled the pipe and made our way back to the scene of the crime.

No hitches this time.

Pfssst!!!

KaBOOM !!!

The sound was deafening... like the sound made by a stick of dynamite. I right away felt a sickening,sinking feeling in my gut, and thinking to myself... Crap, now we did it. We were going to get into "BIG" trouble, plenty fast.

We ran like hell!

When we went back to see what was left of our test piece, we found a suprise.
We thought it had exploded and blew shrapnel all over the place. The pipe blew itself partially into the ground, the cap was gone to wherever and the top side of the pipe was split open. We collected all the evidence and ditched it into composter at the back of his yard.

In about an hour and a half the City Police had made there rounds in the neighborhood asking questions about the loud explosion. Somebody had reported hearing the noise of the explosion. When they came to my friends place, we were lucky because we missed them. We found out later about the Police going door to door.

The next day the R.C.M.P did their rounds, nobody in the neighborhood new what had happened.

But of course we were scared and sweating it.

This time period sort of coincided with the FLQ's habit of blowing up "Her Majesties" Mail boxes.

Some daring individuals phoned in bomb threats so they would close the highshool down for the day.

Regards,

Alas, Toby is in Bluetick Heaven now !
So, Bowser my Redbone ¥aenubis says Woof! Woof!