Sentimental Journey

[Joe Varo]

What is it about this "destructive urge" in little boys?  Seems many of us
male P-listers enjoyed blowing things up...usually things we'd spent time,
money and effort to build.

I also used firecrackers on models.  Also used them for target practice
with my BB gun.

I never really appreciated my chemistry set.  I always wanted to know
*why* what was happening was happening, and as a pre-teen I just wasn't
able to understand chemical equations.  Watching the process of
sedimentation just didn't satisfy me, in and of itself, for too awfully
long.

In my early teens, I got my mother to buy me some potassium nitrate from
the drugstore and along with the sulphur and charcoal from the old
chemistry set I attempted to make black powder.  The stuff would burn like
crazy but I could never get it formulated or contained well enough to
explode.

Surprised to see that there are no model rocketry enthusiasts here.  I
built a couple of them:  one nearly started a brush fire and the other,
during a parachute descent, wafted over toward some neighbor's picnic and
landed in a bowl of potato salad.

One toy that I recall (from back in the 60's), and have never seen since,
was something called a "Show & Tell" record & film strip player.  It was
this thing that looked like a small portable tv with a 45 rpm turntable
mounted on top of it.  You would insert a film strip in a slot and play a
record which went with it.  As the record played the narration the film
strip would feed through and be projected on the tv-like screen, timed to
the record.  If I recall, they were mostly history lesson type things,
stuff about Davy Crockett & the Alamo, Columbus, etc. 

Joe