Growing up before our time, it seemed very possible that our parents raised two sons to be Ordnance Engineers.

At about a yard stick tall, Bruce Jr. and I negotiated with our parents and bought fire works from a mail order house in Texas. Oh, the wait was terrible and each day we would run to meet the rural route mailman. He would say – "nothing today". Finally, this box would arrive and would you believe that it was 36"x36"x36" in size? Nothing but the best for us to do our damage and smell up the air with the pungent burnt odors! M 80’s and the works were our fond memories. This box would cost us about $12.00 and this took the last cent we had to pay for our "fun in the sun" excursion.

Together with Dick Kreycik, we would fight a war against each other until it was time to do the chores (i.e. milk the cows etc). Now our war plans would be started. We would take two boards 1" by 8" inches and form a 90-degree angle and then nail them together. Then, we would take two 2"x 4’s cross them for support and that formed our weapon. Somehow we got the idea that placing a gallon container at the base of this "weapon" and then placing another smaller can inside, we had the mass destruction weapon. We would fill the first can with about 3 inches of water, take the second can and place a pin hole in the top and run the "cracker" fuse through the hole. "Let me tell you", if you wanted to see force, with the water as the sealer, the can inside would travel about 200 foot in the air and land about 100 foot away. Boy, this was a big deal and to think that we designed it ourselves was awesome!

It would take us all summer to get through the box of fireworks. I guess we were lucky as we never removed any fingers or started any fires; however, we did place "damage control" into effect after engineering our major last war effort. It was on a Saturday afternoon and the parents had gone to Valentine to shop, we decided that we needed some new excitement to stir up or blood. At the South end of the coral, we had a 10 foot diameter water tank for the cows. Dick Kreycik, Bruce and I took our water can cannon unit and decided to throw it into the tank, allowing it to sink to the bottom. Boy, when it went off, the water spray went 30 foot into the air and the can went to several hundred feet. Oh, this was great until we goofed and the can tipped over and you're right, it went out the wall of the water tank. This took another ordnance degree to explain to our parents our thoughts behind this project. Bruce Sr. was tongue tied over this event.

In a later year at Lincoln, the three "evils" got together (Bob Tyler, Dean Honnen and myself) and we lit up the skies in Lincoln, Nebraska. Talk about bottle rockets; yup, you guessed, we would place the bottle rocket in a bottle and aim. We about burnt down the Tyler’s home as one of the rockets fell onto the roof and caught it afire. Now that is excitement watching three grown men and the wives run in circles attempting to put out the fire. This certainly caught our attention for future fun time. Enough is enough about firework!