A memory of cherry bombs and apple guns

When we were young, the search began even before school let out in early June: Which kids would be taking a vacation outside of Illinois, and could they find a way to smuggle some fireworks home without Mom or Dad finding out?

The grand prize, of course, was the cherry bomb. Its waterproof wick meant that it could be used to sink the ships of yuletides past.

Every Christmas we asked Santa for plastic model kits of the great ships of America’s proud naval history. We assembled them through the dark, dreary months of late winter, and by summer the kits had been built, played with, and abandoned to the back of the closet.

But in early July, when the cherry bombs arrived, it was time to dust off the ships and bring them back by the alley.

Behind every house in our neighborhood was a cement trash bin with two metal doors—one at the top and one at the back, where trash could be burned and the ashes shoveled out. The bins had been built a generation earlier, and by the time I was a boy, people had stopped using them.

Well, except for all the boys on the block.

The cement bins were little more than rain collectors and breeding grounds for mosquitoes, but in early July they became the site of tiny naval disasters of epic proportions.

We would load a cherry bomb into the cargo hold of one of our plastic ships. In a solemn ceremony, we would drizzle airplane glue over the deck, then light it on fire and float it on the tiny mosquito-squiggly sea inside the bin. Then we would stand back and watch her burn and melt.

Suddenly, a rush of blue smoke would hiss from her hold, and our hearts would race, for we knew that the fuse had been lit.

And then, kablooey! The proud ship would fly to flinders, mosquito larvae would be concussed to oblivion, and we would cheer with terrorist zeal.

And then we would dash down the cinder alley, for we knew that the roar of a trash-bin naval disaster would fetch every mother on the block racing down the back steps to see if it were her son in the middle of the mischief.

Sadly, we rarely had enough money between us to afford more than one or two cherry bombs, so then it was time to turn our attention to the cheaper and more common Black Cats.

A Black Cat was the best of the paper firecrackers—about the size of a pinky finger, and sure to explode with a crack that would echo through the alley, loud enough to bring a smile to our faces, but nowhere near the mother-summoning roar of a cherry bomb. We would parcel them out in small piles, hoping they might last long enough to give us snap-cracking fun through the rest of the month.

But even Black Cats can become boring after a while, until someone hatched the brilliant idea of dropping one into an empty plastic Linco Bleach bottle, just to see what would happen.

The muffled bark and puff of blue smoke delighted us—for a while.

But even that soon got boring, until someone noticed that by late July, the tiny apples on Jim Danz’s tree were the same diameter as the mouth of a Linco Bleach jug.

It was a neat trick to light the fuse, drop the Black Cat into the jug, plug the opening with a little green apple, and aim it at Jim or Larry or Scott in time to shoot him in the back with a mini-macintosh as he ran squealing down the alley.

Anything could go wrong in that sequence, and it usually did. Larry bonked an apple off his forehead when his Linco-gun fired prematurely. Scott roasted a finger when a stubborn wick refused to light before the match burned to a stub. I blackened a thumbnail when I lit a fuse, corked the jug with an apple—then realized with a bang that I still held the Black Cat in my left hand.

As Mom ministered to my wound, she said, “It serves you right,” as if God had sent a Sign to show me the error of my ways.

That night, I considered her words as I lay in bed, but it was hard to believe that God could fault a bunch of boys for our explosive alleyway fun.

After all, He was the one who decided that little green apples should grow to the exact size of a Linco jug mouth just as your Black Cat piles had dwindled to a precious few each summer.

It was a Sign from Heaven that we needed to find more Black Cats, before the apples—or we—grew to maturity.

TR Kerth is the author of the book “Revenge of the Sardines.” Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com.

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