Marion Gunderson Art (and the Farmer's Daughter)

(Click here to go to this blog’s home page.)

The prologue to this series of posts explains about the transcript below, including about the blanks ( __________ ) and the brackets [   ].  For the list of archived posts about Mr. Spaulding, including Part I and also an explanation of who he is, click here.

* * * * *

L.:  Since you didn’t have enough money to buy what you wanted as far as fireworks, what did you use to make fireworks?  Did you just have things around home and you figured out how to combine them?

Mr. S.:  No, I’d buy chemicals like __________ at the drugstore and I could get __________ and __________ without any problems.  I could buy those over the counter.  I’d make a black powder that way.  [Explanation of a process.]  Then put it down on the concrete and whack it with a hammer.  It would make a roar like a shotgun.  [More explanation of the process.]

Mr. S.:  That other stuff that I burnt my hands on {told about in Part I}, that just gave me a good idea.  I’d put some of the explosive mixture in.  [Several sentence explanation about a chemical procedure.]  So then the __________ worked its way through the tape and would fall down into that mixture and go “bang, boom” depending on how much I had in there.  Depending on how much tape you put over __________, you could sort of time it…set it for a few hours…when it burned down, the __________ got through the tape and it’d drop down in the powder and “kablooey.” I could use just one thickness of tape and it would take a certain amount of time.  If I would double the thickness it would take longer.  I could roughly set it for the period of time that I wanted.  That worked pretty well.  [An explanation about outdoor locations in Mr. S.’s hometown—locations common to any town—where, when he was growing up, Mr. S. would harmlessly put a chemical mixture and wait for the “bang, boom.”]

L.:  Did you ever get in trouble for that?

Mr.: S.  They never found out.

L.:  About how old were you at the time you were just talking about?

Mr. S.:  Oh, I suppose I was about sixteen.

* * * * *

Part III will be posted no later than Saturday morning, September 19th (which is also International Talk Like a Pirate Day…..aaaaaarrgh!).

(Click here to go to this blog’s home page.)

Tags: Dave Spaulding

This entry was posted on September 17, 2009 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Mr. Spaulding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.