When we were kids, one of the greatest dangers that we faced was that of blasting caps. They were EVERYWHERE! Why, you couldn't sit in a back yard without some Eddie Haskell troublemaker type finding one in the grass and making plans to put it in your father's barbecue grill and blowing up your sister!
We must have seen hundreds of public service ads on TV warning us of the dangers of blasting caps. What was frustrating to us boys was that despite the fact that the filmed spots advised us that you couldn't walk across a vacant lot without stumbling across blasting caps of every conceivable type, we never found a one.
The message of the filmed spots was to make us afraid, VERY afraid. But unintentionally, they turned us into eager seekers of blasting caps. Imagine the sheer coolness of the lucky kid who actually located a genuine blasting cap. The leadership of the neighborhood gang would have been his!
But in my sleepy hometown of Miami, Oklahoma, the closest thing I ever found that resembled blasting caps were discarded electrical parts at my dad's truck garage. They were close enough to scare the girls at school, though, which was a pretty significant accomplishment in itself.
This 1957 video runs about fifteen minutes. Odds are that if you remember JFK, you saw this in school. It certainly rang a bell with me.
It's worth a watch for many reasons. Seeing dad roll up in his Lockheed Constellation (quite simply, the sexiest airplane ever built), hearing him talk about his WWII flying days, and the wise words of Mr. Barrow, who was likely old enough to have risked mustard gas and trench foot in the Great War, make it worth your time.
But there's more. There is some seriously cool retro furniture on the back porch, where tragedy was narrowly averted by Tag, who stopped evil Chuck from blowing up his family. There's Mr. Barrow's sad description of a kid who handled a blasting cap and maimed his hand. "He'll never play baseball again!"
Tell that to Jim Abbott.
Commercials about blasting caps aired on an almost-daily basis in the 60's. While the adults in the ads were sorely concerned about the potential of the detonators falling into the hands of curious children, my dad would merely grunt if I asked him about them. I guess he knew that the biggest hazard that I faced in my NE Oklahoma hometown was getting popped in the head by a foul ball at the Babe Ruth league that we watched my older brother play in.
But obviously, the danger was out there somewhere. Otherwise, why would none other than Willie Mays be telling us about how much better it was for all concerned if we kids played with baseball bats and gloves instead of those ominous-looking little metallic cylinders with those threatening wires attached?
Blasting caps public-service ads aired all through my childhood, then disappeared from view when I was a teenager in the late 70's. The IME (Institute of the Makers of Explosives) continue to offer educational materials just like they did in the 50's and 60's, but TV stations no longer feel the need to broadcast them on a daily basis.
Indeed, nowadays, we parents and grandparents worry more about things like pedophiles, drug dealers who have no qualms about selling to kids, and psychopathic students who show up at school with anger and loaded weapons.
What would wise old Mr. Barrow have to say about that?
Comments (5)
I had forgotten those public-service ads. And you're right-- they aired them constantly. Thanks to you, I can now recall seeing them every afternoon between the kiddie-type offerings on TV. I wondered, even back then, who was scattering blasting caps so blatantly that there was just cause for all these warnings? Some militant modern-day Johnny Appleseed, perhaps? I surely never saw a real one. Maybe since the grown-ups were having the A-bomb threat thrust in their faces daily, some kind soul figured that the fear of a lesser-POP for the kiddies would more evenly spread the paranoia across the gender gap.
Posted by NCeddie | December 15, 2008 5:22 AM
Posted on December 15, 2008 05:22
I remember the PSA regarding blasting caps. A favorite pastime was exploring quarries and building sites which required blasting ledge to accommodate a cellar and foundation. There were almost always snippets of “dynamite wire” left over from the detonation (this was before radio controlled detonation) and charges were set off by a plunger box (like in the movies when trains or bridges get blown up.)
Long wires were required to put adequate distance between the human detonator and the explosion. These wires went from the plunger (magneto driven) or a battery with one terminal disconnected and then to the blasting cap where a jolt of electric current (generated by the plunge or touching the wire to the disconnected battery terminal) would ignite a small charge similar to a match head which in turn would detonate the cap which would detonate the main blast. Many times the wire would be rendered too short for reuse and left in situ where little boys would retrieve it after the work had ended for the day.
I prized the stuff and had many pieces of variable length. I never found any blasting caps but we had better (bigger, more dangerous) explosives.
We would make pipe bombs out of black powder, homemade gunpowder, or charges liberated from 0.22 or shotgun shells. We were careful to use copper pipes to avoid unexpected ignition when crimping (with a vise – hammers could be fatal) and after filling, a small paper straw (remember those?) filled with gunpowder was crimped into the package. After placing the copper tube in the site to be exploded, a non-filter cigarette was lit and affixed to the waxed straw and cover was quickly taken and after 5-7 bated-breath minutes we were rewarded with a loud explosion. Sometimes they failed to ignite and consequently a long wait was in order before venturing as no one wanted to be maimed or killed. Fortunately there were no injuries during my time of ordnance experimentation.
DISCLAIMER: Do not attempt to make homemade explosives as such activity is extremely dangerous.
As far as showing up at school with anger and loaded weapons, I was plenty angry and brought loaded weapon but times were different. see Guns in school
Posted by Burt | December 15, 2008 8:13 PM
Posted on December 15, 2008 20:13
Re guns at school: I was on the rifle team. I doubt if any public schools still have them.
I never found a blasting cap either, but to this day an old friend of mine from childhood and I still sometimes say "Be careful. It could be a blasting cap."
Posted by Lee | December 18, 2008 4:44 AM
Posted on December 18, 2008 04:44
Di anyone EVER REALLY find a Blasting Cap?
I'm 51 I remember those ads.
Posted by dleekc | December 20, 2008 11:42 AM
Posted on December 20, 2008 11:42
I saw these every day when I was a kid. I think they were so common simply because the PSAs themselves were of excellent quality (as the linked example shows) and TV stations of the time were always hungry for free material. As the article says, the unintended consequence was to launch every adventuresome boy in the country on a search and destroy mission for stray blasting caps.
My brother Doug (then 7 years old) was one of the five or six kids in the whole country who actually did find one, mostly because we lived next to a sand and gravel quarry and could not resist trespassing there on weekends. He and his friend Mark tried to detonate it with some bootleg matches. They failed of course, but the security guard caught them anyway. They earned a trip to the police station and a lecture from a judge, all of which increased their kid-status to unheard of heights.
Fame is fleeting though. They lost their status a few days later when a bag of tasty-looking chewy things arrived as a sample in the mail and my mom put it in the refrigerator. Doug and Mark promptly stole it and ate most of the chewies before an older kid informed them, in front of the whole gang, that the new treats were in fact DOG chewies. They were immediately demoted from uber-cool blasting cap pirate to dog-food eating laughingstock. They did not show their faces for weeks.
Posted by Shiplord Kirel | April 13, 2009 4:29 PM
Posted on April 13, 2009 16:29