Chief Johnnie Michaels

Back in the day, policing was handled a bit different than it is today and truth be told, most of the “better stories” I have to tell would land a kid in jail these days, but not back then. 

When I was about six, our parents purchased a house that was just a few short blocks from the Police Station.  Appropriate, I know.  But back then, even Barry had yet to really get into anything that was community level, and so, we Vandermolens were flying under the radar, something the Livermore yokels hadn’t even heard. 

 

Every year along about Thanksgiving there was a bum that came rattling into town on his route.  I know, my lack of sensitivity training is showing and I should refer to him as a poor underprivileged alternate domiciled human of holistic means (the appellation of person after all includes “son” a blatent sexism if ever there was one) …but back then we cut directly to the heart of the matter, if it dressed like a bum, had no job like a bum and didn’t try to get one, and road the rails for transportation…..it was just a bum.

Right across the main street from the Police Station was the Ford Dealer and that down-trodden soul would walk up to it, day before Thanksgiving every year and put a large rock through one of the front windows of the place.  Always in the middle of the day, when there was sure to be someone there to watch him do it, and then he would just stand there and wait for the police to cross the street and arrest him.

Of course the Courts would already be closed for the Holiday and what with one thing and another it would be 4-5 days and one thanksgiving feast later before he would be up in front of the local Judge who would sentence the guy to 30 days (no such thing as time served back then) or a fine.  And of course no fine was ever paid.  So that would mean the bum’s alternate domicile would become the city jail effectively from Thanksgiving through New Year’s.  Yep, three solids and a cot, and warm to boot; Regular as the calendar.  Thanksgiving celebration, Christmas (with appropriate gifts from the community) and New Year’s all covered with one simple rock.

 

Oh, and then there was the entire shift change ritual to watch, better than TV at times.  Yep, any thinking thief who spent any time in town knew that the time to pull a job was shift change.  All three of the city’s police cars would come screeching up to the station at the same time (most likely cause they left the coffee shop at the same time and raced each other back to the station) and it would be 20 minutes until the new officer’s hit the “mean streets” of Livermore again.

 

About a year after we moved in, the Howard family moved in a block closer to the police station.  Never could figure out what prompted them to do that.  Their house was on a side street a block and a half down and across the street from the entrance to the jail/police station.

Old man Howard would get liquored up now and again, settle in on his front porch and start taking pot shots at the light that was always lit over the jail door.  Off to jail, a bit of notoriety, 30 days to dry out, and back out to do it again.  Seemed to me that if’n he disliked the police that much, he would have moved into a place across town so that he knew he could get away with something every shift change.

 

Johnnie Michaels was the police chief and he had a couple unique solutions to dealing with crime that were ahead of his time.

His officers used to be required to fill out a “field interrogation” report any time they ran across something that seemed a little off center to them.  Now a field interrogation report was nothing more than a 3 x 5 card with the date, location, and name of whomever the cop felt might have been involved in something out of the ordinary, but hadn’t actually been seen to be doing anything wrong.

If a citizen filed a serious complaint, Chief Michaels and his detectives would go back through the day’s reports and find out if anyone had been in the area that should be talked to.

I have thought about those things often through the years and must admit that I am fairly pleased that this was before the evolution of affordable computing power.  Because, knowing the number of those little cards that had a “Vandermolen, something” on them, I have come to the conclusion that they had to file those cards by date.

If they had been filed alphabetically, long about 6 or 8 inches later, someone would have come to the conclusion there was three boys that needed some attention.

 

Chief Michaels had another novel concept.  This one worked much better.

If some kid was caught out screwing around on a Friday or Saturday night, doing something he shouldn’t, or being somewhere he oughtn’t be, the cop that picked him up wouldn’t take the kid home, he would haul the kid to Johnnie’s house.

Johnnie was reputed to be a pleasant host all told.  Feeding the kid, getting him a soda, turning on the TV.

Then, along about 3:30 in the morning (no matter when the kid was picked up), Johnnie would call the kids home and roust the parents out of bed to come and get their child.

I am sure the ACLU would have something to say about this tactic these days, but let me tell you, most kids I knew feared this more than going to jail.  Johnnie knew that Mom and Dad might blow off a little “youthful exuberance” but certainly didn’t take to kindly to Mom having fretted herself silly and Dad losing sleep and having to traipse across town in the wee hours of the morning because of their idiot kids.

Luckily the three of us were not only pretty fleet of feet, but knew every hidey-hole, low fence, dogless yard, and accessible roof in town and so never had to deal with that little issue.

 

 

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved

Things that go “Bang” – Part Four – Making Some Noise

 

Our excursion into the field of “explosives engineering” began as I have related with a few firecrackers and some purloined gun powder.  But not being smart enough to cut our losses, we kept at it from there. 

Often in life I have looked back on this and wondered how we got out alive, or at least with all our fingers and toes.  Not to say that there weren’t a few close calls such as the time where for most of a week Barry couldn’t feel the fingers on his right hand or hear much from his right ear.  Jeff always claimed it was a “fast fuse”.  I think Barry always figured it was a slow “it’s lit” instead.  And of course no one was impaled by the flying cannon, or any of the numerous intentional projectiles either, but remove those and a few other temporary difficulties, and we all came out of the “Bang Phase” biologically intact amazingly enough.

   

One of the first lessons that we learned was that highly volatile reactions may create lots of smoke and some flame but, unless there was a force working to contain them, they just really weren’t all that impressive.  In a gun, the burning powder has the shell, the brass case, and the bullet to resist its expansion; in a bomb, there is the metal casing; and even in a firecracker, there is the tightly wrapped layers of paper.  Yep, without a counter-acting force, gun powder (or any other fairly simple man-made mixture) just burns really fast.  No bang.  No shockwave, no damage; still pleasing to smell to young men such as we were, but no “blood-racing” wow factor. 

Minimal metal working tools and fewer pennies to spend meant that custom fabricated metal casings were mostly out for us.  Sure, we could pool our savings and buy a few selected metal containers, but that would leave no funds for powder to fill them with.  And somehow, using glass (other than for “underwater” devices) seemed too risky.  Not that a piece of metal shrapnel flying through the air was any safer than glass, but the imagination does what the imagination does and seldom bases its conclusions on fact.

Truth be told, while my brothers and I liked to make things go bang, we really had no desire to damage anything.  In fact, you can apply that to a great deal of our youthful foolishness; it was seldom at the intent of harm.  Pain and damage were just our constant unconsidered companions.

 

Over time, we hit on an ideal solution.  File folders.  Yep, standard manila file folders, carefully cut to fold up into small little boxes.  Then, filled with our “powder de jour, we would stick in a fuse, and wrap the cubes tightly with fiberglass strapping tape.  Now at some point, we ran out of gun powder and while we were starting to reload our own ammunition by then, an explosive with a “little more bang” was what we wanted for our little boxes.

It turned out that Barry knew a guy in high school who was farther ahead of us on the experimenting curve, but perhaps further behind us in caution.  And so, when one day he was rushing and didn’t carefully clean out the grinding equipment between component chemicals, he touched off a batch of powder that was significant enough to put him out of action for a while, run up some doctor and home repair bills for his father, and put him out of the business of making and supplying explosive powders permanently.

Like a shark on blood spore, Barry recognized the opportunity when he saw it and offered to buy up the guy’s “back up” tools and materials.  The Vandermolen Powder works had come into it’s own.

 

Back in the day, you could send off and get chemicals mail delivered. No, really.  The back few pages of most boy focused magazines had colorful ads for everything from aircraft plans to x-ray glasses.  And somewhere in there was a chemistry supply house just drooling to pair energetic boys with energetic chemicals.

All we had to do was make sure we were hanging around on Saturdays during mail delivery time if we had an incoming shipment so that Mom or Dad didn’t get the mail and wonder what was in the package from ACME Explosives (or some other graphically named supply source).  Heck, we even bought underwater fuse by the foot and it arrived coiled up in an envelope.

And if for some reason the mail wasn’t safe enough (I know, that is probably an oxymoron), we could stop by the local army surplus store and like as not the important things we needed could be bought there as well.

 

Because over the years I gained a few bruises and scars at the hands of un-named senior members of my familial generation, I won’t go into details as to what makes a good fast burning powder.  That and of course the Department of Homeland Security, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives, the FBI, CIA, and various other law enforcement agencies would prefer I don’t share for fear that some religious or political malcontent will be inspired to lodge a high decibel complaint with their local government office.  

Suffice it to say that we came to the skills and materials needed to fill little boxes and thus have a nearly unlimited supply of things that go bang.

Now, my father was always fond of quoting that a little bit of knowledge was a dangerous thing, and for some reason, my brothers and I seemed to feel that we needed to underscore that point once in a while.

So after making and blowing off innumerable ½” x ½” x ½” cubes, with truly wonderful bangs and resultant smoke clouds, we decided to build one slightly larger.  Exercising “our little bit of knowledge” we promptly decided to make a device that was 4 times “bigger”.  The results were a little bit like when NASA made the original mirror for the Hubble Space Telescope.  Things just naturally turned out a little bit fuzzy.

I would like to in clear conscience blame the failure on Jeff, or Barry, but I really can’t tell you who screwed up.  In any case, while 2 inches may be 4 times bigger than ½”, a 2” x 2” x 2” box is not 4 times bigger than a ½” box.  For those of you struggling with the math in your head…..it is actually 64 times bigger physically. 

The “wonderful bang and resultant smoke cloud” of that ½” cube unknowingly was going to grow in dramatic proportion.   As to the resultant multiplication of force….I must admit that I discontinued my studies after surviving this one and thus have never figured it out.

Luckily after making the powder to fill that cube, fitting a very long fuse, and using a full roll of tape, we decided to head out to the far edge of town for the test instead of a simple quick trip to the football field.  Running right through the middle of town (east and west) was the local train tracks.  Those came close to our house, and ran right past the charred remains of Barber’s cycle shop and feed store.

Baseball sized cube in hand we headed out the tracks east of town where the rail bed had been cut through a bit of a ridge.  Although only about 6 feet of bank existed, it allowed us to burrow a hole back into the dirt a couple of feet, push the cube to the back of the hole, trailing the fuse out and pack the hole with dirt again.  That repacking of dirt added to that “resistive force” I was mentioning earlier.

I recall some discussion as to how close we could safely stand (to get a good view), and surprisingly enough the natural skeptics in the crowd actually won out in that discussion.  I can’t recall which one lit the fuse, though I am sure it wasn’t me.  Not that Barry or Jeff would have minded too much, but they knew I was at that “gangling puppy” phase and they figured they didn’t want to have to explain anything about this to Mom and Dad.

I used to know how long it took to burn an inch of fuse, and certainly we had done the math back then but you might want to refer to the ½ inch to 2 inch discussion above before you decide there was any security in that.  We had, however, vacated the immediate area and doubled back up above the embankment and backed off most of 50 yards or so.  I remember watching the fuse smoke over the embankment and then what seemed like forever before the ground literally shook.

A huge, no I mean HUGE fountain of dirt and rocks leapt skyward accompanied by a tremendous lung crushing explosion.

Now, most evidence to the contrary, my momma didn’t raise no dummies and so, before the smoke had even risen from the resultant crater we boys were legging it back towards town as fast as our paperboy strengthened legs would carry us.  There was no doubt in our ringing ears and befuddled minds that explosion had been heard.  Next town over likely, and we knew that the local authorities were going to put down their coffee cups and doughnuts and come see what was up.

 

Fast as we were, the cops were faster.

 

We were running down a two-track crossing the dirt and grass fields when we heard the first of the sirens about to round into the field at the far end.  Panic set in.  While we didn’t have a hope in heck of beating the cops, we spun around and started running back towards the settling dust cloud.  

A few seconds later a police cruiser came careening down the lane behind us, bottoming and scrapping as a city car will do in a hardscrabble field, plume of dust in its wake.

Sliding to a stop the cop hollered out the window; “Boys, what are you doing out here”.

I can’t say as I have a clue what Jeff would have said, and I know that my eyeglass frames were still singing like a tuning fork from that detonation, but at least Barry was still firing on all cylinders, cause he ups with “Wow, we heard this really big bang out this way and are going to see what caused it”.

As I recall the cop didn’t look too convinced, but after taking our names down on a “field interrogation” 3 x 5 card, he told us to go back the other way and then he raced on towards the smoking crater. 

 

 

 

© Copyright 2015, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved