How did I stay out of Jail
This is a continuing series of stories about growing up in the magical village of Tarrytown, New York during the mid 20th century, and my life at 27 Cottage Place.
Previous posts have covered a variety of Tarrytown topics as well as a genealogical trip to Italy to search for our Italian ancestors who settled in Tarrytown. This blog features staggering youthful stupidity.
There are a number of incidents that occurred in my life for which I should have been imprisoned. Most of those came out of my "middle school" years. As fate would have it, I managed to avoid that penalty and stay out of the "hoosegow".
One of those incidents was brought back to my attention by a recent Facebook posting featuring a photo of the building on the northwest corner of Washington Street and Main Street. This building used to house a stationery store, Kugel's, which sold a variety of candies, magazines, cigarettes, and other novelties.
I was a frequent customer of this store. It was on my route to school from Cottage Place during my Junior High School days at WI. I used to regularly buy candy (lots of it) and, at that point I was probably already heavy into cigarette smoking.
I spent a lot of time looking over the goods in the store and Mr. Kugel had two things that connected in my devilish little Middle School brain.
One of the things was a fake firecracker. That's right, fake. It consisted of a red cardboard cylinder, three inches long and about an inch in diameter. The cylinder was empty, but it came with a fuse, or a set of fuses. You would insert the fuze into a small hole in the end of the tube and then you could lite it. It would burn and sparkle and fizz like a real firecracker, and then you could throw it at your friends(?) or otherwise scare someone with it. Of course, nothing happened when the fuse burned out.
Another thing that Mr. Kugel sold were cigarette bombs. These were small splinter like things that you could slip into someone's cigarette. When the cigarette burned to the splinter, it would explode and blow your cigarette up. Oh, that must have been a barrel of laughs. I don't recall ever seeing anyone suffer through this sick joke, but the combination of these two things gave me an idea.
I purchased several packs of the cigarette bombs and 1 fake firecracker. Now I don't even have to tell you what I did, do I? You can probably visualize me carefully prying the end off the fake firecracker and stuffing it as tightly as I could with the little cigarette bombs. This was going to be good.
Just a few yards down Washington Street towards the school, there was an open parking lot and I took my invention there with one or two friends. Just as we were attempting to light the fuse, a police car spotted us and pulled into the lot. Oh boy!
As I was putting my cigarette lighter into my pocket the officer came over and asked, "What are you guys up to?" Since I was the mastermind, the other kids kind of hid behind me and let me do the talking. I said, "Oh sir, we're just playing with one of Mr. Kugel's fake firecrackers, see." I held the device out in my hand and prayed that he would believe me and not ask to inspect the homemade "bomb".
At this point I must tell you how sure I am that God has a plan for me. I'm sure because he always answers my prayers as he did this day. The officer looked at my improvised bomb, chuckled a little under his breath and asked us to disperse and get to school.
We took his advice and ran on to school, throwing the unused bomb down some storm drain along the way.
It's amazing how these youthful indiscretions come back to haunt me so often. How I avoided serious trouble in my youth is a subject which I will never understand. Well, that's it. I'm not proud, but, indeed, I did this stupid thing.
By the way; anyone who leaks this information to my grandchildren will get un bocci di Morte, Capisce?
