The Rocket

Gene is sitting here telling me this story, which is one among many of the escapades he and his brother Bob got into. So for all of you kids and grandkids out their who only see a couple of gray haired conservative and cautious senior citizens, don't ever judge a book by its cover.........Sometime between 1955 and 1957 Gene and Bob decided to build a rocket. They took a foot long, one inch diameter copper pipe and bent one end over and started to fill it up with match heads. Not the whole match, just the cut off heads. Now this took about two weeks or so to "find" enough matchbooks. They packed them all into the pipe nice and tight and set the pipe in the middle of the field by the garage in Millville. Then they poured a line of gas from the rocket to the garage which was about 30 feet away. They lit the gas and ran like hell into the garage and looked out the window waiting for the rocket to take off up into the sky. Unfortunately, it didn't take off, it just exploded like a stick of TNT and blew the glass out the window closest to it and cracked the glass in the others. Dad came running out of the house and was absolutely furious, not so much about the window but that they could have killed themselves. Gene and Bob were confined to their room but heard Dad laughing as he was telling Mom what happened.