A Fun (and Dangerous) Story About My Dad

The tweet below put out by Fox5 in Las Vegas this morning touched off a memory from a long time ago about my Dad, Texas, and life in the ‘70s.

This is a true story: When I was in high school and had just gotten my driver’s license, my dad bought me a very cheap, old car to drive. It was an old, rusty Buick he’d bought from the widow of a deceased friend who served during WWII.

When we got the car home, we opened up the trunk which was full of junk, a collection of odds and ends that appeared to have been tossed in there by the previous owner over a period of many years. My Dad looked at me and told me, “Well, this is your car now, Bullet. Go get a trash can and clean that mess up.

It was a daunting task, made more daunting by Dad’s warning that some of what looked like absolute junk to me might be valuable to him, and that it was up to me to reliably cull the valuable junk from the unvaluable junk.

Thus equipped with total responsibility but precious little guidance, I set about the task. About 20 minutes into it, buried deep in the bowels of all that junk, I came across a pair of cylindrical objects with cotter pins stuck through their necks that looked suspiciously like the object held by the man’s hand in the photo above.

Fortunately for me, I wasn’t quite dumb enough to just pull out one of the pins and see what happens. I mean, I’d seen plenty of episodes of “Combat” and “Rat Patrol” to have an idea what these things might be.

So, I ran into the house, woke Dad from his daily nap on the couch in the den, and told him to come take a look. Sure enough, it was what appeared to be two live WWII-era hand grenades.

Naturally, my Dad being an adventurous outdoorsman and gun collector, there was no way on earth we were just going to do what normal people would do and call the local police and let them dispose of the things, no siree. Instead, Dad called up his buddy and fellow gun collector Raymond to come take a look.

Raymond said he’d be over in 10 minutes (he lived just a mile away) and eventually did show up an hour or two later, which he was prone to do. Raymond didn’t possess an especially keen sense of time. Then again, we were in Beeville, Texas and it was the ‘70s. Time didn’t seem to mean all that much back then.

After confirming “yep, Georgie, those are live grenades all right,” Raymond and Dad decided that the only rational thing any three Texans in this situation could possibly do would be to take these explosive devices out to the caliche pit at Raymond’s ranch, set them up on a target stand, and explode them from a fairly safe - but not overly safe - distance using Dad’s 30.06 rifle.

And that’s exactly what we did. It was as much fun as anything I’d done in my life.

My Dad and Raymond, no doubt being fully aware we had just broken a vast array of local, state and federal laws, made me swear I would never tell anyone what we had done, not even my dear Mother.

And before today, I have never shared this story with a soul. Dad and Raymond have both passed away now, and I figure any and all statutes of limitation long ago ran their course.

It was the ‘70s. It was Beeville. And it was so damn much fun.

That is all.