History On a Roll

An old memory resurrected.


Preferred cap guns for us were the ones that took the little wheel of caps with six shots each.

If we were gonna play cowboys, we were after realism and being limited to six shots between reloads made for some interesting play.

Along with some fairly realistic Russian Roulette.
One of the guys was constantly losing and then bitching about his ears ringing.


I'm sure y'all remember the little thin cardboard boxes full of roll caps.
When you opened it up, five rolls of caps connected at the edge slid out.
You broke them by hand - an easy chore - into single rolls and loaded the one roll into your roll-type cap gun.

An Italian kid, name of Donald, who lived across the street was forever cooking up dumb stunts.
He got us into more than a few scrapes, but we tolerated him cuz his mom was the best cook we’d ever seen.
A lunch invitation was not to be turned down for fear you’d miss the next one.

He got the bright idea of grabbing his dads old ball peen hammer out of the shed, bringing it along on our little neighborhood forays and when we were in a suitable place he’d toss a single roll of caps down onto the cement sidewalk and hit it with the hammer.

Made a heckuva bang.
About what you’d expect from a 38 Special.
We’d heard plenty of those by watching the local Gendarme’s practice on the pistol range up on the hill.
We’d pass by it on our hikes into the hills and sometimes it sounded like a little war was going on.

Anyway, banging a roll of caps would definitely make your ears ring, but we were tough guys and knew that the ringing went away after a while so no big deal.


That came to an end for me the day I found myself at home after a day of running around with the gang and I still had dad’s ball peen hammer in my pack along with a full box of caps.

I got to wondering what would happen if I hit the full roll of five rolls before they were separated.
One of my less than brilliant thoughts the way things turned out.

I kneeled down behind the front yards low brick fence, slid the roll of unseparated caps out of the box, placed them on the sidewalk and lined up with the ball peen hammer.

Kinda funny when I think back, I remember thinking that the hammer strike had to be just right or I’d probably screw up some of the rolls and they’d end up unusable for anything.

I swung hard and the resulting explosion was absolutely deafening.
Small chunks of the sidewalks cement was blown out and I got my face peppered.
At least I had the good sense to close my eyes right before the hammer hit.

Talk about your ears ringing.
I don’t think I ever had my ears ring so bad . . . ceptn’ for the first time I shot sisters boy friends 44 Magnum handgun . . . a Ruger - sans ear protection - and one of the first ones in town.

Not sure which one was worse, but it took about three days for the ringing to completely subside in both cases.

The explosion brought some of the neighbors out to see what had happened and I had the smarts to stand there looking around.
I could tell that Mr. Ruggles was asking what happened, but I couldn’t hear a thing.
I shrugged my shoulders and went in.

Mom looked up from her book.
She knew I’d been involved, didn’t want to know and didn’t ask.

Sometimes being in the dark is a nice place to be....

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Strangely enough, many years down the road my hearing is still pretty good although high frequencies get lost in the shuffle....
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Good story. Amazing we survived childhood. I still don't know how my parents tolerated me and all the crap I did in the '50s and early '60s. Now that I'm in my 60s my body is paying me back for all the dumb crap I did in my younger days, and still do.

 

Man i just had a flash back with that story..even after all these years i can still feel the grit hitting me in the face..the hammer thing must have been a ritual for all guys to try out when growing up.

 

I did the same thing . That was a ton of fun . Has anyone ever tried taking the entire box of the roll caps that had like 5 or 6 roils of caps in the . The boxes were Red . Well I used to do the that way in an alley with concrete walls all around ! Boy did that make a loud bang !
Those were the great days !
How about the Big Red & Blue cap rockets . You would take the roll caps and tear off one at a time and throw them into the air and then they would land on the ground and BANG ! I could get around 8-9 in there to go off !