Our basement on 19th Avenue Southeast, where I grew up, was dismal and clammy. Scaly yellow mold flourished on the whitewashed cement block walls, no matter how often my mother made me scrub it away with diluted Clorox bleach. The undulating cement floor was painted dark gray, and had begun to fissure -- creating a welcoming abode for spiders and silverfish. The squat gas meter sat in one corner, looking like a goblin. Most of the basement was taken up by the massive cast iron furnace, with hot air tubes wrapped in asbestos cloth shooting out and up in all directions. Next to it lurked the green fuel oil tank. My dad was in charge of watching the cracked and stained gauge on its side, so he would know when it was time to call the fuel truck to come fill it up again. This, like many other things in his life, he frequently neglected to do. I recall one Christmas eve when the fuel oil ran out completely, and there was no fuel truck in all of the greater Twin Cities that cared to make a delivery that holy evening. We huddled around the gas stove, with the door open, as our only source of heat, and went to bed layered in flannel shirts, snowpants, and about a dozen wool socks on each foot. The bedroom was lit by the eerie green glow of dozens of Christmas candles, most of them reeking of bayberry, which mom thought would give us a modicum of heat through the frigid night. Dad had to pay a hefty premium, above and beyond the regular fuel oil price, to get the truck out first thing on Christmas day.
The only bright spot in that embryonic dungeon was the laundry corner, which contained the washer and dryer, as well as an ancient cast iron sink divided into two halves. Mom put yellow curtains up on the casement window and tacked cheery plastic flowers onto the sullen corner wall. She kept a radio tuned to WCCO on a small shelf next to the Oxydol and 20 Mule Team Borax, so she could listen to Joyce Lamont’s recipes and household hints.
There was just room to squeeze in a small workbench next to the washer, where she folded and stacked laundry -- and where I performed my mad experiments in chemistry and mechanics.
I guess my curiosity about how things were put together and what happened when you mixed one thing with another, were natural in a small boy. What was altogether unnatural, and severely irritating to my parents, was my surreptitious experiments on the basement workbench that resulted in disemboweled toasters and roaring stenches that would choke a goat.
My experiments started out innocent enough; pouring vinegar over baking soda in a cup to watch it fizz and pop, or unscrewing the lid of a flashlight to see how the batteries were connected.Once I sawed a golf ball in half, to discover a tightly wound sphere of rubber binders that immediately began to quickly unravel, resembling a globe of thin worms twisting their way to freedom. The gooey black center of the golf ball dribbled all over the front of my shirt, the stain proving so reluctant to yield to my mother’s efforts to expunge it that she finally ripped it up for dust rags.
But by the age of seven I wanted to push the envelope a bit more. I took apart a transistor radio, spreading its wire guts all over the workbench. There were little brightly colored knobs and discs among the wires, which I sliced open with a pen knife to discover what their innards were made of. They didn’t seem to be made of anything, and so that exploratory surgery ended up nugatory -- and when my older brother Billy finally missed the Realtone that had been in his shirt pocket the day before, I beat a strategic retreat across the street to my friend Wayne Matsuura’s house for the rest of the day, after sweeping all the tangled parts into the basement wastebasket and covering them with old newspapers.
My infamous chemical exploits were inspired by a movie I saw on TV, called ‘The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.’ It starred the ineluctable Hans Conreid as a mad musician who enslaves little boys and forces them to play on a gigantic piano, and was written by Dr. Suess. At one point the boy protagonist concocts a sound-sucking potion out of liquid odds and ends he finds around the room; the resulting brew not only vacuums up every decibel of sound but explodes in a most gratifying manner at the end of the movie. After seeing that, I was resolved to recreate the same results on my little workbench in the basement.
I had received a Chemcraft chemistry set for Christmas the same year we had to cluster around the Kenmore to keep from freezing to death -- so I immediately set to work on my sound sucking formula. A little cobalt; a splash of rubbing alcohol; a touch of ammonium carbonate; gum arabic; and, of course, a generous helping of sulfur. My formula looked, and smelled, troubled, but not yet effective. So I added my ace in the hole -- a cup of bleach. The results were spectacular. The plastic beaker melted like wax, so the formula dribbled off the workbench onto the cement floor, where it ate away the gray paint. The overpowering odor caused me to gasp and cough, and then tear up. The smell soon permeated the whole house, making it uninhabitable for a few hours, while all the windows were left open to air the place out.
Here’s the funny thing, though -- I no longer remember what dire punishment I received for my reinvention of tear gas. Likely enough it was a couple of swats on the rear with mom’s hairbrush and then exile to my bedroom for a longish period to ponder my misdeeds. As I stitch these little memoirs of my childhood together I am often nonplussed by my lack of memory of the punishments meted out to me. Wholly justified they were, of course. But maybe there just weren’t that many, after all. Anywho. I know I always tried to show my own kids a little more mercy and respect than I seemed to get as a boy. Carpent tua poma nepotes.
