Laundry Bag / Pipe Bomb -unusual adventures of a 14-year old

1960s- A 14-year-old boy gets stopped by the police, for suspicious behavior. What was he doing?
    The boy was riding his bike one-handed down the road in a small town one evening, and with his other arm he was steadying the large canvas sack which was balanced on his shoulder. He had done this many times, and so he was surprised when a cruiser pulled him over with its lights flashing. The boy found the interruption slightly amusing, and he shrugged off the inconvenience with his usual stoicism. It became even more amusing when the officer swaggered up warily, and demanded, "What do you have in that sack?" On demand, the boy was compelled to dump out the sack's contents onto the road, which revealed nothing more than piles of soiled socks, T-shirts, underpants, and the like.
    "I told you it was just my laundry," the boy was telling the now bewildered cop.
    The boy himself found nothing unusual in carrying his sack of laundry down to the local laundromat, for he was used to being a bit out of step with other boys his age. I know this, because the boy was myself. My mother was who-knows-where at the time, possibly off on one of her weekend jaunts with her acting troupe, or perhaps just working late at her hat-check job in our local small-town night club, where swells from New York would often come down to go slumming for the weekend, and see if the local talent was any different than last time. Details are hazy in my memory, of where my mother was at different times; I just got used to not seeing her around sometimes. Starting back when I was about twelve, I remember my brother and I finding a note and some money on the kitchen table, and taking our bikes down to the food store, and coming back with TV dinners and ice cream pops. We would eat that, and do our homework, get our lunches made and bagged, and get ready for school in the morning. It was all just routine to us.
    There were problems though. I once lost a friend, due to my unusual circumstances, and only through mere misunderstanding. I had met another kid when I first started high school, and we found a mutual pleasure in our new acquaintance, talking about life, and music, and all kinds of stuff that we were interested in. He asked me what my phone number was, so we could get together after school. I liked that idea, but I had to inform him sheepishly that we didn't have a phone at home. He found that so unbelievable, that, in short, he didn't believe me. Of course he had no idea of my mother's tendency to run up a large phone bill, and then be unable to pay, so that our phone service would periodically get shut off for extended periods. It was just another one of those strange and inconvenient things that I was used to.
    I tried to explain it to my new friend, but he thought I was trying to trick him or fool him; his feelings were hurt and he was suspicious of me from then on. We drifted apart and never became friends. The memory of that misunderstanding still rankles.
    Probably most normal boys feel at some time or other, that they have no one that they can tell their problems to. In my case, it must have happened a lot, for I developed some unusual leisure time activities, such as making large firecrackers, and pipe bombs. I used to set off explosions in a vacant lot near my house late at night, just to hide in the woods and watch all the lights in the houses go on, up and down the street. It sounds kind of stupid to say it now, especially in these very sensitive times, but I meant no real harm; I just wanted people to know I was there, even if they didn't know who I was.
    Now, picture this same boy getting stopped by the police again, this time carrying not a bag of laundry, but a thick chunk of iron pipe with a plug at each end, and a ten inch section of red fuse sticking out. I was 15 years old, walking down the road with my friend David, in about the same place where the laundry incident happened a year previously. There was a large gravel pit on the edge of the deep woods, behind the shopping center where I used to do my laundry. That's where we were heading, Dave and I. We had not a care in the world, just joy of our newest pipe bomb, and anticipation of the huge boom it was going to make when we got it out there, and lit it up. Now, the cops in my town at that time during the early 60's were actually pretty suspicious, of anything that looked like it was not on the straight and narrow. It was a time of national unrest, and local crime in our town, and I was not unused to being stopped and questioned; for any reason or no reason. Sometimes it just happened when I was riding my bike late at night. Sometimes it was just because I looked like a hippie and they wanted to find drugs. But I never took it personally, and I never got busted for anything.
    David, on the other hand, had a real grudge against the cops. For instance, one time we stopped to investigate a local disturbance. A man was raving and yelling by a store, and it turns out he had been sniffing glue and was acting threatening. Dave and I had just been biking by, and we stopped to gawk at the disturbance and try to see what was going on, with all the cop cars flashing and people stopping to get out and look. Within a minute, two cops approached us out of the milling group of people. Of all weird things, they searched Dave and peppered him with snappy questions, and confiscated his pocketknife, while completely ignoring me. My own knife was in my pocket, as it always was, but they only hassled Dave; of course Dave was showing them his usual bad face, and he ended up never getting his knife back. Stuff like that was always happening to Dave, and he was mad at all cops. Me, I didn't mind 'em. Even when I was carrying a large explosive device, it never occurred to me to worry.
    So on this one occasion, when we were walking down the road on our way out to the gravel pit with our new pipe bomb, Dave said, "Len, could you please stick that thing up your sleeve? What'll you say about it if the cops stop us this time? 'Oh, nothing, officer. Just a little ol' bomb.' "
    Well, I had to admit that Dave was right, there. It couldn't hurt anything to stick it up the sleeve of my coat, so I did, and we had no trouble. We got out into the middle of the gravel pit on that balmy night, and we had a lovely time setting off the bomb under the moon and stars. When the thing went off, it shook the ground with a profound thumping echoing boommm, accompanied by a plaintive whining hum, of shards of iron spinning away into the distance. Then, a moment of silence in the aftermath; Dave and I spellbound with awe. I thought to myself, "I bet they heard that one!"
    An unusual experience, perhaps, in the life of a typical young boy, but not that unusual to me.




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