When my Grandma Link passed away, Mom and I had to do most of the work to clean out her place. And Grandma was a packrat, so we knew it would be quite a job. But we weren’t expecting to need the bomb squad!
During the winter and spring of 1976-77, we spent just about every day off of school except Sundays and Christmas out in West Point going through the house and figuring out what to do with everything. By summer we had gotten through it, and our attention turned to the garage.
The Garage
The garage was a humble affair. The door was the old sideways-sliding barn door type, and I don’t recall ever seeing it closed. There was a side door (person sized), which always stood open too. The garage was mostly full of lumber, stacked more or less neatly on the dirt floor of the single bay. On top of the lumber were stacks of cardboard boxes, which proved to hold empty tin cans.
Grandma stored a bunch of garden implements and such in the garage, and there were some shelves holding old cans from canned hams, which Grandma favored for storing odds and ends. We figured we were in for a pretty straightforward task.
The ham cans turned out to be full of the keys from canned hams and such, most with the strip of metal from the can wound around them. We found a lot of old scrap metal at Grandma’s, apparently she had gotten into the habit of keeping scrap metal during WW2 and just never stopped.
We were feeling pretty sassy about our progress when we took a moment to look up in the rafters of the garage. And suddenly the job wasn’t straightforward anymore.
Up in the rafters was a dynamite box.
Dynamite!
We knew Grandpa knew how to handle explosives, and Mom remembered that he used to make decent money doing blasting jobs for local farmers. But Grandpa had been dead for twenty years, and hadn’t done blasting since about fifteen years prior to his death. Which meant any dynamite in that box was at least 35 years old. And that was a problem.
You see, when dynamite gets hot it oozes nitroglycerin. And nitro is extremely unstable – a sudden impact can set it off. And up in the rafters of a garage in a Midwestern summer it gets very hot.
We beat a hasty retreat to the house, and Mom called the fire department (which is a volunteer unit, as mentioned here.) She explained the situation, and they assured us that they would send someone out, though it might be a while.
We hung out in the house, figuring the fire department would be getting in touch with one of the bigger towns to get their bomb squad to come out. We knew West Point didn’t have their own.
The Bomb Squad
Pretty soon someone did show up. One guy, with an extension ladder. He didn’t have the big bombproof suit, either. The guy was wearing jeans and a chambray shirt. He said he was there to look it over and figure out what to do.
We duly showed him where the box was, and he made us, and all of Grandma’s neighbors go up the street about a block to be clear of the blast in case something went wrong. Then he set to work.
We weren’t waiting very long when we see him walking up the street, carrying the dynamite box casually under his arm. He was laughing as he approached us.
“Wanna see what’s in the box?” he asked.
It was more empty tin cans.
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