Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories.
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Did you ever do something really foolish when you were a kid? I mean, something so foolish it was dangerous … something that could have hurt you seriously.
I did something like that when I was around 14 years old. It was nothing I planned to do. It just happened one day when I was riding my bike down Maple Street on my way to the Union County fairgrounds. When I got to the bridge over Mill Creek, I saw a boy named Bob Patterson.
When we were a bit younger, Bob and I did some fishing, frog hunting and exploring along the banks of Mill Creek.
Bob was carrying a rock, about the size of a head of cabbage, up the hill from the creek at the north end of the bridge. I asked him what he was doing and he explained that he was conducting an experiment.
He said he had recently done some work for a man who was clearing out a partially wooded area on his farm. There were a lot of trees that had been cut down over the years, but their stumps still remained in the ground. Some of them could be dug out, but others required more drastic action.
He told me that a farmer was using explosives to remove some of those stumps. He had Bob dig underneath the stumps, and then the man placed the explosives there. I think he probably had one of those plunger things to trigger the explosions.
As Bob worked with the farmer, he learned quite a bit about explosives, like how to handle them safely and different ways to detonate them. So he thought he would do a little experimenting on his own. He took a little of the explosive powder from under one of the stumps and he put it in a small cloth bag.
He took me down under the bridge on the north bank of the creek. There was what looked like a row of sandbags, maybe three feet high and 15 or 20 feet long, like you see in photos of flooded areas. But they weren’t sandbags. They must have originally contained a concrete mixture, and they were hard as a rock. They looked like they had been there for years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they are still there today.
Bob had put the explosive powder on top of one of those bags, a foot or so west of the edge of the bridge. Then he put a few matches on top of that. He then placed a flat rock on top of it all.
His plan was to drop the cabbage-size rock onto the flat stone on top. He said that should ignite the matches and set off an explosion. He said there wasn’t enough explosive powder to cause a big explosion, so it wouldn’t be dangerous.
He said he could use my help in dropping the rock. That sounded like fun to me, so we both went back up onto the bridge. We looked both ways to make sure there were no cars coming. Then we both lay on our stomachs on the edge of the bridge.
We held the rock maybe a foot or so off the west side of the bridge, directly over the target. Then we dropped it. It was a direct hit, and you wouldn’t believe how loud that explosion was. It scared the daylights out of me, and tiny bits of dirt and sand blew up into our faces. It may have been my imagination, but I swear I could feel the bridge shake.
Bob and I were both OK, but I think you can probably understand why I didn’t tell my dad about all this. He would have gone through the roof.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com