Childhood Memories

A couple of posts by Brock & The Feral Irishman have got me to remembering some of my childhood antics.  Step over to Brock's link to read about one of them.

Here is another that every time I remember it, I laugh at how I didn't kill myself growing up.

I grew up farming row crops and I loved to fish.  My Grandpa Myers (Mama's daddy) had a lake house about 30 minutes from the farm.  One day he pulled out some worm rods to get some fishing worms.

These were two rods that he had wired up and when put into the ground & plugged in, the electric field would run the worms to the surface.  Boy I thought that was cool as shit.

Now mind you I was 9 or 10 at the time.

So one day I was going to go fishing, and didn't hunt night crawlers the night before.  I thought I would be slick and get some like I saw Grandpa do.

We had a old TV antenna out back so I went and broke off a piece of it and took an old extension cord.  Wired it up I did.

I stuck it in the ground, plugged in the cord and waited for my bait to appear.  After about 5 minutes, no worms, so off I went for the shovel.  Dug my bait and went fishing.

Daddy drove truck to make ends meet and he was on the road right then.  He came home that evening and Mom was telling him that something was wrong as there was no power inside the house.

Well, 10 yr old boy's are not well versed in electrical things.  I had wired both ends of the extension cord to the ONE rod.

I blew not a simple round glass fuse, but one of the big shotgun style fuses in the old farm house we lived in.

Boy I got my ass tore up over that.  Almost as bad as when I set mama's hair on fire.  She was sitting in the kitchen and I decided to stick a pair of tweezers in the socket right above her head.

This was in the early 70's with big hair & lots of hairspray.

There were many good times growing up.  I look back and laugh.  Not a care in the world, but as to what I was going to play tomorrow.