BB Gun

When we were kids, Donald and I traded the .22 we had bought from the Roseburg kids for 50 cents to Albert Bozich, my cousin, for a BB gun. The BB gun had already been used a lot and the stock was broken off, but it was our only chance of having a BB gun like our brother John had. BB's cost money, and when you bought a nickel's worth, you might get 100-200 BB's in a small container. We ran out of BB's and we discovered that tiny rocks (about the size of the BB) would work just as well firing out of the gun. However the rocks not being symmetrically perfect it was a slightly erratic shot. For passing time away while Ma was cooking we would find enough rocks to bring in the house and we thought, well BB guns can't kill birds so these rocks can't do much damage. Donald and I had a challenge to see who could stand the sting from the gun. The only thing we would allow to be shot was the bare foot (we were mostly bare footed anyhow). I was a better shot than Donald and he'd yell a little bit.

I can remember like it was yesterday, sitting on the floor holding my knee up, my bare foot ready for him to shoot out, looking through my toes at the barrel of the BB gun. He fired and it missed my foot and hit me right next to the eye!

That was the end of that experiment!

I don't know exactly what happened to that BB gun. It probably got thrown down the well. If the new owner of the house were to dig up the well, he'd probably find it.

I think I was crazier for guns than Donald was. My mother always told a story about 'killaself' and I wondered what she was talking about. Apparently when I was a little boy I would bang a little cap pistol into my head and say "Killaself! Killaself!" I don't know what I was thinking - just a kid I guess!

A Dick Tracy story told about a prisoner in a cell asking for a large potato. They gave it to him and he carved a replica of a gun. He asked for iodine and poured it on the potato and used that to scare the guard into escaping. I was always intrigued by guns, even from the old Dick Tracy columns.