For me, it all began in the back yard of our home in a small town in Illinois with an Alpha kit and a fractional A that my dad bought me when I was in grade school.

It evolved into amateur rocketry starting in 8th grade using Brinley's Rocket Manual for Amateurs when Tom and I were what the model rocket manufacturers at that time described as "basement bombers." However, we were weren't even close to the "shoving strike anywhere matches into an empty propane cylinder" variety of those and followed to the extent that we could the safety rules in the books we were using as guides. That's why we're all still alive and physically intact.

I still have the dog-eared, yellowed cellophane tape copy of the Brinley's RMA we used. Years ago I saw a MINT copy of that 60s book for only $7.00 in the small catalog of a pyrotechnics book seller who I believe I found on the Pyrotechnics Mailing List when I was a member of the Pyrotechnics Guild International (which, BTW, you should join for at least a year so you can attend their annual convention https://www.pgi.org/ ). Selling it for only $7.00, he didn't know what he had. Since I later decided I didn't need two copies, I sold it on eBay and it got around $70 for it if I recall correctly. VERY shortly thereafter, a scanned copy of what must have been it showed up on-line and has now migrated to be The Internet Archive:

Rocket Manual For Amateurs By Capt. Bertrand R. Brinley (Ballantine Books 1960)

https://archive.org/details/RocketM...age/n1/mode/2up

For propellants we used both "caramel candy" and Zn/S. We used so much KNO3 that we bought 25 pound drums of it from a defunct place called Xercon Scientific in Chicago, a company which advertised pyrotechnic chemicals in the back of magazines like "Popular Science" at the time. The "adult signature" on the order form was mine. I'd come home from school to find large boxes with various colored ICC hazard labels on the boxes left in the unlocked garage by the shipper. With exceptions for safety, we did most of the work in Tom's basement.

In early high school we tried the asphalt(um)/KClO4 mixture shown in the book whose proper mixing was not described in any way. We used a one pound coffee can on a high school chemistry lab hotplate donated to us when they got new ones in. We tried to make that mix on the driveway of Tom's home on the suburban street of our engineering (mostly) bedroom community small town. We wore surplus Navy fire suits (yes, ASBESTOS, but I'm still alive) bought from another defunct place which sold techie military surplus and which also advertised in the back of science magazines at the the time, Meshna Surplus.

I stirred the mix with a large non-sparking aluminum spoon. Imagine this scene for the rest of the neighborhood: we were both sitting cross legged on the driveway in those fire suits stirring something on a hotplate. But this was back in the days when smart kids were going to save us from the Russians and weren't seen as terrorists like today. The scene would get even more interesting shortly...

We were doing this at dusk. In my limited field of view through the view port on my suit hood, I saw a slowly flashing and very bright satellite transit which I knew most likely was a tumbling upper stage in orbit. I took off my suit hood to get a better look. Shortly thereafter, the mix ignited. Moving backward rapidly, I saw what looked a lot like a nozzle-up test of a buried SRB like I saw in the films we got from Thiokol which I will get into later. Tom was laughing his ass off... but HE had his hood on. Now, once again, imagine that scene for the rest of the neighborhood.

We went inside so I could look in the bathroom mirror. Half of my face, the side exposed to the radiant heat, was turning red, a small number (luckily) of spots were burnt from splattered propellant and my hair on that side was crisp and very stinky, but there really wasn't much more pain than a sunburn. I road home on my bicycle, my parents phoned our family doctor, he called in a prescription, my dad went to get it, and I got to take a prescription pain med for the first and last time. The doctor later did stuff in his office to make sure the spot burns didn't leave scars so they didn't add to my naturally "not beautiful" look. Going to high school afterwords was fun since I had what was perceived as the red badge of scientific endeavor which was actually a red badge of stupidity.

On the Thiokol films topic, when we got our amateur rocketry start in middle school, Tom and I were also audio-visual volunteer nerds. Somehow, perhaps through something in Aviation Week magazine which I could read at the local library, I found out they would send 16mm films at no charge to organizations to show off what they were doing solid rocketry wise. We created a middle school rocketry club and had them send the films to us at the school. They came postpaid in heavy-duty film mailing containers. There was a metal-framed window with the mailing address and metered postage on a card which would be flipped over and slid back in to show the return address and postage. We watched the films using the projector in the school auditorium.

One interesting event related to our middle school amateur rocketry efforts: it was a damp, post-harvest fall Saturday with the vast, plowed corn and soybean fields surrounding the town beckoning. It was also a bizarre weather day when the fog had lifted to create a spooky-low cloud base. I had recently come up with a way to get a more easily cast-able mix of the caramel candy propellant and we were anxious to try it out in a newly built rocket. I wanted to wait for better weather, but Tom didn't and I not very reluctantly agreed since I was also impatient.

The rocket was made from 1 inch electrical conduit, was about 24 inches long and painted blaze orange. The nose cone was, as usual, a diluted epoxy coated balsa ogive made using the centered dowel in a balsa block end held in an electric drill held in a vise method of machining. No recovery system, launched from a triad 1 inch hardwood dowel on plywood base launch tower using a safing/timing mechanism that would allow moving to a safe distance before launch. We launched from a plowed field east of town just on the outskirts of town and I'd estimate a few hundred yards out into the field. ALL of our previous flights from there had gone straight up and straight down.

A beautiful launch quickly disappearing into the freakishly low cloud base. We waited for the sometimes audible pre-impact sound of the rockets' return or, at least, its appearance from the cloud base. Nothing. We went back to Tom's place.

Sometime during the next week, I walked into science class and saw on the teacher's desk our rocket. It was about half to three quarters covered with mud showing since it had, of course, dug in on impact. I didn't say a word. Tom, who was most like Sheldon on Big Bang Theory, brilliant yet stupid, walked in and said, "Hey, my rocket." I was glad he said "my" instead of "our." Turns out it had impacted just in front of a dog house in someone's back yard on the edge of town and because the middle school had been noted publicly for its MODEL ROCKETRY program the COPS brought it there. Nothing bad came of this, unlike what would happen in our modern era of paranoia. Some good came of it in the new launch site we built MILES out of town where, once again, Tom later displayed his brilliant stupidity.

Miles out of town there was a significant creek right next to a rarely traveled two-lane blacktop which had huge corn and soybean fields on both sides. We asked the farmer on the creek side if we could build a launch site which was not only miles out of town but a long way from his farmhouse. He said OK. Once again, remember the times.

The creek had a ~70 degree bend away from the road in it for some reason which, after 20 feet or so turned back to its original direction. The result was a bank of dirt about 6 feet tall on one side of the turn. We dug a pit into the top of it and punched home two gutter drain pipes through to it for viewing ports with enough room in the pit that we could duck sideways at launch. The top was just plywood which provided no real protection above. No timer in this case, but a proper wired remote launch system with the launcher placed on the other side of the creek. Tom's mom used the family station wagon to allow us to lug the materials out there, but our test and launch rockets were transported there via our bicycles.

Here's where Tom's and, apparently, at least his mom's naivete comes in again. His dad was a commercial pilot (which is relevant later in the story) and his mom worked for the county newspaper. We were about to launch the largest rocket we'd made so far, 2 inches in diameter and 36 inches long, and his mom managed to get a significant article in the county newspaper about "his" rocket (once again, thank God) and where and when it would be launched. Thank God that when the launch Saturday arrived it was a nearly pea soup fog morning. Even fireworks were and are illegal in the state let alone metal pipe amateur rockets, but I suspect everyone just considered it to be "model rocketry" or did nothing if they didn't. We launched later on a different Saturday, thankfully with no audience.

For small, paper cased caramel candy motors, we built a test stand from an empty can rotated by a synchronous motor tracing on paper a thrust curve using a calibrated spring mechanism with an attached felt tip pen.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Balloons also interested us.

We created a large scale hydrogen generation system using a rubber stopper with glass tube on a gallon A&W root beer jug for the exothermic reaction of a concentrated Red Devil Lye solution with hand crushed aluminum foil "turds" dropped into it. From that, surgical tubing routed through a condensation trough took the hydrogen and condensed steam to a large jar into which the water was ejected and from that into latex balloons.

Tom had taken shop while I chose independent study in electronics, so he printed up on postcards a questionnaire with questions like when and where the card was found on one side and his home address on the other. These were suspended via string from the balloons contained in the very light weight non-ziplock type of sandwich bags from back then taped shut with cellophane. To attracted attention, we taped to the bottom of those bags a 2 inch or so wide strip of aluminum foil which you could sometimes see flashing in sunlight long after the balloon was no longer visible. One also made quite a flash when the foil on one of them launched on a windy day hit the power lines in Tom's back yard. Could this be a reason why Estes got rid of aluminized parachutes?

We got maybe a dozen responses, mostly from neighboring states. The longest distance one by far was from an east coast beach, New Jersey I think, where a father had found it and wrote a letter because his son wanted to know why were were doing that. Since Tom's dad was a commercial pilot he could get his hands on expired weather maps which we then tried to use to guess how the balloons got to where they were found.

I also made a 12 foot tall DIY red and white tissue paper hot air balloon which we launched from the side of his house with me on the roof holding the loop at the top using a broom handle with hook. It went ups hundreds of feet and luckily landed in the large high school sports field which was about a block north from his home. It was launched on a summer weekday and while we followed it we could see cars slowing to watch it. Luckily for us, no accidents were caused.

Our pyrotechnic adventures which I won't go into detail about involved, for example, the old cylindrical Estes motor mailing tubes and, in the largest example, a 12 inch section from a carpet tube buried in the garden in Tom's back yard, covered with bricks from the garden border which were blown as high as the power pole with dirt clods landing on the roof and on the driveway in FRONT of their house. Quite a THUMP sound which was followed by the resident behind their home coming out their back door and shouting that her husband had recently come home after being hospitalized for a heart attack and if we did that again, which we had no plans to do, she'd call the cops. I asked Tom if he had known that and he said, "Yeah."

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Here's a cautionary tale about the unsafe handling of pyrotechnics.

Ed was a fellow high school student also interested in chemistry, but not rockets. It may have been my propellant incident burn which caused him to approach me at lunch to ask for info on pyrotechnics. I loaned him one of my books, it may have been the classic text "The Chemistry of Powder and Explosives," but whatever it was it had do and don't safety warnings in it which I told him to be sure to read before messing around!

His family owned a 100 year old (even back then) farm which had been designated as a historical landmark of some kind. He also bought his chemicals from Xercon and began messing around with them in the old smoke house no longer used for that purpose, grinding them together (yikes!) in a mortar and pestle. At some point he used the wrong combination, probably KClO3 and sulfur (cracker ball stuff), he doesn't recall, and the mix detonated. Not deflagrated rapidly, detonated.

It shattered the ceramic mortar driving fragments into the inside of his knees between which he was holding it and turning them into what he said looked like ground hamburger. Luckily, his wedding veggies weren't harmed, but the outer three fingers of his left hand which held the mortar had been blown off and his thumb on that hand blown back and dangling by flesh. It and the index finger were later saved. The tips of the pinkie on his right hand which had been holding the pestle and the finger next it were like exploded cigar ends he said.

His parents weren't home, but thank God he was not alone. A friend Dave was luckily there in the smoke house with him and standing behind him. He suffered minor ceramic shrapnel injuries to his upper torso and face. The explosion shrapnel blew out the incandescent light bulb in the smoke house. Ed after noticing the damage to his left hand only after having jagged bone catch in his jeans and understandably being dazed went to the pump well nearby and pumped cold water over the remnants of his left hand. Dave helped him into their farmhouse kitchen and called for help. Since they lived on a rural route and were many miles from the nearest medical facility, the ambulance took a long time to get there.

His mother came home to a kitchen floor covered with blood and a note.

He took it all amazingly well and joked with the remnants of his left hand when he returned to school, calling himself "The Claw" and acting the part with his left hand. But there was a happy ending. He was very smart and that along with his handicap got him a full ride through pre-med and medical school. He became a pathologist in California and many years ago according to his sister he was thinking about training to become a psychiatrist.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Now that's more like it

You seem to indicate a dislike for prescription pain medication.
I wholeheartedly disagree with that opinion. They work. Idiots taking them for "kicks" have made them SEEM negative, with the FOOLISH gov't intrusive response scaring physicians into less prescribing. Total ABSURDITY of typical gov't response in regulating something they have ZERO business butting their snoots into.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

No, I was just showing that I've been cautious enough in life, including the many other pyrotechnic activities during those times that I didn't mention here, to have never again needed them.

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Great stories!

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Scott D. Hansen
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