The Jordan H.S. Match Gun Incident

Thanks everyone for the great Christmas messages, posts and comments. I very much appreciate them all. Now it's time to share some more stories from my dysfunctional and crazy childhood. This one was posted shortly after I started my blog and I don't think anybody outside of my family read it and/or commented.  

There is a way to make a “match gun” using a wooden clothes pin and a rubber band. I don’t remember who taught me how to do it, but I experimented until it worked. It had to do with taking the clothespin apart and reassembling it backwards. The rubber band is there to hold one end of the clothes pin together. The match (a wooden kitchen type), lights as it is shot out of the clothespin by one end of the spring. I just found the above picture on the Internet, and it looks pretty close to the ones that we made. Yes, we were evil wicked children...

I don’t remember the exact year, but I think it was 6th grade. It was mid-summer and very hot. Kenny Meeks and I were walking down Myrtle Avenue in North Long Beach, along the backside of Jordan High School where the athletic fields are. We were having an ongoing “war” with our match guns, shooting them at each other. I suppose it could hurt if one hit you in the eye, but we were young and didn’t worry about it at all. I shot one at my friend and it zipped right by his head. We continued on our merry way until we noticed smoke coming from the area we just came from.

We hid our match guns and ran back to where the smoke was. I guess the match that whizzed by my friends head went through the fence and caught some grass on fire.  As we looked through the fence it was very obvious that it hadn't been watered all summer. It was brown and dry and starting to burn. The fence was too tall to climb over and there were no gates on that side of the school. There was only one option remaining and we took it. We ran! The hidden match guns were forgotten. What match guns anyway?

We ended up at our original destination which was the local junior high school to play bombardier in the gym. A few hours later we walked by the high school again on our return trip. A patch of grass about the size of half a football field was burnt. We couldn’t tell if a fire truck had been called to put it out or not, but because there was nobody in the area, we assumed the fire just burnt itself out.


Several years later I attended that high school. Every time I was in that area I thought about the fire and the match guns, and just how little supervision I had as a kid.  Of course with my mother, having little or no supervision was a good thing...