Lootie Rainwater and my uncle S.B. had been childhood chums, always into some kind of incorrigible business.

S.B. told me about the time they took all the powder from a dozen shotgun shells and packed them into an empty mustard jar. With an ice pick, they poked a hole in the tin lid, and pushed a fuse from a cannonball firecracker into the jar.

At the college baseball field just up the street, the boys dug a hole under the pitchers mound rubber and buried the bomb. They needed the piece of rubber for their own sandlot field across from Greenwood Cemetery. Now, all athletically inclined boys know that a properly constructed pitcher's pad is connected to a steel pipe, and driven down two feet into the dirt. The boys wanted the bomb to remove the pad, but didn't plan for it to carry half a truckload of East Texas red clay with it.