One of the things that is unique to little boys is their attraction to guns. This takes the initial form of pointed fingers with accompanying sound effects and progresses through cap guns to BB guns and eventually to actual weapons that shoot real bullets. I was no different than most boys.
I won’t spend much time on the pointed finger stage, but after that my brothers and I and our friends moved on to the rubber gun stage. Rubber guns could be made out of a piece of board and an old car’s inner tube. The tube was cut cross wise making bands about one-half inch wide. The rubber rings were the ammunition. The gun could be shaped almost any way the owner wanted it. The trigger was a clothes pin. It was tied to the handle or stalk of the gun and the rubber bands were stretched over the end of the barrel and clipped into the clothes pin. To fire the rubber gun, we just pressed on the clothes pin to open it. A good rubber gun could shoot fifteen to twenty feet. They didn’t hurt much unless you were really close to the shooter, but we spent hours playing with them. We used them to shoot at targets and at each other and at whatever else we could think of to shoot at.
About the same time we were into rubber guns, we also used the metal cap guns. I had a number of different cap guns. I had the typical forty-five revolver model like the cowboys used in the movies. I even had holsters to carry them around in. One of the other cap guns I remember was a little silver one that had a single long trigger without a trigger guard and two short barrels. It took a special type of cap rolls that were narrower than the normal red caps. Those particular rolls of caps came in colors other than red. That type of gun popped almost every cap and you could shoot it very rapidly and it almost never had a cap misfire. It was pretty inexpensive yet it was a neat little gun.
When I was about eleven years old the toy makers came out with miniature guns that used round single caps only. The guns were miniature replicas of different guns including revolvers, Winchesters, Tommy guns and other types. I had a Tommy gun model. You cocked the gun, inserted a single round cap and then fired. The resulting pops were very loud. We used to hang out of the car windows driving down the road and shoot at passing objects or we would use them to play around the house. They were very small (three to six inches long depending on the type of gun they were trying to copy), and easy to carry in our pants pockets.
When I was pretty young I got a BB gun. Charlie Reidhead also had a BB gun and we would wander the hills or wander around town and shoot them for hours or until we ran out of BB’s. One of the favorite places to go shooting was to the Heber dump. It was located across the creek to the north of town and up a draw and it was full of old bottles and cans. We would line them up and shoot at them. Later, we both got twenty-two caliber rifles and we used to spend a lot of time at the dump, shooting at bottles and cans. The only problem with the twenty-two rifles was the cost of shells. As I recall, it cost about one dollar for a box of fifty cartridges so we had to be selective about how much shooting we did, but we had fun with the rifles. My brother Ted had a twenty-two caliber pistol and sometimes he would let me shoot it. He also had a thirty-thirty Winchester but I didn’t get to shoot it much.
Probably the “ultimate weapon” we ever fired was my brother Vard’s cannon. Vard had made a cannon barrel in metal shop. It was about eighteen inches long and about two or three inches in diameter. The hole in the barrel was about a half inch across. There was a small hole drilled in the top of the cannon that went through to the hole in the barrel. We could put a fuse in that small hole, then pour gun powder down the barrel and then add cloth or paper and tamp it nice and firm using a ramrod. The explosion that occurred when the lighted fuse hit the gun powder was pretty amazing. We used to shoot it off on the Fourth of July to wake up the town and I think it did a pretty good job. It was a not-so-subtle way of punishing those in town who were too lazy to get up for the “Early Morning Fourth of July Flag Raising Ceremony”. They were awakened whether they liked it or not.
We even tried shooting bolts with the cannon. If you look closely there is a hole in the garage door at The Rock House where a bolt we shot went sideways through the garage door. When we saw the power the cannon had, we quit shooting objects and just settled for making loud noises with the cannon. Vard may still have the cannon he made. We had a lot of fun with it.
One other experience I should relate is the time my brother Ted put a bullet through the front window of The Rock House. It occurred shortly after he got his twenty-two caliber pistol and holster. He liked to practice the “quick draw” and play with the gun. One day he had it in the front room. I guess maybe he was practicing with it. Terry was asleep on the couch in front of the big front window. Ted initially aimed his pistol at the sleeping Terry and then raised his pistol to aim it at something across the street thinking the gun was empty. When he pulled the trigger, the gun went off and the bullet went right through one of the narrow window panes of the front window of The Rock House. I think it scared Ted more than it did anyone else in the house. He realized that if he had pulled the trigger when he had it aimed at Terry, he might have shot his own brother. He was much more careful after that and we all learned an important lesson about being sure guns were unloaded when they were brought into the house. The window was never replaced. The bullet hole is still there to this day as a reminder to all of us about gun safety.