Days of Wine and Roses, and Vasectomies

[This story got into the Washington Post, reader submissions, 2007.]

Toys, well. Not for me a sappy reminiscence of a floppy-eared bunny. But I now realize I have not thought much about how many of our playthings were shadows of state-sponsored violence.

Growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, it was hard to avoid that. So many of us of that generation had fathers and uncles who had come back from World War II and Korea, or hadn’t come back. That wasn’t quite the case with my extended family — my father turned 18 just before Germany collapsed, and by 1950 he was married and in seminary, so it fell to Uncle Dick in the peacetime Navy to be our military hero, if you don’t count my narrow escape from Viet Nam.

There was a brief interlude in the early ‘60s when our attention turned to the Civil War Centennial. My brother Steve and I had Union infantry caps and muskets with rubber bayonets, but it didn’t last, and we were soon back to machine-guns, ponchos, and lying in wait for imaginary Japanese patrols.

However, the 1960s were also haunted by the spectre of nuclear annihilation in a way that is difficult to imagine now. I clearly remember seeing the newspaper maps with concentric rings around Cuba that showed how soon Castro would deliver his Soviet missiles to us. You’ve probably heard me recount my comforting belief that I could run home from school in six minutes, way ahead of the missiles that would take 15 minutes to get to East Henrietta Road.

So if I mention the “Goldwater Summer of 1964”, be aware that the GOP candidate for President that year was a man from Arizona who might have been a little fast on the draw with the nukes if he got the Big Job. It was in that fearful summer that we devised a method to counter the threat from the West, the kids on Cimarron Drive. They threw plums from a tree at the edge of our property and tried to trespass, and we responded with green apples, but we thought if we could deliver bucketfuls at once, the shock and awe might be enough to drive off the invaders for good.

The war council recommended and devised an apple cannon, and bade us start construction, we being Steve and me, Terry McMullen, Blaney McVea, Mark Cielke, Debbie Marlin, and some others whose names are lost forever. But we couldn’t let the enemy observe our work, so we determined to install the new doomsday machine on a platform Dad had built about 10 feet up in our willow tree (10 feet? could it have been more like five?). The willow leaves were numerous but not thick, and it seemed to us that they would be the perfect cloaking device until the moment a dozen lethal green apples roared from the cannon’s mouth to sweep away our tormentors.

For the cannon’s barrel, we found a heavy lacquered cardboard tube, the kind that carpets wrap around, and lashed it to the platform, aimed slightly up and to the west, where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence would repose. Then we devised a plunger that would easily slide through the barrel. For propulsion, we scrounged up some old inner tubes, stretched them across the breech end of the barrel, and nailed their ends to stout willow limbs.

But we could not test the weapon for several days because of heavy wind and rain. On the next bright morning, my co-engineer Blaney and I ascended to the platform to assess the damage. The apparatus was intact, but when we opened the ordnance box, we released a swarm of really ticked-off hornets that had been attracted to the damp and rotting apples. In a panic, we had to jump or be stung to death, so we jumped. Neither of us could muster the nerve to go back up there, and the ultimate weapon passed into history.

The apple tree and the willow tree are history now as well, as are our house and the vast back yard in Rochester. But although the cannon would probably not have worked as designed — inner tubes are not stretchy enough — it was effective nonetheless. Cimarron Drive must have collected some intelligence about what we were up to, for my memory is that the threat of invasion ceased abruptly, never to be revived.