WUNDRAM: The day we dropped a safe into the basement

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By Bill Wundram | Saturday, August 02, 2008 |

IT comes as no surprise when they say that kids today are of worse manner than kids of generations ago.

The difference is that on August days, we did more thrilling things. If there was nothing to do, we made our own innocent excitement, like pitching horse shoes.

Kids today have thrills without bounds — sitting on the couch and playing video games like “Grand Theft Auto.”

Once, after a few rousing hours of sitting around, we decided to build a boat. This was utterly ridiculous, because if we could get it to the river — about five miles away — it would certainly sink and we would all drown.

Our patient fathers, to keep us out of mischief, spent several dollars to buy wood for the hull of the boat. There were seats and a cabin.

One member of the Powers gang, another group of innocents from across the street, resurrected a baby carriage wheel that we would use as a ship’s wheel. We calked the seams with pitch and oakum (twists of rope) to make it water worthy.

We knew there would be no way to take that misshapen boat to any body of water, but it was a dream. It actually looked like a boat that would hold at least six kids. We even had a name for it, the Whimsy. Parents came to look, actually admire our folly.

The only water was a good-sized fish pond in our backyard. We skidded the Whimsy into the pond. There, it floated quite handsomely until all of us got aboard. It immediately sank. We escaped with no more than water over our ankles.

Our feelings were damaged; the boat stayed, kerplunk in the fish pond with the goldfish, until our parents made us tear it apart. This took another week, so nearly a month of our summer was lost.

In idleness, we turned to Malone, the broom maker, who was closing up shop in the big, ugly frame building near our house. It originally was Berea Congregational Church, and had been turned into a broom factory. It was about to be torn down. Malone gave us handfuls of colored leftover string that he had used to bind straw into brooms. We had an astonishing idea — we would break a record by wrapping our block, all around, with string.

It took from breakfast until dark, but we tied the 6-inch pieces of string on sidewalks and across the alley to perfectly wrap the block. Neighbors, I know, were thrilled by this idiotic stunt.

Days later, the old church/broom factory building where the string came from was torn down, level to the sagging wood floor. In the northwest corner was a gigantic safe. At least, we thought it was gigantic. It had once been the church safe, but church elders said there was nothing inside and no one remembered the combination to the locked door.

As kids, we were bugged. We hammered at the safe door handle. We stuffed firecrackers around the safe door, assured that we would blast it open, like yeggmen, as safecrackers then were called.

The old wood floor sagged more dangerously, day by day. One morning we all climbed on top of the safe. Just as it crashed through the floor, we leaped off, Down it plunged into the basement of the old church building. Now, we were certain, the safe door would burst open, yielding to us the gold of Midas.

The safe door, alas, remained intact. The site was leveled, leaving the safe in the bottom. It is still there, 10 feet down at West 5th and Oak streets. I don’t suggest you try to excavate it. Churches were never known to have great wealth.

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.