An American Lion

I never went fishing without a stick of dynamite and a gun, sir

Throughout my life, dynamite has played an important role in shaping not only my destiny but my choices and my values. Where some people have important experiences with religion, family, faith, love or law enforcement, my most important experiences have all involved dynamite. That's a strange thing to say, I will admit. Many children did not have the same upbringing that I did.

My own children fail to understand that I am a product of a broken home--Father and mother may have raised me, but there were other women in Father's life, or so I am told. Peej nods his head and starts to say something about this, but then he goes silent and has a curious smile on his face. I can't explain it. Not only did Father disapprove of my page-boy styled hair, he insisted that my mother justify it in writing.

She did not comply.

But one thing I do know--he was too afraid of her to shave my head.

Growing up the son of a famous defense industrialist meant that my childhood would be vastly different from the one most men my age experienced.

I was born in 1944, and by the time I was 9 years old, I had already learned how to insert a blasting cap into a stick of dynamite and set the fuse, then light it and run.

I was introduced to the world of machine guns, large vehicles, and defending America. It was a different time, and in America, when you were wealthy, certain things were acceptable for certain types of people. In many cases, you'll find that this was an entirely different country if you are able to suspend a little disbelief and look at American society as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. It's one thing for a father to bring home a toy gun for his son. It's another thing entirely when your Father makes vehicles that mount guns that sometimes have defects in them and your Father decides to bring them home rather than discard them.

I'll never forget the time I brought a Thompson submachine gun (defective magazine spring, sticky bolt handle) to school for show and tell. The police said that my Tommy gun was the nicest one they had ever confiscated from a perpetrator. It was more than just the guns, however.

Father's company, at that time, was heavily involved in flame throwing vehicles, projectile firing weapons such as recoilless rifles, and mounted chemical weapons dispensers. The lethality of these weapons, and their violation of basic laws of warfare and those of the Geneva Accords, put Father on a collision course with none other than President Harry S Truman, the first Democrat who tried to have Father killed outright. Truman sent thousands of men, in dozens of planes and ships, after my Father and they hunted him all over the world.

Truman told anyone who would listen that my Father was a monster who had profited from what they then called the Second World War and accused him of stealing the Admiral Hassenpfeffer. Never mind that Father had a document, signed by President Roosevelt himself, that ordered him to North Africa and granted him lifelong ownership and use of any Axis-flagged vessel that my Father deemed necessary for transporting captured German war material.

They hunted him through the Straits of Magellan, they chased him to an island in the South Pacific near Borneo and the only thing that saved Father was a canoe filled with orphans and old ladies came by just as the US Navy was beginning to fire on the Admiral Hassenpfeffer with 12-inch guns.

Only Father's ability to bribe local officials, sail the Admiral Hassenpfeffer with incredible skill, and his ability to beat a man down with his bare hands saved him.

This experience probably shaped Father as well. I do not know. He will not speak of his time on what her calls "the lam" because he is probably either extremely proud of that time of his life or ashamed of it. Then there is that third option we've come to know and love--he's forgotten about it, but if his mind suddenly snaps, he could remember it and turn it into something profane and horrible in the middle of a public place. It was during this time that he shaved his head, started wearing striped pajamas everywhere, and he even started using heroin or morphine to get himself psyched up.

People talk about Graham Greene and his use of opium. Goodness, Greene was a piker compared to Father. Father would roll poor little Mr. Greene out of an opium den, take his place in the center of the room, and shut the place down for a weekend on one of his benders. Once Truman left office, Father was able to reconcile his weapons development with the more dictator-friendly Eisenhower Administration after finding out exactly how much campaign donation money they needed to have deposited into exactly the right accounts.

Father went from being Public Enemy Number Three (J. Edgar Hoover refused, out of envy and spite, to make him P.E. Numero Uno) to being the number one supplier of riot control and peaceful demonstration vehicles in the world, behind Union Carbide, General Motors, the Disney Corporation, Ma Bell, and Pan Am. Those companies may have sold more vehicles, but only Father could devise a riot control vehicle that fired sticks of dynamite into crowds of protesters AND kept the crew inside the vehicle safe and secure. As the development of the Rogers Flying Thunderstick Launcher Series of vehicles proceeded into the mid-1950s, my fascination with dynamite grew out of the fact that Father named me the number one tester of dynamite throwing slings.

I was a frisky boy when it came to testing things. I would test something for hours on end, trying to get it to break. We installed a dozen different types of launcher on our estate, near what used to be an old quarry, and we tested them endlessly. Saturdays, most boys went to the movies and played catch with their fathers.

On Saturdays, my Father and I ate cheese and tomato sandwiches and launched short-fused sticks of dynamite at stationary objects with short-arm catapults and elastic-band launching devices. Some of the designs were duds and we would have to duck down and hide behind the small concrete blast wall that was hastily built to save our lives. Some of the better designs threw the sticks of dynamite too far, and passing cars would have their tires and windows blown out by the concussion.

That's where the word "skadigetty" comes from--Father would scream "SKADIGETTY!" whenever a stick of dynamite landed short. That would mean that I was to stop dancing and laughing at the destruction and scramble into the blast bunker. To this day, whenever someone tells me to skadiggety, I stop dancing and flatten myself on bare concrete. In point of fact, the majority of this dynamite was left over from what used to be known as "World War I."  

And, what many people probably do not remember, and I know I didn't, was that the surplus in explosives from what used to be known as the War Between the European States resembled in scope and size the vast surplus of unexploded ordnance from the US Civil War, which used to be called "The War of States Rights and Secession."

The cost of storing that Civil War ordnance was so prohibitive that the US Government wisely decided that it would be best put to use by farmers throughout the country who were too poor to dig their own ditches. Hence, great numbers of US farmers were blown up by their own incompetence while trying to blast open drainage ditches they could not afford with government dynamite that was already starting to go bad. But farmers weren't the only ones who got free truckloads of dangerously unstable dynamite from the Federal Government. Father put his name in and received more of it than anyone in coastal New England.

The only catch was, he had to figure out how to get it to a handful of rather unpopular dictators in a way that would keep the CIA and the US Congress from finding out--in those days, everything really top secret was handled by the Hoover people in a special building called "FBI Headquarters." By the time Father was able to distribute several thousand crates of this dynamite, it was pretty much useless.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to make a few hundred thousand dollars, Father decided to skim some of the dynamite off the top and remanufacture a few dozen crates by creating what he called Near-Dynamite. The sticks were cut in half, glued to dummy half sticks, repapered, and sold as full sticks. This is called "cutting the stash" and drug dealers adopted this practice much later on. Once we were able to remanufacture the dynamite and double our allotment, it was time to find a way to make money. We had to find a third world country desperate enough to buy it. Mexico bought quite a bit, as did Cuba and Paraguay, two countries that I have fond memories of. Father would bring the Admiral Hassenpfeffer into Havana Bay, gingerly offload a few pallets of dynamite to the Batista people, and then we would sail away with cash in hand and the distant puffs of chemically-reacting unstable dynamite wafting away from shore.

Father would laugh and punch me in the arm, in his curiously profane Irish way, and show his bare backside to passing ships. (yes, Miranda has that problem as well--perfectly shy and retiring in the real world, but profane and given to showing a butt cheek to whoever dares pass the Admiral Hassenpfeffer without lowering a pennant or flag out of respect). Now, my children have never really been around dynamite, at least that I know of. It was nothing for me to be around dangerous vehicles, poisonous chemicals, or loaded weapons.

If something bad happened, there was always a hospital nearby. I once got a lung full of mustard gas that Father wasn't supposed to own. Instead of going to the hospital and revealing to several million panicked residents of the upper Northeast that my Father was testing a riot control vehicle that could deploy chemical weapons, I sucked it up, got on a plane, and was treated at a suburban Pittsburgh hospital for exposure to chlorine from a badly-maintained above-ground pool.

Wink, wink.

About eighty crates of the better dynamite found its way into our possession.

Father refused to cut the good stuff down as that would ruin our personal stash. He would remind me to not hand out our prime blended dynamite to the hired help or to passing strangers. I was responsible for anything that was blown up near our property. So long as I told the truth about the things that I destroyed, flattened, razed, or burned to the ground I was alright. That's a lesson I've imparted to my own children.

They're never in trouble if they tell me the truth, straight out. Even today, when I see some children playing with matches or gasoline, I'm reminded of my idyllic youth, firing short-fused sticks of dynamite high into the air near the duck pond near our estate, killing hundreds if not thousands of fish, deer, ducks, geese, and squirrels with well-aimed shots. Ah, the memories.