Sigh, I wasn’t too bright as a kid, and my curiosity always got the better of common sense. I would have been a kid who, if I found a discarded radiation therapy machine in a Mexican dump, I would have unhesitatingly tried to break it open and been fatally irradiated by the nice blue stuff inside. If I ever came across an explosive device, I think I would have taken a hammer and chisel to it.
When I was in Seventh Grade, one of the kids in my shop class found a bullet, and we were able to remove the primer from the case, and while we huddled around one of the kids put it on the sidewalk, took a hammer and whacked it.
Of course, it made a loud and satisfying bang, but the metal jacket on the cap shot into the kid’s shin and got lodged inside, and they had to call an ambulance. It could have been me, or it could have gone in my eye or neck and nicked my carotid artery...anything. just another dodge of stupidity.
I was a Navy brat, and in my travels came across all kinds of military odds and ends in abandoned buildings, and I was constantly breaking things open just to see what was inside.
My dad had a Rolex he had purchased back in the early Sixties, and it stopped working so he put it in his dresser drawer.
He mumbled about it often, how much he wished he could afford to get it fixed, and...one day when I was about seven, I got the watch out of his dresser drawer, convinced I could fix it, but probably more curious about what was inside a watch. (that was around the age my parents gave all us boys watches, and it was a thing of pride and ownership. (They were just cheap Timex watches, but...a real watch!)
No way I was going to open MY watch up and look inside.
So, I took his Rolex down to the basement, seized it in my dad’s little red vise, and with the help of a hammer and screwdriver, managed to get the back off. No mean feat for a Rolex...
Anyway, I destroyed his watch in the process of trying to figure out how it worked and fix it.
I panicked and threw it in the trash.
For the rest of his life, I would see him rub his crew cut head with a hand, and hear my dad lament under his breath “I wonder what happened to that watch...”
I never got to tell him, never had the guts. He passed on a few years back, and now he knows...:)
Back in the '50s, three of us went "camping" in the New Jersey wilds. We brought our 22s with us and one guy gets the idea to throw a handful of cartridges into the campfire coals. Nothing. The wise guy says they're too far from the fire, reaches in to shove them further and one goes off.
He's grabbing his hand making chicken noises. We take a look and the shell casing is halfway in his finger. We take a camping knife and pry it out, dump iodine on the wound (more chicken noises) it, wrap it in a piece of cloth and continue camping.
Good times, good times.