Posted on 06/17/2017 3:31:01 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A person looking to sell a 1913 World War I device at a South Whitehall Township church yard sale attracted police instead of buyers.
Township police were called Friday morning for the suspicious package at the Asbury Church, 1533 Springhouse Road, police Sgt. Ron Scholler said.
A person not known to the church or police had brought a 1913 World War I device to sell. In an abundance of caution, the Allentown Bomb Squad was called to handle the item, Scholler said.
By 3 p.m., the bomb squad had taken the device away and the scene was cleared.
The church's yard sale runs until 8 tonight, and resumes 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday.
Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.
He once gave me a spring loaded aluminum box filled with aluminum shavings that were tossed out of airplanes back in WW-II that were designed to throw off enemy radar.
Anyway, I had it sitting on my stereo equipment when I had a party at my apartment and somebody picked it up and tripped the lever that sprung it open and sent the aluminum contents all over my living room........
...betcha that reporter could get a four paragraph story out if it...
Wow, you must have been really chaffed.
Shells from WW1 are still being unearthed in the fields of France and Belgium to this day...and once in a while they still explode.
Several years ago a (live) 3 inch shell from WW1 was unearthed in a backyard close to the Great Lakes naval base. Not sure if they ever figured out how it got there.
The random ordnance memories for this Army brat ...
When I was four or five years old Nick, I found a live `pineapple’ grenade in Germany, 10+ years after the war. Eventually my Mom took it away from me, mothers can be real killjoys.
Less than ten years later, some kids I knew at Benning wandered out on a mortar range. A couple of them learned the hard way that you aren’t supposed to pick up `dud’ rounds. So maybe Mom was right.
Pop brings home a Claymore mine dummy as homework and plays Sousa band music on his Sony reel-to-reel to relax while getting to know Mr. Claymore.
He gets you sharpshooter and marksman qualified in small-bore at age 12.
You show up at your third civilian junior high school and some officious butthole asks you if you’re a `dove’ on the war. Once you figure out what he means, you say, “I support my country and my Dad.” so you sit by yourself at lunch.
Sniff
They had a lot of cool stuff behind glass at the WWII museum at Ft. Benning—MG 42 machine guns, sub guns, `potato mashers’, rifles, Lugers, Nazi flags, and tanks you could climb on and into, etc.
Did it look like a science project by a muslim yute?
My W-4 brother in law after Viet Nam riverboats, then diving finally went to EOD. His final deployment was on a carrier for Gulf War 1.
After retirement, he did contract work all over the US cleaning up old ordinance. His final job was in Bosnia a couple of years ago training their EOD teams how to keep from getting killed as this stuff was cleaned up. So he eventually stopped getting his hands dirty and worked in a classroom. I called and talked about Camp Croft where he worked for a couple of years cleaning up. They'd take the metal detectors (searched in grids so the whole place was surveyed), find the stuff, dig it up and the reward days was when they got to blow it all up!.
As he tells it, diving (based on the stories I've heard from him) is a much more dangerous profession to go into after service as "guys who used to work for me....."
From a web FAQ that Camp Croft in upstate SC is discussed (it was turned over to the state in 1949 and is now a state park).
"More than one veteran has told me it was very difficult to turn in ammo, so if you didn't expend it during the training session, you dug a hole and buried it or otherwise got rid of it. That certainly accounts for some of the larger finds. There are only two "underground bunkers" I know of. One was a "gun shed" in the 28th ITB area which was used to store 37mm and 57mm antitank weapons. It is still around, but the current owners have no idea if it is empty or not.
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