When I was growing up M-80s were that strong and
even cherry bombs were nothing to sneeze at.
There is actually a pic on the internet
of some guy from Thailand who was holding an
M-80 in his mouth to light it and it went off,
turned his face inside out, horrible.
We blew up lots of stuff when I was a kid, never
got hurt but came close a couple of times, we used
to throw smoke bombs, had one go off in my hand once,
quit fooling around after that.
Yeah, we respected M-80’s. But we had a lot of fun with them.
When I was about 6, we were standing on the sidewalk on E. 14th st. in Oakland watching a labor day parade, and a guy about 5 feet from where we were standing lit a firecracker of some kind and dropped it into a beer can, and handed it to a woman standing next to him. I turned away before it blew, and when I turned back the woman’s arm was severed above her wrist and her hand was nowhere in sight.
That ended Oakland’s labor day parades.