A Denver adventure of the brothers Gee
We lived in Denver at 433 Corona Street. The House was a duplex and in the back there
was a rather large tree. We built a
treehouse. We had to climb the tree in
order to get to the treehouse. To facilitate
getting things up to our treehouse we decided to install a method so that we
would not have to climb the tree and carry the material up to the
treehouse. Being the inventive boys
that we were, we attached a pulley to one of the limbs. Through the pulley we strung a sash cord
rope. This was a cotton rope that was
woven and approximately 3/8 of an inch thick.
This worked well and we could attach whatever we wanted to the end of
the rope and pull it up and thus build our treehouse.
One of us thought of the idea to attach a cast iron window
weight
to one end of the rope. Thus we could
haul it up to the top where the pulley was attached and then let go of the rope
and it would fall to the ground. Thus
we became bombardiers and had fun raising the window weight and then letting it
drop.
We found that we could cause the window weight to drop but
not hit the ground by stepping on the rope and thus impeding it in its flight
downward. Now comes the interesting
part. Martell decided to see how our
window weight bomb looked as it dropped from its perch next to the pulley. We measured exactly the position the weight
would be as it dropped and was impeded in its progress by one of us holding our
foot on the end of the rope. In the
foggy recesses of my memory I do not remember whose foot was supposed to be on
the end of the rope. Nevertheless, the
window weight dropped as we yelled “bombs away”. Martell was directly under the area where the window weight would
reach its final destination.
Unfortunately, the foot was not placed properly on the end of the rope
and our window weight bomb hit Martell squarely in the face just under his
eye. Of course this was not pleasing to
Martell and he started to bleed. We ran
quickly into tell mother about the accident.
She was upset and rightly so. So
being the Boy Scout that I was, I put a pressure bandage on Martell's
laceration and mother made me take him on the streetcar to downtown Denver to
the doctors office where Martell was attended to.
Fortunately Martell did not suffer a blow-out fracture of
the orbit or a fracture of the zygoma.
As far as I am able to ascertain Martell did not have any deleterious
effects from his heroic effort to observe the falling bomb. We were wise enough never to try that again.
A window weight is a 14 inch long 2 inch in
diameter piece of cast iron with a hole in one end.
