Bombs Away

 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.

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[1] A window weight is a 14 inch long 2 inch in diameter piece of cast iron with a hole in one end.