Enjoying the great vids and your memories Stan and just had to smile at your dynamite story. I had my share of bangs and experiments but my Dad had me beat by a long way. When he was 16 he spent one summer holiday on my Grandfathers farm following around a road gang that were building a municipal road through the farm and down a big escarpment. The foreman who was young and didn't have kids of his own enjoyed the company, then rather unwisely took dad under his wing and showed him a bit about blasting. He also did not keep too close a check on his supplies.
Holiday over Dad heads back to boarding school down in Nairobi. He started real gently. Small unexplained bangs around the playing fields. Then getting cocky did a couple of small ones underneath the WW1 wooden huts mounted on short stilts that were some of the classrooms, just before they went in for a lesson, with a longish fuse. Chaos everyone rushing out...great fun.
Friends in the know wanted bigger, better, bangs. Dad thought he had a handle on things, knew all about dynamite and obliged. Fortunately he had the sense/blind luck to put the next one under an adjoining empty classroom, and not the one they were just going into.
When it blew it was spectacular. Massive hole through the floor, all the windows out and certainly a major diversion. Luckily no one was hurt, except for some eardrums, and the search was on for the perpetrator. Instant expulsion.
Dad had unfortunately been expelled from his previous school, another story, and knew that his father would be heading down to pick him up from school. My Grandfather was a pretty fearsome character, certainly to me, and I am certain that Dad was not looking forward to this at all. It was late 39 the war had just begun and the Air Force was recruiting. Dad and a buddy headed for town and volunteered. He lied about his age and by the time his Father had arrived, had been accepted as a pilot recruit.
He was the youngest ever pilot on his first Fighter Squadron when he checked out of Flight School, and was promptly nicknamed Pee-Wee, (a long time before Mr Herman). He probably escaped the worst of what his Dad may have had in store for him, though I am sure that his new career path through the invasion of Crete, North Africa, Ceylon, Burma and invasion of Europe provided him with all the bangs he wanted and probably then some.
It certainly was instrumental getting him into the air, and later into the airlines, then me, probably my two boys as well. So I may just owe it all to a bit of dynamite in the wrong/right place.