MORE MEMORIES
Written by Henry N. Patterson
December 1996

When we moved to 12th Street I had no one to play with so I had to find things to do. I found a dump about a half a mile from our new home that fascinated me. There were no Public Dumps in Grand Junction at that time and people from town would clear out their place and dump it there. There were no signs and the land apparently belonged to the county so it was fair game. About four years ago I visited Grand Junction and drove past this area. There was no dumping but sage brush and grease wood were from 6 to 10 feet tall all over it. Across the road are a group of very expensive homes. I would go there from time to time just to see what was there. There was one short period of time when I was 11 or 12 that I went there very often to find bottles. Medicine bottles about 6 inches tall were best but shorter ones would do if they had corks. In fact the corks were all important. Plastic screw ones had not been thought of then.

Now I needed some carbide and that would come from Bart Lynches Hardware store in the two hundred block of Main just west of the old Krohn Funeral Home. Bart was a locksmith and gunsmith. He had a small hardware department but also handled guns and fishing equipment. I visited his place many times when I was in the 5th and 6th grades at the old Lowell School. I liked to watch him make keys and repair guns. It was a fascinating place for a little boy. There were lots of guns in the gun racks and hanging from the ceiling were many, many real old guns that people had loaned him to display. My father had one there which was an old Flint Lock Squirrel rifle from Kentucky. I tried to get it back after Bart died but there were no records kept so I was unable to get it. On the east side of his store he had show cases of pocket knives and fishing supplies. One case was of fishing flies and it was very colorful to me. When I was old enough to go to Grand Mesa to fish I bought many of those colorful flies but found out the fish would rather just have an old earthworm.

That doesn't take care of the carbide. Carbide is used to make acetylene gas for welding. It was also used for miners lamps and bicycle lamps and probably for some of the early motorcycle and automobiles. I would like to have back some of the many bicycle lamps that I threw away when dry cell batteries got plentiful for flashlights. The lamps had a compartment for carbide and another compartment for water. You would turn a small valve to let the water drip on the carbide and it would make gas for you to light. Miners lamps were the same principle. But that was not what I would use carbide for. When you are young and growing up whether you are a boy or a girl you learn things from your peers that they don't teach in school and even your parents don't tell you. This is one of the things I learned. If you put a little water in a bottle and drop in a little carbide, push the cork in tight, in just a little while there will be enough gas made to force out the cork. It would make a loud pop and it was fun. But you had to be careful and not lose the cork or the game would be over. You could take several bottles and line them up and put in the carbide and push in the corks and call them canons firing against the advancing enemy. Or you could take a small bottle and target shoot. Keeping your cork was a problem as sometime they went quite a distance. The bottles were made of pretty heavy glass and I heard of no one getting hurt. A ten-cent bag of carbide would probably last two or three days if the corks held out.