What Was Your Great-Grandpa's Favorite Toy? Dynamite, Probably

Today, TikTok is filled to the brim with videos about the unmonitored childhoods that Gen Xers casually endured in the 1980s. Back then, kids were out, roaming the streets, setting off fireworks, cracking their heads on concrete playgrounds, swimming in factory waste and smoking a pack of Camels a day before they’d even turned 12. No small humans were tougher. Or, at least, that’s the popular narrative on social media.

And yet: Step aside, feral mall children of the 1980s, for local news archives tell us that there once existed generations of kids who make Gen X look like absolute wusses. These tiny maniacs grew up in the first half of the 20th century and, let me tell you, they were armed, dangerous and would not — though their lives literally depended on it — stop playing with deadly knickknacks. These kids had actual, bonafide TNT, nitroglycerine and — sure, why not? — teeny tiny weapons.

Did they get injured? Of course! Did anyone learn a lesson? Nope!

Please now allow me to regale you with tales of the toughest Bay Area offspring from last century and, of course, their weapons of choice.

The dynamite kids

Which is worse? Deciding at the age of 12 to “blow up the Berkeley school” with your friends using 12 sticks of stolen dynamite? (This was in 1936 and, thankfully, the Danville boy responsible got busted before his crew could light any fuses.) Or, heading to school in 1940, aged 13, and “roaming a crowded [Oakland] school playground during recess” waving a stick of dynamite around? It’s hard to say which child was more likely to murder someone, but the fact that Northern California kids like these two just happened to keep stumbling across this very specific type of explosive is even more of a head-scratcher.

In Chico in 1915, an 11-year-old named George Simpson saved the life of a 10-year-old girl who was about to bash two dynamite sticks on a rock to “play Fourth of July.” In 1922, a 6-year-old and a 3-year from Hayward did themselves serious damage after finding dynamite in one of their dad’s barns and lighting it up. Try not to think too hard on the fact that these kids, according to newspaper reports, were too young to read the “Danger!” warning on the box, but somehow old enough to proficiently light matches.

As late as 1959, kids were still in full Wile E. Coyote mode and trying to blow crap up. One dynamite explosion set off by teens in Walnut Creek that year broke a square-mile’s worth of windows, started a two-acre grass fire, blew a three-foot-deep hole in the ground and scared the crap out of people as far as 20 miles away. The dynamite had been stolen from a nearby storehouse. Rebels without a cause, indeed.

The ‘toy’ cannon lovers

Unless there’s a game in which actively attempting to hurt one’s playmates and pets is a thing, it’s really hard to figure out how exactly one “plays” with a toy cannon.

The 2013 book Britain’s Secret Treasures has some clues as to the operations of such items, stating that, back in the day, “Many households would have had musket powder that could be used to fire a toy cannon … Buckshot could have been used for cannonballs, or any household item that could be fashioned into a hard, round projectile … It is doubtful that these little cannon were sold with instructions, so a trial and error approach was required.”

And those errors, friends, could result in some very not good things. In 1903, a 14-year-old Berkeley boy named Will Bass managed to shoot his left index finger off with a toy cannon. (He was in the middle of trying to repair it at the time.) A single edition of the San Francisco Call newspaper later that year listed two separate incidents of boys getting severe face burns “while trying to find out why a brass cannon did not explode.” (One was an 11-year-old Tenderloin boy. The other was 8 and playing in Golden Gate Park at the time.)

Also in that issue of The Call? A 17-year-old Civic Center resident who had injured “the palm of his left hand terribly” after his cannon went off prematurely. (The exact same thing happened to a 14-year-old San Franciscan the following year.) All of which makes even Jarts — an unhinged “missile game” from the 1960s and ’70s — look positively tame.

This one kid who made nitroglycerine

I’m not going to be able to say this any better than Herb Caen did in a 1951 column for the San Francisco Examiner, so let’s just use his words:

Bob Zwieg, 15-year-old … made up his mind months ago that he was going to produce the biggest Fourth of July explosion in San Anselmo, where his family has a summer place. ‘Yup, I’m gonna make me some nitroglycerine’ he kept saying, and his mother humored him. ‘You go right ahead, sonny,’ she soothed as he pored over chemistry books and fiddled with laboratory doo-dads.

Wednesday morning he announced, ‘I’m ready to make the big noise.’ He put the gloop in a pot, began stirring it and — wham! The roar was still fading away while young Bob was being rushed to Ross Hospital with burns, singed eyebrows and slight shock. Anyway, it was the biggest noise in San Anselmo on July Fourth.

This is what happens when we underestimate the determination of our young people.

The ‘toy’ gun tinkerers

In 1903, one Clarence Ito of Grayson St. in West Berkeley found himself with a toy gun that was refusing to fire. He, naturally, responded to this by staring down the barrel of the weapon and pulling the trigger. According to an issue of The Call at the time, Clarence was left with “a big hole in his cheek, just a little below the eye, and it required the services of a physician and a large amount of thread to sew it together again.”

Thirty-five years later, toy guns and the kids that owned them were still doing each other dirty. A 1938 edition of The Examiner reported that a 14-year-old Hayward boy had a .22 caliber bullet lodged in his jaw after he and two friends decided to shove the ammo into an air gun and see what would happen. The injured kid’s condition was described as “not serious,” but would you want a bullet lodged in your jaw? I’m gonna go with nope.

The blasting cap hoarders

For those of you without a working knowledge of the history of demolition, blasting (or dynamite) caps were basically detonators designed to set off small explosions in order to ignite bigger ones. And apparently, in the ’30s and ’40s, they were just lying around willy-nilly.

In 1948, Tony Martin found a box of blasting caps on San Mateo’s Rockaway Beach. He would later tell staff of the Mission Emergency Hospital that he “knew they were dangerous after [he] read about them in the newspaper,” but decided to throw a rock at one anyway. He was treated for burns and shock.

Twelve-year-old Billy Douglas got off a little easier in 1937 after San Francisco cops raided his home to confiscate Billy’s large collection of dynamite caps. They removed the detonators without anyone getting hurt, and Billy was transparent about the fact that he had been planning a large explosion on his street (Geary, incidentally) for Fourth of July celebrations.

Even worse than Billy were the six high school friends who got shaken down by cops in 1947 after it was discovered that they had managed to collect a bunch of dynamite, a box of blasting caps and 10 pounds of blasting powder. The kids — students from Balboa High School and Horace Mann Junior High — had been stashing the explosives in their parents’ basements. No word on what exactly this band of hooligans were planning to do with it all, but the students all got off with warnings.

Take that, Gen X!