Wednesday, September 23, 2015

High Explosives

If, while cleaning out your late grandfather's house, you find a souvenir live hand grenade from WWII, please do not bring it to the police station. It gets everybody all excited and causes them to run outside in inclement weather, and it makes cops point guns at you until they figure out what your intentions are. It also makes the bomb squad guys have to come in on their days off. Call us; we'll come to you.

4 comments:

Don said...

A few years ago, someone in my town was having a yard sale

They told a friend, who went out to his barn and brought a bunch of Grandpa's Korean War Army equipment to the sale.

One of the shoppers looked in the Army backpack and recognized what it was, put the backpack down and backed away slowly.

Yep, about 20 lbs of Korean War vintage dynamite and blasting caps.

At least they left it in the yard. The fire department handled the evacuations and controlled the scene for about 6 hours. It is hard to find a bomb squad on a Sunday morning in a rural area.

charles said...

It is amazing that Grandpa kept that stuff with grandkids around, no?

Rita said...

I've attended two universities at which a clean up of the chemistry cupboards resulted in a slow backing away followed by frantic calls. Heard about both cases while attending the mandatory employee safety talk.

sp77 said...

A few years ago, my mom moved into a historic home with a ton of built-in cabinets. She found a grenade and some other questionable WWII souvenirs under a drawer.

Since her new home was directly across the street from the local police station, she walked over to report her find. Some blowhard gave her a long "Look lady, are you sure it's a grenade? We hate to get he bomb squad out from the state Capitol if it's just some kid's toy..."

So she walked back home, took some photos and brought them back. Same guy freaked right out and called the bomb squad. She admits that she was momentarily tempted to bring the actual grenade back to the guy who blew her off, but figured that wouldn't go so well.

My Jewish stepdad decided to keep the gravy boat with the swastika hallmark.