Iolan Larry Wolken and I had a conversation the other day, with it touching on a subject Humboldt’s Ellery Robertson also mentioned this week.
The stimulating topic? How years ago we shot rubber bands, often with accuracy and enough velocity to leave a painful albeit short-term welt on young bodies.
When all three of us were young, we made do with what was at hand, and a favorite was a little toy gun we made, each a little differently but still similar, that used rubber bands for ammunition.
It sounds simple enough, but it took some ingenuity for a kid with limited resources to put together a functional rubber-band launcher.
To start with, you had to find a piece of wood better than a foot long that was just the right dimensions and not too difficult to handle. The inch or so square supports from corners of produce crates worked well. The longer the gun’s barrel the longer the range, but we were at the mercy of what was available.
The firing mechanism was a wooden clothes pin, one of those with a spring in the middle that held the working end closed. After taking the clothes pin apart, one side was tacked to the barrel, or, with more sophisticated guns, on a perpendicular handle. If the rubber band was to be stretched to the max, once the clothes pin was put back together you wrapped a smaller rubber band around it to increase tension.
Ammunition came from innertubes.
Nowadays I don’t think any automobile tires have innertubes, but in the ’50s they were common.
In Humboldt, the Harwood brothers’ service station on South Ninth Street always had a few worn-out tubes they were willing to give to an enterprising kid. The next step was to slice off bands about an inch wide.
That done and with firing apparatus in hand, you were set.
Sometimes I got a little more inventive, as did Wolken. By attaching several of the wooden guns to a two-and-four, you could fire several rubber bands in quick succession. Or, as I once did, you could arrange them to fire all at once with a lever over the triggers.
As munitions experts, we didn’t have promising futures, but by creating the rubber-band guns we filled many a summer day.
How to send rubber bands sailing
