KA-BOOM !!

         From 1991 until 2000, I spent nine good years in the central North Carolina village of Coleridge as minister for three United Methodist Churches in the area.  "Downtown" Coleridge had once been a thriving mill village, but like with many of its counterparts, the post-World War II era marked the end of the mill's operation.  Consequently, the once thriving village with its mill, company store, company houses, bank, school with grades 1-12, volunteer fire department, at least two churches, including the United Methodist Church with its stained glass windows and  pipe organ settled into a kind of shadow of its former self.

     Many small towns have their lore about hush-hush happenings in the not too far removed past.  So it was in this  particular town.  One dark Winter night, there had been a HUGE explosion on the high school baseball field.  It opened a crater large enough to enclose a small automobile.  During my tenure there, one of the perpetrators trusted me with the story, as well as identifying several of his cohorts.  Although those men are now well past 70 years old (Now in 2017 some are in their 80's),  I have not divulged their identities . . . except to one other person who knows the story even better than I.  For his column in an area newspaper years ago, he interviewed (without attribution) yet another person who had been present that evening.  (Coincidentally,  two of the participants are now each other's brother-in-law; but that's all I will say about that.)

     Warren Dixon has given me permission to retell the story here, quoting extensively from a column he wrote for an area newspaper 15+ years ago :

   "The biggest New Year's celebration in Randolph County undoubtedly occurred in Coleridge on Dec. 31, 1954.
   The reason you've never heard about it is that the perpetrators have kept their silence over the years better than Mafia hitmen.
And even though the statute of limitations has run out on these festivities, the men still don't like to talk about it.  It's like they still fear that their Mommas might find out about their activities that night.  But one man has wilted under pressure and has consented to give this columnist a short version of what happened that New Year's Eve.  He wishes to remain anonymous and use only his initials, 'K.B.' which, as you will discover later, stands for 'Ka-Boom'.

    The boys involved were mostly high school students living in Coleridge.  It started innocently enough when they built a cabin in the woods (perhaps  of appropriated materials) near Deep River.
  
    Someone decided that the path to the cabin needed to be graveled and the boys set out to borrow some gravel from a local quarry.  They sneaked onto the property in a pick-up truck and while there noticed a shed at the edge of the property.  Being of a curious nature (and the door being unlocked), they went inside to check things out.

    There in the corner of the shed was a box of dynamite.  As one of the youths said later, the boys didn't want to leave it unattended and have it fall into the wrong hands.  So they took it back to the cabin for safekeeping, along with at least one load of gravel.  Later an older friend who worked at a  hardware store procured them some blasting caps and fuses.

    They pounded the caps on the dynamite with their pocket knives, not a real bright idea one boy later  admitted.  It seems that they also tested it on Deep River to make sure it would explode.  Then they decided to bring in the Coleridge NewYear in style.

     Someone located a 55-gallon drum, which they set in the middle of the pitcher's mound on the Coleridge ball field.  The boys started filling the drum with dynamite.  It was dark and none of them could see what the others were doing.

   'I put in  six or eight sticks,' K.B. admitted. 'Someone else said they stuck in 10, another  one said six.  We probably had 24 sticks in there when someone came up with a fuse.'

     The problem was the fuse was only about  two feet long   or at least that's how it looked in the dark.  But just as an alert kid was noticing this discrepancy, someone produced a cigarette lighter and the next sound they all heard  was a rapid 'whoosh.'

    They all ran with all the speed they could muster. The flash, said K.B., looked like '5,000 bug lights going off.'  The entire woods lit up like daylight.  Both dugouts on each side of the pitcher's mound were blown out, and shrapnel stuck in what was left of them.  All that remained of the mound was a Volkswagon-sized hole.

     Townspeople ran out of millhouses left and right.  One complained that the blast had knocked out 50 years of dust and soot from his ceiling.  Another said all his wife's whatnots had been knocked off their shelves.  One of the boy's mother exclaimed the next day that she thought Ft. Bragg was shooting off its artillery that night.

    Some of the shocked instigators didn't wait for a ride back to their houses, but walked (or ran) all the way home.
    It was a New Year's Eve that will forever live in the lore of Coleridge, the night the ballpark went up in smoke."

     I know that at least one of those ordnance experts of long ago reads these posts . . . and 'you know who you are.'  Fear not, your identity is safe.  

     Satchel