Remember these? I do. I do really, really well.

I bought one of these bastards with my own money- at a time when I didn’t have a lot of scratch to throw around. I think it was Confirmation money. I saw the commercials and thought, good lord, I HAVE to have one of those.

And then I got it home. I realized, there is barely a piece of concrete in the neighborhood. Our driveway was shingletab, the sidewalk gravel, the street was oiled crush&run. There was concrete in front of the front door. So I would stand there and throw the superball at the concrete, but instead of flying many feet into the air, it just bounced up and hit the ceiling of the porch, back down to the concrete, lather, rinse, and repeat. Think “Bam. Thump. Bam. Thump. Bam. Thump. Ow!” as it bounced back and forth and finally creamed me in the throat, or groin, or eye, or ear.

Without concrete, a superball isn’t a very fun toy. So I was disappointed I’d spent my $5 for something I couldn’t play with.

And then, I thought of the tennis ball cannon. Every American kid has made one, and mine was six soda cans and a can of hairspray.

So, I thought. The Superball is just a projectile waiting to happen. I searched and searched until I found a piece of thinwall tubing that fit the ball, though a bit snugly.

I had my neighbor braze a cap on one end.

I greased up the ball.

A tiny bit of hairspray was all it took to put that thing halfway into orbit. it seemed to take forever to come down, and by the time it had, Gogi Miller had come out of his house (having heard the noise through his open kitchen window) and wandered over to investigate.

The laws of conservation of energy were still a foreign country to us; we saw the Superball commercials and decided that if we could use the superball cannon to bounce the superball against a hard surface, that would give it MORE POWER! and it really WOULD go into orbit.

So we pointed it against the one hard object in the neighborhood, Gogi’s house. It was a red brick, and we figured the right angle would have Nasa looking to us for the trajectory information for the (then, upcoming) moon launch.

We greased the ball. We stuffed it down the tube. We sprayed in a LOT of hairspray. We jammed the end of the tube against the hard packed indiana clay. And we lit it.

Gogi miller’s mom lived in a house with her husband and two kids, none of which had any inkling of what it takes to keep a house. They lived in squalor but for the kitchen. SHe was a nurse, and the kitchen looked like an operating room. Nobody was allowed in there, and it was her sanctuary. She also collected bric-a-brac. Lladro, when she could afford it. Hummel. Precious moments. She even had a few small Dresden pieces.

The superball leapt through the open kitchen window like a Harrier homing in on a rabbit. The superball, propelled at supranormal speed, bounced around the kitchen for about a half hour, destroying everything.

She must have heard a noise because she walked into the kitchen to see the ball banging and crashing it’s way through her fortress of solitude, looked out the window to confirm the identity of the culprits (as if there had been any doubt) and picked up the phone to call Dad.

See, she needed permission to give me the smackdown she was about to deliver, and she didn’t want me coming home bruised and bleeding without warning dad. And did she ever deliver a smackdown.

At that time it wasn’t uncommon for people to beat each others kids. We often were deserving of a beating (hell, between the ages of six and fourteen, someone should have been assigned to me to beat me constantly) and any available grownup would deliver as need dictated.

So Gloria took a handful of wooden spoons out of the drawer, grabbed an armload of shoes, picked up her husbands belt, and went out into the front yard.

You would think a 350 lb woman would have difficulty keeping up with a pair of preteen kids, but you would be wrong. She beat us with spoons until the spoons were all busted to toothpicks. She threw shoes at us if we looked like we were getting away. She beat us with her husbands belt until the buckle flew off and the end of the belt delaminated into shreds., And then she took her bra off and beat us with that, the metal hooks on the end not quite cutting into our flesh like a flail.

And then she bandaged us up, and sent me home.

Dad whipped my ass when I got there, but it was like “ho, hum. A belt. Well, I guess I’ll go to bed now” After the Gloria smackdown I swore I was never gonna fear another beating again, and I didn’t until I was nearly twenty.

Number, I think, nine of the ten worst asswhippings I ever received.