Birth of the Blue Missile

I really didn't think yall would have much to say about these developments.
here is a sort of response to the mad scientist inquirey that I will actually insert earlier in the saga than her, but here is where I thought about it.

One of the readers has questioned my scientific background and whether or not I was an evil scientist. And since there are a lot of concert stories here I think it is appropriate to include a concert/science flashback from a time well before the duster. This should show that the mad scientist gene is one that shows up early.

The year is 1968, the location is rural Massachusetts.
When I was fifteen I was in the last year of attending summer camp. All of the parents in the area I grew up in, Long Island, sent their kids off to summer camp for a couple of months, so they could go traveling say to Europe.
Well I was not the athletic type, but tended to hang out at the science bunk or you could find me swimming or fishing. I did complete the seven mile swim to state road and back, I guess that’s athletic.

We always had fun at the science bunk pushing the envelope by testing what we could get away with. The science counselor was a young chemistry teacher from the Pittsfield area. One day he asked us what we might want to do over the next week or so. He planned our activities out and then had them approved by the camps vice director. I responded to the question with “hey lets make some liquor” He said that while it was well within his abilities he wasn’t going touch that request unless I could talk Bob into it. I went right then and found Bob who was the vice director, and told him we wanted to make some liquor in the science bunk, was it OK? He looked at me and said I don’t think you’ll be able to, but Ok. Under one condition, you have to let me taste it before any of the campers, for safety’s sake. I said that would be acceptable and that we also needed say some apricot juice to make it out of. He said he would tell the kitchen staff to let us have whatever we needed.

I went back and told the science counselor who said he would go by the Corning plant and get a bunch of ‘seconds’ glassware they gave away to teachers for free. They just threw the ‘seconds’ into the dumpster for crushing and recycling anyway. He also said he just happened to have a fractionating tower he built when he was in college. This would help.
He came back with four or five large one gallon glass containers and some brewers yeast. We built water valves for the tops; we had spent a lot of time blowing and bending glass tubing for various projects, and put up about five gallons of apricot juice to ferment. Three or four days later we took all of the juice and ran it through the still.

The still consisted of a large 2 liter Erlenmeyer flask as the base and at its top connected by a stopper, was the fractionating tower which fed a very large Liebeg condenser being cooled by running water. The tower had a thermometer stuck through the stopper at its top to monitor the temp so as to get the highest alcohol content possible. When we were done we had about a half a gallon of approximately 195 proof alcohol. We tested it by weighing on a triple beam a set amount in a watch glass, then burning off the alcohol, and weighing what was left. He explained to us that you could not drink alcohol that pure it would make your toung expand and could cut off your air supply. In order to make something we could drink we filtered the rest of the apricot juice through activated charcoal and layers of filter paper. What came out was a clear golden fluid that tasted like apricots. We then combined it with the grain alcohol to make about 90 proof apricot brandy. In order to split it up equally we had collected washed out empty ketchup bottles. We put up about twenty of them. I also took some and half filled a large test tube about one inch in diameter and eight inches long, and stuck a cork in it.

I then took the ‘sample’ to Bob who was directing the rehearsing of the senior play in the theater. I walked up on the stage and handed him the sample and told him we were done. He looked at me with a smile, and looked at it and said “Well let’s give it a try”. At which time he pulled the cork and downed the whole tube in one motion. His face turned a very pleasing shade of bright red, He obviously could not breath for a moment and when he caught his breath he asked me with a very shocked look on his face and only a whisper of a voice “How much of this did you make?” I told him we had twenty ketchup bottles mostly filled and we were going to take it to the concert a few days later. He was a man of his word and said well ok and walked off.

The day of the concert we returned from a group fishing trip to Glouster where we were fishing for cod. We had left the day before and had gotten up very early to get to the boat. It was a half day trip and by 10:00 we had caught nothing. The captain said he wanted to try one more spot a hole he knew about. He had one of those fish finders with a paper printout and when he got over the hole it looked like a solid mass of fish. He thought it might be on the fritz but we all dropped our lines. After a few minutes most of us thought we were hung on the bottom. One of the mates came over to me and tried to lift the pole and said it was just a large fish, cod always felt like dead weight. A couple of guys brought their fish in before me and they were in the fifty to sixty pound range, so was mine. The counselor arranged for an extra hour and at the end of our time we had caught twelve hundred pounds of cod.

So now we are back at camp just in time to get cleaned up and leave. We cleaned up, got our supplies and left for the Tangelwood pops festival on the camp bus. The reason I mentioned the fishing trip is that Doug the fishing counselor was going to go to the concert as well, but the kitchen staff made him clean all of the fish which had followed us back to camp in a large pickup truck. As we left we all waved to him, as he was waist deep in very large fish on the porch of the kitchen. Boy what a concert he missed.

For you see the concert was the event of the year in that neck of the woods. It was BB King, Janis Joplin, The Association, Iron butterfly, And Joshua’s light show from the Fillmore East. The refreshments were more than enough to keep us well adjusted to the point that when we returned at midnight the guys were literally swinging from the cabin rafters. I have two memories from the concert first the fact that Iron Butterfly’s ‘In A Gadda Da Vida’ was the last song and went on for a wonderfully long time, And Janis’s appearance. You see we were drinking, but her appearance blew us all away. First Big Brother and the Holding Company did a set of their own stuff which was pretty good. During their set there was a single stool behind a mike on a stand at the very front of the stage. On the stool was what looked like a bottle of Southern Comfort sitting on it. Now they were far enough back on the stage that they didn’t knock it off. When they called for, and introduced Janis, she walked onto the stage right up to the stool. She said hello to the crowd and then proceeded to down the entire bottle in one fell swoop, and went right into ‘Me and Bobby Mc Gee’. As I said we were blown away, we didn’t think that was humanly possible! So even then it was cool to be the mad scientist.

more later
Andrew