How About A Quit Smoking Challange

Still going strong here two months in.

Pat, your story reminded me of one. I was working in the Grumman Low Speed Wind Tunnel. We had a shop attached to the building and we usually congregated there a couple times per day for a cup of coffee and a butt for those that smoked (I did not at that time). "Danbo," one of our instrumentation technicians (there is a story in itself how his name, Dan, morphed into Danbo) always had a butt with his coffee. My brother, who was an Aerotest engineer at the time, dove on the U.S.S. San Diego, an armored cruiser that sank off the coast of Long Island during WW I. He brought back some .30-'06 ammo from a small arms locker inside the ship. I had pried some bullets from the cartridges and laid the powder on a piece of paper to dry for a few days. I applied a match to some and it flared up pretty good. It was just sitting there on my workbench when a brainstorm struck me one morning.

I cut a small block of wood, mic-ed one of Danbo's Marlboros, drilled a hole through the block, and then split the block through the hole. I grabbed one of his butts from the pack, which he always had on his workbench, mounted it into the jig in a vise, and then plucked about an inch of tobacco from the butt. I poured about 1/2 inch of gunpowder into the opened end of the butt and then packed it closed with 1/2 inch of tobacco. I placed it back into the pack with the filter end sticking out about 1/2 inch. It looked real good.

Well, we all gathered in the shop, waiting for Danbo. He walks in, goes to his workbench, and pulls out the loaded butt. Instead of sitting down at the table with us, he stood there for a minute kibbitzing with us. Finally, I said, "Danbo, aren't you gonna sit and have coffee?" "Nah," he said, "I gotta take a ****," in his heavy Queens, N.Y. accent. He turned and walked out. We just shrugged our shoulders, silently bemoaning a lost opportunity.

The crapper was at the end of a U-shaped hallway. Two minutes later, we heard a muffled Ralph Kramden-like bellow, "WOOOOOOOOOWWWWW!."

We were rolling around, laughing our balls off. In rushed Danbo, hollerin', "You fuckin' idiots!" "What's wrong, Danbo?" somebody asked. Danbo started laughing so hard that tears were coming.

He said, in his thick accent, "There I was, relaxing on the crapper, leaning back against the wall, my pants around my ankles, taking a drag on my butt. All of a sudden, Mount Vesuvius erupts two inches from my nose." We were laughing uncontrollably at that point. He continued, "That ain't all! The whole flaming end of my butt fell off, bounced off the head of my dick, and started a fire in my shorts!"