MEMORIAL DAY: EXLOSIVE MIXTURES
By Ed Barna
Memorial Day makes me think of the post-World War II G.I. Bill of Rights, which included the right to a college education. You have me here in Vermont, for better or worse, because my father came to Vermont to avail himself of that right, and because my mother, on her way to a well-paid executive career, decided Vermont would be a good place to start a family.
Both came from upward-struggling Hungarian families that came through Ellis Island in the 1890’s. My mother had been a star at the New Jersey high school from which she graduated early in the Depression: a girl whose mother cleaned other people’s houses but who became the valedictorian and the first-ever female president of the Athletic Association, having won letters in three sports. One of her teachers loaned her the money to go to Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, where she again lettered in three sports on her way to becoming a teacher. She had been “pinned” by the captain of the hockey team: she wore his fraternity pin, he would date no one else, and a future engagement would surprise no one.
Then came the day, back home, when her younger sister’s date (and future husband) Francis Barna had to be driven to the Bedners’ mini-farmstead by his older brother Bob. He had been in her class, but was now a chemical plant worker. They got to talking—and when she returned to Ursinus, she handed back the hockey captain’s fraternity pin. Explosive Mixtures, chapter one. She and my father would marry during the war, before he went overseas, at Langley Field in Virginia.
As a child, my father had fallen from a considerable height onto his head. In school, in Western Pennsylvania where his family had a produce farm until the Depression, he was considered retarded. The teacher put him in the back of the room with the other unreachables and unteachables.
Then one day in fourth grade Bob raised his hand: “Teacher, I know how to read now.” In fifth grade, he spelled down the school. Apparently he did have the family ability with languages, like his father, who could talk with anyone of any nationality at the Erie, Pennsylvania farm market, or the distant ancestor who supposedly led a peasant delegation to speak with Emperor Franz-Josef. Maybe he was like my late brother Walt, who didn’t talk until he was three because he didn’t want to unless he could speak in complete sentences; later he would ace his SAT’s, come within a point of doing so with his GRE’s, and master six languages, not counting computer codes.
Bob didn’t compete in athletics during high school because he had a hernia, and his Old World parents thought surgery was “going under the knife,” and wouldn’t consider it. He had to get a job to pay for an operation, and to get a job, he would have to be examined by the factory doctor, to make sure nothing was wrong with him. He would have to squeeze his stomach muscles together to pack in his hernia. So he did sit-ups, by the hundreds. He got the job, hired the best surgeon he could find, and was told afterward that the man had never seen as thick a stomach wall in his entire career. Those were the days when my father would walk to the Watchung Mountains on his days off, to save money, a roundtrip of 20 miles or more. Farm kids.
As the war went on, and the call was for fighters more than factory workers, he enlisted in the Air Force. As part of basic training, everyone took a number of tests, including something called the Alpha Speed. This was, he learned later, the IQ test of that era. He went home on leave, came back to Langley, and found his whole unit had gone to Germany, except for him and one other guy. “You’re going to navigator school.”
The plane loss rate for the Eight Air Force over Flak Alley in Germany, with its radar controlled guns, was about 90 percent. Instead, my father flew in a B-24 bomber halfway around the world and over the Himalayan “Hump” to fight in China. In all probability, that’s why I’m alive—though he went through enough rough stuff to win two Air Medals and two Distinguished Flying Crosses.
Meanwhile, instead of my mother joining “Rosie the Riveter,” she became the supervisor who helped make Rosie more efficient. She was a time-and-motion expert for Merck Pharmaceuticals, good enough so that after the war, they offered her $500 a week—a huge sum back then—to stay. But it was Bob’s turn to go to college, and besides, she wanted children.
After earning a master’s degree in German at Middlebury College (my mother earned her “third degree” at Porter Hospital, having three boys in four years), my father found that no one was interested as he had been in finding out how the great German civilization had become such a chamber of horrors. He never got to teach German. Moreover, he discovered he didn’t have enough credits in teaching courses to get certified. So for three years, while he took night classes, he was Captain Barna at Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia. She taught as well.
Then another Midd grad, Tom Whalen, principal at Brandon High School, invited the two of them back to Vermont. Many people in Brandon still remember my parents, either from BHS or from Otter Valley Union High School; at one or the other, they taught from 1955 to 1970.
Which brings us to Explosive Mixtures, chapters two and three.
Since BHS needed someone to teach chemistry, my father took on that job, before finally going to the English department. He always said one of the things that convinced him to hand off the chemistry duties was the day he left his best, most reliable student in charge of the lab while he took a quick break, and returned to find that the student had generated enough inflammable gas to create an explosion so powerful that no one could ever find any pieces of the beaker. Fortunately, none of the bits of glass made it into Bill Herzog’s eyes; he would become Otter Valley Union High School’s first Harvard student, and went on to a distinguished career in the ministry.
The part about no pieces of glass made perfect sense to his three sons, because they had figured out how to turn cherry bombs into hand grenades.
We would get a metal-topped glass jar (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!), make a hole in the lid with a nail, put the fuse through the hole, screw on the lid, and while the thrower held the grenade, his assistant would light the fuse. After a pause to make sure the grenade would explode just over the Nazi trench ahead of us, the thrower (usually me) would hurl it high into the air, and all of us would hit the dirt. If done with the right timing (it took practice), this would not only create a most satisfactory blast, it would be followed by the sound of myriad pieces of invisible glass pitter-pattering to the ground all around us.
Moral of the story: smart kids don’t get into trouble as often, but when they do, things can get very complicated.
Which brings us to Explosive Mixtures four and five.
When the old high school closed, there was the problem of what to do with the chem lab’s hoard of ancient substances. My father helped make those decisions, and I happened to be there the day he dealt with the sodium.
Sodium is a soft, silvery metal, but if anyone ever tells you he’s seen such a metal in nature, he’s lying. It’s so reactive that unless the artificially generated pure form is kept in something non-reactive like kerosene, it will vanish. The oversimplified explanation goes something like this: all the elements are happiest with eight electrons in their outer ring. The most reactive are the ones with either just one, which they are willing to get rid of on the molecular equivalent of Ebay with no bottom price, and the ones with seven, who are like Ebay collectors missing just one of a series, and willing to pay anything to get it. Sodium is a plus-one. Chlorine is a minus-one (in other words, a plus-seven), which is part of why there’s so much sodium chloride (salt) in the world-- and why chlorine has been used as a poisonous gas in wartime.
Knowing all this, my father took the jar of kerosene-soaked sodium metal behind the school, to a place overlooking the Neshobe River.
“Watch this,” he said. He dumped out a chunk of sodium, grabbed it with some paper towels he had brought for the occasion, and sent the mass fluttering into the river below. After a brief pause during which the stuff sank and soaked, there was a serious flash and a huge WHOMP as it exploded.
When we went back to the school, we entered through the boys’ side. Brandon High School, like many schools of its era, had separate entrances for the boys and girls, and different areas for them to store personal belongings and use “the basement.”
School directors in those days held the quaint belief that if you were simply to mix the sexes at the age when males were at the peak of their testosterone production and females had no direct personal experience with pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care, the results could be premature in all sorts of ways. Of course we know so much better.
In any case, that was Explosive Mixtures chapter five.
Ed Barna can be reached at [email protected]
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