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Teenage Tear Gas
Piner High School Class of ’79 Yearbook
In high school, I was a horrible student in chemistry. Okay, maybe not “horrible”, but a C student. I was still very glad that my chemistry teacher, Mr. Buff, came to my 45th class reunion last weekend. He retired from teaching over twenty years ago, but he’s still active and well.
I had to ask him if he remembered the tear gas.
In my junior year, Mr. Buff showed us how to make a relatively tame kind of tear gas. Far from deadly, it still made our eyes water and our lungs burn a bit. Being high school guys, we challenged each other to see how long we could stay in the room with the doors and windows shut.
I asked Mr. Buff if he recalled this, and he did indeed. And he told me that if he was teaching now, he never would have done such a thing.
Then I told him a story he didn’t recall. We were allowed to choose individual experiments from a book. I decided to make Sterno. I mixed the ethanol and methyl alcohol and acetone and other stuff in a beaker, and the solid Sterno formed. I pulled some out and put it on the asbestos pad. And set it on fire.
As the Sterno burned, more formed in the beaker. Being the barely C student I was, I reached into the beaker. I tossed the new Sterno on the burning Sterno. And the flame ran up onto my hand. I waved my hand above my head and fortunately, though the alcohol on my hand burned, my hand didn’t.
Mr. Buff seemed a bit aghast that he let this take place in his classroom.
There were a lot of unsafe things that happened in classes back in the day, particularly in the shop classes.
I can’t help wondering if forty-five years ago, students’ fingers were in greater danger, but their minds were a little safer. What do you think, Ricochet readers?
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Mr. Buff! Love the name and the story. It’s a wonder all us boys didn’t die before the age of 20.
Our chemistry guy was Mr. Strack. He taught us how to blow stuff up real good.
Gratuitous sidetrack- Our shop teacher, Mr. Zerby, was missing a couple of fingers.
Too bad there wasn’t more of the lead-up, but I couldn’t find anything better.
Science teacher in Jr High was Mr Doyle, he was well-known for always jingling keys in his pocket.
The metal shop teacher was intact, the older wood shop teacher was missing a few, and his thumbs could bend back at unbelievable angles. His name was Mr. Bate, whose school joke name should be obvious.
Although I took both metal shop and wood shop, which included making a table for my mother with a lathe-turned central post, my only “incidents” occurred in science/physics class. Due to a 2.2 Kv (I think it was) transformer for the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment.
Chem teachers were the best! Mr. Bergdoll, like your Mr. Strack, taught us how to blow stuff up real good. Like throwing metallic sodium into the pond.
We didn’t make tear gas in my high school chemistry class, but we found out the tubing used for burner gas could be pressurized with water, turning them essentially into water balloons. You held one end, filled it, then grabbed the other end. When you chucked it into the hallway, water sprayed from both ends, the tube sometimes spinning around as it emptied. Of course, this was when the teacher was not around.
Ah, the fun old days . . .
Sounds like y’all innovated on your own.
In 8’th grade my science teacher gave us a little puddle of mercury to pass around the class. That explains a little. I still remember how heavy and strange it felt in my hands.
My 1’st grade teacher gave me a 12v power supply. She said I was the only one who ever used it.
In a notorious incident at my high school in England, someone blew in the doors of the gymnasium with a preparation he had made in the chemistry lab. They weren’t detached from their hinges, just damaged in the area of the lock where they met in the middle. There may have been a small fire. It happened before I became a student there, but the outrage had entered school lore and was cited occasionally by old-timers remembering the good old days.
Another chemistry lab memory, from a different school than the one I mentioned above.
The chemistry master was named Mr. Heep (or perhaps it was Heap, I forget). There was a Bunsen burner on his lab table at the front of the class, and several on each of the students’ tables. Experiments involving Bunsen burners he would demonstrate before telling the class to have a go themselves, and during the demonstration his would be the only burner lit.
Don’t ask me how, but at some point an enterprising student had discovered that if you took the burner in front of you, closed the collar that admitted air to the burner tube, opened the stopcock, blew down the tube, and closed the stopcock, it would inject a bubble of air into the system, a bolus of nonflammable gas that eventually made its way to the only burner in operation—Mr. Heep’s—which would then go out. The success of this operation depended on concealment and subterfuge, but as Mr. Heep was preoccupied with the experiment in front of him and was some distance from the students’ tables, a bold boy could pull it off, occasionally more than once during the same demonstration.
The trick was handed down from one class of students to the next and Mr. Heep was at the school for decades, but I don’t believe he ever discovered why he had to relight his Bunsen burner so often. I witnessed it several times but lacking boldness and believing that teacher torture was cruel, never attempted it myself.
Doc Lewis taught us how to make wine out of apple cider, which we drank in the spring.
Interesting reminder. When I started 1st grade, it was a brand new school with all brand new equipment including the science stuff. It didn’t mean much at first, but by the time I got to 6th grade I was using the still-basically-new projector microscope to show the fertilized chicken eggs etc to the whole classroom.
Meanwhile, I think in 4th or 5th grade, I was experimenting with CO2 cylinders because one of the neat little things they had was a spring-loaded thing to puncture the end of the cylinders. They didn’t produce enough “thrust” to lift a rocket, but I improvised by running a fishing/clothes-line from the back of the classroom to the front, at the front it was anchored to the wooden frame at the bottom of the chalk/blackboard.
When I visited the school several years later, the dent in the wood from the “horizontal rocket” was still there.
To see how much our society has declined, think of what playground equipment looks like now and how it looked in the 60’s, 70’s and until the mid ’80.
back in the day, slides were tall enough that you could survey the neighborhood. Swings were items that could also get you a grand view, even if you weren’t one of the kids who tried to get the swing to go over the top bar.
These days the playground stuff looks like it would be used by padded cell inmates.
Those of us who were teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s did or were exposed to lots of things that horrify modern parents.
I was surprised when my daughter reported that her high school chemistry teacher in 2001 showed the class how to make something stinky or flammable (I forget which) that struck me as somewhat risky. I wasn’t personally bothered, but imagined that somebody in officialdom might have been. But the teacher sure had the attention of the boys, who are notoriously difficult to get engaged. So, yea!
A few years ago, a friend of ours (a mother of several children) got curious as her teen and pre-teen children asked for a series of cooking ingredients and took them outside. “What are you guys doing?” The kids knew Mom did not get rattled easily, so they told her than one of them had been told how to make a “flour bomb.” So, Mom helped them get everything together, and let them use some of her kitchen equipment so the operation was at least a little safer.
Not chemistry class, but during the era I was in elementary school (1960s) it was not unusual for the teacher to leave the room for short times, leaving the students in charge on our own.
One of my classmates had epilepsy, which in the day was not well-controlled with medication, so our entire class had been instructed on what to do if she had a seizure. At the time the instructions were to remove from the area all hard objects against which she could fall (like desks and chairs), and to put something firm/soft in her mouth to keep her from biting her tongue.
During our 5th grade year, she had a seizure in the classroom while the teacher was out of the room. Immediately every other student in the room sprang into action, pushing desks and chairs to the walls. From somewhere one of the students produced a wallet that we put in her mouth while one student ran to the school office for an adult. She ended up fine.
We students felt really proud and accomplished that we had done something important and consequential when our fellow student emerged unharmed, and the adults commended the class on our calm and decisive response to our fellow student’s seizure.
We all know what would happen now.
Cellphones.
Two of my brothers as we were attempting to build a “hot air balloon” with a can of sterno and some garbage bags. Judging from the apparent age of my little brother, this would be approximately 1974.
A little-known number by The Who, “B-side” of “Teenage Wasteland.”