Teenage hi-jinx on a Friday Night

Letting off a stink bomb in the play area of Farmers Department Store

My father was highly intelligent and like myself, loved to study. One of his many passions as a student was chemistry. In his latter days, he translated a Dutch book from 1819 with all sorts of alchemic remedies from medicines, to glue, to changing lead into mercury. Sadly he couldn’t turn lead into gold.

It was only natural that when I turned 14, he would give me a chemistry set. I had a bunsen burner, all manner of bottles and glass vials, many of which he brought home for me from the museum, where he used a lot of them. I was more interested in algebra than science, but he worked out a way to pique my interest.

When relatives came over from Holland, we would take them to tourist places like Rotorua. Back then you could go to the geothermal areas, public and private, where pure sulphur was right there for the taking.

I would always grab some to take home, mostly to make homemade fireworks for Guy Fawkes Day. They weren’t as good as bought ones but were a lot of fun to make. I don’t have any photos from when I was that age. But this photo of me visiting Whakaari White Island will give you an idea of how plentiful pure yellow sulphur was, back in the day.

Often on a Friday night, I would head into Queen Street and meet up with a couple of schoolmates. I’ll call them R & R, given I haven’t asked their approval to be included in this story, or others that might follow.

You’ll have to pardon the lyrical pun of the title for the song from that time I chose to tell the story of our stink bomb.

So I found a recipe for a stink bomb, using pure sulphur, sulphuric acid, ammonia and a few other bits and pieces. If I did it the right way and put a rubber stopper into the glass vial very quickly, it would stay inert until I took the top off.

My friends and I would wander around Queen Street, maybe visit a record store, or musical instrument store, check out the girls, the cars cruising up and down the street, and catch up with other kids we knew, some of them were in those cars. We would look forward to the day when that might be us. Sometimes we would catch the Farmers Free Trolley Bus and head to the top floor of the Department Store.

There was a large playground on the top floor of Farmers, with a cafeteria where the parents would sit. I don’t remember if they were stairs or an escalator, but at the top, there was a walkway that had a little bin on the floor, like a waste paper basket.

We found a bench seat far enough away that would allow us to watch the proceedings without being seen to have anything to do with them. I walked up to the bin, and carefully took the rubber bung out of the chemistry vial, carefully placing it in the bin such that it couldn’t fall over while trying not to look obvious. The chemical reaction started pretty quickly and in no time at all, a little vapour and the area smelled like rotten eggs.

We would sit there, trying really hard not to crack up with laughter every time someone walked past the bin and took a sudden swerve, perhaps looking at the person next to them in an accusatory way.

This was just one of many ‘fun’ nights we had out on the town, making our own entertainment. If our school principal had found out, it would probably have been a caning, something all of us experienced in our time. Sometimes deserved, sometimes not. Oh, there are some stories I might have to come back to, of our school days. If you found this amusing, why not subscribe? If you didn’t find it amusing, I have some more serious ones here too.

I’m going to stop here with a wonderful video backed by the song School, by Supertramp. The video is French, but it has a great video story to go with the lyrics, which fits my story a little.

What did you get up to as a teenager? You were a teenager, weren’t you?