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My father had a huge vertical antenna out behind the barn, which had a permanently attached gin pole socket that we could swivel up and down. The socket had a "weep hole" at the bottom to keep water from accumulating and said hole was ideal for a firecracker fuse if you could find a way to thread it down the 24 inch long pipe. We came up with a way involving a coat hangar and some string.

We started out shooting pretty much anything that we could get to fit the tube with "Black Cat" firecrackers and other slightly larger ones, including some efforts at getting our bombs to "burst in air" Then we discovered that lemonade cans fit the tube perfectly.

In an effort to improve the ballistics of the lemonade cans, we started adding various levels of fillers. One third full of paraffin wax over sand worked great for various small crackers, many of them landing on the barn roof and rolling back down, with the occasional one making it over the barn and endangering the cars in the driveway, but we discovered that they didn't propel a can full of plaster very well.

And then someone got the bright idea to use a cherry bomb as the motive force. We hit the house roof, luckily no one was home. Years later my father was investigating bees nesting in the roof and discovered the divot that the can took when it hit, but never could figure out what caused it. He decided some unknown piece of hardware must have dropped off a plane flying over and declared that it was a good thing nobody got hit.

Of course that was far in the future.

And then we tried an M-80.

The can was still going up when we lost sight of it and we hunted for it in vain, and decided we had hit the danger point. Someone finally noticed a "dent" in the middle of the macadam (the old kind of compacted stone with tar and waste oil poured on it) highway out front of the house and upon investigation we found it contained the top of the can and some plaster dust. Glad we didn't hit any cars. The tube was pointed up at about 75 degrees (reconstructed) when it was fired, we hadn't wanted to take a chance on the shot going too far.

From the antenna to the barn was about 45 feet, to the house, about 160 (where we hit it) and a full 270 feet +/- from where we fired it to the impact mark on the road.