I have to mention The Bomb.   As I mentioned in the first of these pieces, my friends and I rigged up a fake bomb for the last day of eighth grade.   We all had chemistry sets in those days, and we all learned how to make black powder (with only three ingredients, all commonly available then), but we used it mostly to make rockets and fake volcanoes – no real bombs, just backyard fun.

But someone else – I never knew who – made a real bomb, and exploded it in Falls Church.

I was a junior in high school (then George Mason) and hanging out with friends in the earliest version of Winter Hill one night after school when the house we were in was suddenly rocked by a nearby explosion.  No damage, no windows broken, but it was very loud, and close.  We were initially stunned.  What had happened?

We ran outside, joining a quickly growing crowd of neighbors and bystanders.  At that time there was an open area – a very large empty lot – east of the new houses in what would become Winter Hill.  The strip mall that would later include the Post Office and Anthony’s had not yet been built.  What was there was basically an open field with a couple of small trees on its eastern side.

It was obvious what had happened.  A small shack was now tangled high in the branches of one of those trees.  Clearly it had been blown into the tree by the explosion.  People gathered under it or close by, staring at the shack, which seemed to be mostly intact.

My friends and I poked around the open area – a field – motivated by curiosity, and by pure chance we happened on the remainder of the bomb.

It had been a pipe bomb.  The pipe had split open and was curled back on itself.  It stank of black powder.  It was slightly less than a foot long.  On the side that had been its outside we could see that someone had filed an X and at the center of that X had drilled a small hole – obviously for the fuse.  The pipe had not had its ends threaded and capped.  Instead, someone had hammered each end shut, flattening it.  

We marveled at the stupidity of this.  To hammer shut the end of a pipe filled with black powder was suicidal.  One of those hammer blows could have set the bomb off.  The bomb-maker had been incredibly lucky.  And so was everyone else, no one being caught in the considerable blast.

We found the police and turned over the bomb piece to them.  There had been no injuries and little real damage, so I’m not sure how seriously the explosion was investigated.  I never heard any more about it after that night.