When I was 13, I tried to make vodka. I put potatoes, yeast, water and sugar in a Skippy peanut butter jar. I punched some holes in the top of the lid and set the jar on top of the furnace.
Two weeks later I had a jar of rotten potatoes. The mixture looked awful, but I had never made vodka before, so I assumed that this was to be expected. I went to the hobby store and bought an Erlenmeyer flask and some copper tubing (like you see in movies that feature a still). I put the mixture in the flask, set it on the stove and turned the heat up to boil.
My mistake. I did not know that alcohol boils at 100 degrees not 212 degrees. The mixture exploded. Rotten potatoes were all over the ceiling of the kitchen. My mother sent me to my room to await punishment from my father.
When he came home, my father came to my room. He was supposed to be stern with me, but he couldn’t stop laughing. Next time, he said, you and I will do it right. Below is version 2 of my still.
When I was 15, my best friend and I had a great idea. We would get jobs at Candlestick Park (where the San Francisco Giants baseball team played). He would sell hotdogs during the baseball season, and I would sell beer (that’s how I imagined me on the right). At the end of the seventh inning, he and I would head to the upper deck of the park and eat and drink whatever we had not sold.
Like many of my ideas, what might have seemed like a good idea turned out to be a not very good idea or an unimplementable idea. It seems that no one would let you sell beer when you are 15. And since we’d have to work during school days, our mothers nixed the idea in nanoseconds.
I also wanted to build a gyrocopter. But my mother let me know that I’d have to do my own welding. Since I did not know how to weld, I was worried that the gyrocopter would disintegrate in mid-air, and I would regret my decision to build the thing.
I wanted to hop the freight trains from San Jose to Los Angeles. I would live the life of a vagrant and write a bestselling book on my experiences. My mother put the kibosh on that idea.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, you could get high level plans to make a nuclear reactor from the government. I wrote to the government and got the plans. Unfortunately, I could not make heads or tails of the drawings and, even if I could, they were too high level to be actionable.
Above, on the left is the “plan” for a reactor. The plans did not come with a step-by-step guide to how to make it. Nor did they come with the parts and pieces you would need to make it.
In the middle is a picture of what I imagined to be me and some of my new friends on our way to Los Angeles.
On the right is my gyrocopter shortly after takeoff. At least it was airborne for a couple of seconds.
I have often thought that the archetype conversation between a mom and a teenage son after a teenage son did something dumb was:
Mom: What did you think would happen?
Son: I dunno.
Exactly. The kid did not think through at all what might happen and the likelihood that an adverse outcome would happen.
At times, I marvel at the fact that I made it through my teenage years intact. Thank goodness for moms. Without moms, most teenage boys would not make it to adulthood.