The Zip Gun

WRITERS’ CHAPTER STORY-OF-THE-MONTH – APRIL 2018

THE ZIP GUN

By: Louise Naples

As a child, my best pal was my brother Marty, one year younger than me. We had many of the same friends, as I was something of a tomboy, playing all sorts of street games – ring-a-levio, stick ball, stoop ball, box ball. All we needed for a successful summer was a broomstick, a new Spaldeen ball, and a box of colored chalk.

I like to think back to when Marty and I had a zip gun. It was a home-made object made of wood in an L shape, about seven inches long. There was a tack pushed in at the bottom of the ammo side to which a strong rubber band was twist-tied. The object was to stretch the rubber band around the front, over the top, and along the length of the zip gun, fitting it over the handle end. Then we would slip in a small disk of firm, but light-weight material, under the rubber band at the tip. One flick of the thumb on the rubber band at the back would launch the missile quite a distance. Much depended upon the strength and tightness of the rubber band, and the other variable was the weight of the missile.

Now, I don’t remember if Marty “made” it, or “got” it, but he “had” it. We made a deal; he would keep and hide the zip gun, and I would be responsible for procuring the ammunition. We experimented with many things: cut up cardboard bits, folded up patches of aluminum foil, Necco wafers, checkers, pennies, dimes, and nickels – the coins were much harder to come by. We tried everything. Then one rainy afternoon when I was down in our basement doing some laundry, I noticed a chunk of linoleum that had broken off a floor covering in a space that previously had served as a play area. I broke it into small nickel-sized bits, and put them in my pocket. Lo and behold, I had made a great discovery.

When Marty and I next got an opportunity to use the zip gun for target practice at the empty lot at the end of our block, the flooring chips worked brilliantly. We were thrilled. Marty wanted to know if I could get some more; I assured him there was plenty more where it came from. That floor covering was nine by twelve. It was adjacent to our Mt. laundry, so by subtly moving the mountain, I gradually removed pieces of the linoleum that shrank from nine by twelve, to eight by ten, to six by nine, to four by six, to nothing at all.

Astonishingly, the old linoleum was never missed. It disappeared under the pile of laundry. It really disappeared! I kept expecting someone to ask, “What happened to the linoleum floor covering in the basement?” or at least, “Didn’t we used to have some linoleum on the floor down there?” The subject just never came up. As to the technical aspects of our project, we developed an understanding of distance, velocity, gravity and marksmanship by experiment, and trial and error. It was a hit. It is a truism that science is half invention and half discovery. That being the case, Marty and I were true scientists.