Junior Wizard, or T*rr*rist in Training?

When I was a boy I was quite interested in chemistry. It may have started when my older sister gave me a very nice chemistry set.

But after a while I wasn't content with just the experiments described in the booklet that came with the chemistry set, nor with making a few simple things.

The father of my best friend in grade school owned a pharmaceutical supply business. I was allowed to go to their retail counter and buy anything I wanted: any chemicals, any apparatus. Maybe I had a special privilege because they knew me. I might even have been given a discount.

I bought  lot of nice professional apparatus—beakers, flasks, stands for holding all that stuff. And I bought the ingredients for making gunpowder.

My gunpowder never worked, probably fortunately. I could have hurt myself. Also, I think that if it had worked, and if I had used all of the quantities of the ingredients I had obtained—which I never came close to doing—I could probably have blown up two or three houses.

Clearly that was a far more innocent time—when I could walk into that store and come out with the ingredients for gunpowder, in quantities of maybe a pound or two each—and not raise any eyebrows. Nowadays it would be, "Just stay there for a minute, please" while the guy goes in the back and phones the Department of Homeland Security. And then I'm taken in for questioning.