I'll bet no one has recently told or heard the story of Mr Moore and the pineapple bomb.
Mr Moore was my 11th grade honors chemistry teacher at McDowell High School
in Erie, PA.
Mr Moore told this story each year: One day he returned to his classroom after lunch and saw a suspicious item on the front lab table which served as his lectern. He saw batteries and wires and assumed the worst. He notified the principal, who notified the police, who notified the bomb squad, who evacuated the school and subsequently discovered that the suspicious item was a pineapple from the cafeteria with wires and batteries affixed to it.
He was very embarrassed by the mistake, and I think he told the story each year to work through the embarrassment.
This was long before 9/11, in a day when people thought "How could I be so gullible?” instead of "Better safe than sorry."
The world has changed.
Too bad too many of you reading this now don't know what those days were like. It wasn't all war and protests and drugs. There was a lot of that, to be sure, but there were many more pleasant things.
Mr Moore always talked about "the Big Boys," by which he meant professional chemists, and would occasionally regale us with anecdotes about the chemical conundrums real chemists deal with in the real world.
I saw Mr Moore at Millcreek’s annual 4th of July parade a number of years ago; he was quite elderly. I ran up to him to say hello, as he often welcomed greetings from former students when I was in high school. He was polite, but he didn't remember me, and he knew he didn't remember me; he wanted to move along quickly, and I let him.
I was fond of him, as I was Mr Saunders, my honors physics teacher, but both men were distantly erudite to my empty head. I pictured myself then as a scientist; I persisted in that delusion into my sophomore year in college, at which point I discovered there were more than 10 numbers, and particle physics would be a little difficult after I ran out of fingers.
Started: 2012-05-28
I always thought you were going to go the science route too - growing up. Or possibly engineering, something technical at any rate. But, no - the subject you liked the least in high school became your passion in college!
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