Briefly reliving my childhood - Leonard Fysh Drugs in Moose Jaw.
Somewhere off Main St, downtown, close to the railway station.
I'm probably 12, and I'd gotten hold of one of those old "Science Experiments you can do at home" for kids books, and had been all over town looking for supplies...most of the drugstores had nothing I needed.
The "Make Beautiful Crystals from Borax/Laundry Soap" experiment had been tried, it didn't work out. But there were a lot more...
The front of the drugstore, filled with the standard druggist props, medical aids, mortar/pestles, but the back resembled some old-time apothecary, jars upon jars filled with ...?
I had my list. Start with Ammonium Dichromate, an orange powder that when lit would turn into a fiery volcano spewing toxic carcinogenic green ash all over the neighborhood. They had it, and they sold it to me, and I was in business.
This experiment worked well, exactly as predicted.
And I went back a number of times, money from my paper route to buy things that very few adults, let alone children, could buy now. Magnesium, in long wires, sold by the foot, and this, while tough to light, burned with an incandescant white glow...
Or the glycerin and Potassium Permanganate reaction, buy a bottle of glycerin, add a few sprinkles of the Potassium Permanganate, and soon the mixture would begin to smoke - violent, vile smelling, huge white clouds, and then burst into flames. If you capped the bottle it would explode, which - provided you were out of range, proved even more exciting.
My father discovered the bottle of glycerin and forbid me from any more chemistry experiments, he confused glycerin with nitro-glycerin, and I tried to explain but what parent listens to their 12 year old son?
This "experiment" came in handy in High School, in Edmonton, when a group of us would wander from Louis St. Laurent High School to the adjacent Harry Ainley High School, set up our time-delayed bombs in their bathroom, then return to enjoy the evacuation of the school from the windows of our classroom...
And again in Surrey, where I showed some friends it in the bathroom, and having long since deserted when the fire alarm went off we enjoyed an early recess in the yard, although my teacher was a little suspicious when after a few "trial runs" I started packing up my bag before the alarm, a little too much foreknowledge.