Al from New Jersey discovers the effects of fire plus gas.

Growing up as a child in the suburbs on NJ I could not stand to be dressed up in a suit for Easter Sunday.

The suburb we lived in had recently undergone a sanitary sewer system project because of the home’s failing septic systems. The construction project had disturbed the natural gas lines that ran alongside the sewer system in the street. There were now gas leaks occurring weekly up and down the streets in the neighborhood. They would report the smell of gas and NJ natural gas would come and excavate and patch the pipes.

It was Easter Sunday 1963, if I recall. I was seven and I was all dressed up in my blue suit for Easter Sunday services. I was miserable. While my parents were finishing getting dressed I wandered outside to talk to my friend across the street Kippy Mensch. As I crossed the street I noticed an odor of gas coming from the manhole cover directly in front of our house. I stopped in my tracks and came up with a brilliant idea. As a child of seven I recalled the cartoons of the day where explosions resulted in little harm to the victim other than a blackened face and their clothes in tatters. I silently crept back in the house and opened the kitchen drawer where my mom kept the matches. I went back outside looking behind me to make sure they didn’t bust me.

My friend Kippy met me and the manhole cover. I crouched down, lit the match and just as I dropped it into the pick hole of the cover, the inside of the manhole lit up like a furnace. I reacted by blocking the flame with my right hand and closing my eyes as a torch like flame blasted out the hole. My right hand took the brunt of it and in terror I leaped up and ran up the driveway. No sooner had I reached the curb when a blast lifted the lid to just about the top of the telephone pole like a ringing Tiddlywink, landing and wedging itself sideways in the manhole.

To this day I don’t recall any pain as I took my left hand and tightly gripped it around my right wrist. My parents met me at the door with this look of horror! I don’t remember if I told them what I had done.

An ambulance came and rushed me to the hospital in Red Bank which was about 25 minutes away, by then they knew what I had done. My parents always claimed I had third degree burns but that’s not possible as I have no scarring at all. Even though skin was blistered, burnt, and hanging from my hand. My hair was burnt along with my eyebrows and I still remember that horrible smell. Kippy was not harmed though his socks were as singed as my hand that had deflected the flame.

Suffice to say I not only got out of that ridiculous blue suit that day, but I also got me and my siblings out of Easter Sunday services as well.

To this day I cannot find any newspaper clippings of the event archived. My parents never sued the gas company because that wasn’t done that often in those days. I have searched for news items on Easter Sundays 1962, 63 and 64 with no success. My parents have passed so I can’t ask them. I can just say I am lucky to be alive as that manhole cover could have taken my head off on launch had the explosion not been delayed those two or three seconds. I don’t know why it did, I cannot explain it.

And to think, this was a good thirty years before the infamous Beavis & Butthead episode where they exploded a house with gas and a match.