Pea shooters

I stopped at the store this morning to pick up some navy beans to do a bean pot of baked beans and another bag to make bean soup. As I was waiting to pay I had to laugh to myself what people would say if I told them I was going to give the beans to my grandkids along with pea shooters to keep them [the kids] out of my hair while I ground sausage meat.

As a kid a pea shooter was one of those things every kid had and the bag of navy beans to use in the shooter cost about 15 cents. We never worried about putting an eye out or being hurt because the beans didn’t have much velocity being breath driven, but they sure were fun.

Navy beans won’t fly worth a crap. You need unshelled green peas with the white skin left on. They will have a much better ballistic coefficient.

TH wrote:

They will have a much better ballistic coefficient.

That made me laugh!

We had neighborhood pea shooter fights in the small park across the street from the house which doubled as our whiffle ball field. Peas and beans would sprout for weeks after the big wars.

I always thought “pea shooter” was just a generic term for anything that launches projectiles just short of shooting an eye out. I’ve made slingshots, and bows, and marble shooters, even made an atlatl that mysteriously disappeared over winter after my grandma saw I could launch a spear through the burn barrel, but never made an actual pea shooter.

Good to see they still sell them! We mostly used then in grade school to shoot spit balls in the classroom.

***Spit balls were chewed up wads of notebook paper. In case you younger folks didn’t know. They stuck to almost anything.

-J.

I had a job this past fall along a set of tracks in Two Harbors. There was a big pile of spilled out taconite pellets next to the tracks.

I brought home three 5-gallon pails for for the boys to use in their wrist rockets, they have enough ammo for years

^^^^^ Dad of the year award goes to ^^^^^

-J.

How long will it take for them to discover spit wads?

jwellsy wrote:

How long will it take for them to discover spit wads?

I’m sure the janitors loved us!

-J.

I remember all the spit-wads stuck to the ceilings in the class rooms. Also good for getting someones attention from across the room.

B-man wrote:

I had a job this past fall along a set of tracks in Two Harbors. There was a big pile of spilled out taconite pellets next to the tracks.

I brought home three 5-gallon pails for for the boys to use in their wrist rockets, they have enough ammo for years

My wife’s grandparents lived up in Hoyt Lakes. There’s a railroad transfer spot just out of town. We did the same thing filling up ice cream pails full for the kids many times. Pretty sure we have a lifetime supply at this point.

Mouthful of white popcorn and a McDonald’s straw worked well.