I think that it was almost fifty years

 ago when some damned fool kids dumped several bottles of Joy dish washing liquid into a fountain on the lawn of a large funeral home. This created a monster mountain of soap suds and wound up blocking traffic on a major traffic artery for a couple of hours during rush hour.

Looking back on it one of the culprits learned a very good lesson on two different things. First he learned that Joy soap makes a lot more soap suds than he thought and secondly he learned that it doesn't take a whole lot to block off a major traffic artery.

The wind was just right and blew the billowing mass of soapsuds straight across the highway. The police instantly blocked it off until everything blew over which took a couple of hours.

My dad was on the way home from work and had to reroute a little to get past it. This was no problem as he knew the area like the back of his hand. He actually thought it was kind of funny but then again my dad knew the ways of kids and expected them to do a few dopey things while growing up.

To him it just meant he had to go around the block to get around it and he got an amusing surprise. It was pretty funny seeing a mountain of soap suds wafting across a main highway. Every so often a puff of wind would tear a chunk the size of a sofa off the sudsy mountain and send it floating off somewhere.

Then again he didn't know who was responsible or there would have likely been hell to pay.

On the  other hand maybe he did and chose to let one slide figuring that the lesson had been learned. He was a wise man and knew when to let nature run its course and knew that a kid with a sense of guilt would likely beat himself up and learn from experience.

Of course that was back when the world still had a sense of humor. My guess is that the cops grumbled about having to reroute traffic but had a good after shift laugh in the locker room.

Today it is likely there would be a major state and federal investigation.

Incidentally I did learn something from this and used it to my advantage several years later. 

A shipmate on the opposite relief took to stuffing all of his dirty clothes in a llaundry bag and leaving them unwashed under a bunk because he was too lazy to wash them before he got off.

When we discovered what he was doing we moved the bag to the generator room and cussed him out on his return but he didn't learn.

I got a couple of bottles of Joy and applied it to the dirty clothes liberally. It sort of dried out in the generator room, but activated up again when he tossed them into the washing machine as he wondered what the sticky stuff all over them was.

It filled up the laundry room with soap suds and made him into a changed man. He never did that again.

As for the rest of us, it gave us a pretty good sea story.





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