You asked about my tank war story… Here it is:
This story came up from realizing that Jenelle and Conny live on the same street as my old boarding house. I lived on Rossmore when I went to Art Center School. The house is just two blocks from where they live. I lived in this weird mansion on the southeast corner of Beverly Blvd. and Rossmore. It’s still there only greatly fixed up from when we went last summer to show each other all of our old haunts. When I lived there it was like the mansion of the Munster family, with big trees surrounding and vines creeping in the windows. It had a musty odor like someone had died there, the place was falling to pieces.
The house mother was this overweight alcoholic fright named Mrs. Crump. She was a terror when she was drunk, but we managed stay out of her way. All the guys in the rooming house were after her two teenage daughters, these two little Lolita hippy girls who were always getting in trouble.
There was a big golf course across the street and along Beverly Blvd. I would go for night walks there just to get a bit of forest and open space in my head. I think I even flew kites there at night. It’s a wonderful place in the dark except for those little flags that I’d bump into and sand pit hazards.
It was in the upstairs community room of that house where the tank war was. I don’t know what started it. It might have been sheer boredom, or not wanting to do our Art Center homework, but me and the guy who lived at the opposite end of the “L” shaped house started a war shooting each other’s windows using garbonzo beans and blow guns.
If you fill up a cardboard tube with garbonzo beans and blow real hard, a volley of beans will explode out the end, travel the forty feet to the opposite window and make a terrific rattling noise. This eventually got out of hand, so we decided to make it a real conflict.
We laid down the rules of warfare: Nothing could break a window, you
had to make your war machine from found objects, and couldn’t spend more than $10.
Just me and Ralph decided to do it. We had a week to prepare. All school work got pushed aside.
Our rooms were curtained off, and we started collecting stuff from the alleys to make our tanks with.
Mine was built from a grocery cart found abandoned in the alley. I covered it with cardboard so that I could sit in the basket with my legs out the back and push it. As the week progressed things got added.
Through a legion of spies, (allowed by the Rossmore War Convention) we
would learn from various descriptions gleaned from peeks behind the other’s room curtain what counter measures would be needed.
I added a set of two carpet tube cannons that poked out the front of the cart. They had spring loaded rubber balls in them, and tests showed that despite the ominous look of these cannon barrels, they were largely just
that… scary looking. Balls just rolled out the ends and bounced
across the floor.
Through the spy network I had learned several things about Ralph’s tank.
He had made a large plywood box, 6′ high, very heavy, and very formidable on tiny wheels.
It was painted black.
Spy Stewart said he saw a tiny little window on the box that was Ralph’s only view out.
I added a series of six rubber band cardboard tube missiles to the top wire shoe rack of my tank. Each would have a shaving cream loaded missile paper cup warhead on it that would explode and leave a mess.
Ralph’s spy learned of this and soon a small windshield wiper was installed on his one small window.
Other armaments:
I had a hand saw for cutting into Ralph’s rolling fortress
Marbles to toss under his tank to throw off his footing
Squirt guns
Water balloons
More garbonzo bean blowguns and portholes out the sides for shooting.
I had to add a set of mirrors to my tight fitting cardboard tank. My tank was very mobile but was pushed from behind so I needed a way to see where I was going.
We each made costumes. I was like a Captain America figure. He made a dark Red Baron costume with cape and a Nazi-like cap.
The day came, and Saturday night was for war.
We made sure Mrs. Crump was slumped in her chair downstairs sleeping off her habit.
We cleared the main upstairs room of beds and stacked them high against a wall for the audience.
Students at school had found out about, and wanted to be there for the melee. Someone set up a film camera and light stands to record the frenzy. A bed was placed in the middle of the room as an obstacle.
We both came out in our costumes to great applause, cheering and booing as we slithered into our respective war tanks, and at the signal proceeded to chase each other around the room.
My tank was faster and more maneuverable but that didn’t prevent me from hooking the cord to the camera lights.
“CRASH!”
The lights came down and burst and the whole room went dark. Flashlights beamed from the tops of each of our tanks. There were screams. Water balloons were thrown, streams of squirt gun fire came from small firing holes in each of the tanks. Shaving cream rockets shot wildly, some hitting their target, others shooting off into the crowd and onto the stacked beds.
Screams and laughter! Our tanks circled the bed at the center of the room with every conceivable projectile shooting from them. A water balloon hit a window almost breaking it. Lengths of toilet paper strewn everywhere. Ralph’s Dark Death tank cornered me somehow and proceeded to pound my little shopping basket cart into a pulp.
I reached out the arm hole with my hand saw and started to saw away at his tank in a futile gesture. The sound of uncontrollable laughter from the stands. Marbles were tossed under his tank. Nothing worked. It was curtains for sure as I was being pounded against the corner wall.
Panicked; I reached out under my tank, caught the rim of his plywood behemoth and gave one last super human tug upward.
Through my little cutout window I saw his box tip, and in one slow motion moment, crash to the floor with a thunderous “WUMP!” Only his feet wiggled helplessly out the bottom of the black box.
Cheers erupted.
My water shots and garbonzo bean volleys fired into the bottom of his tank.
A voice yelled up from downstairs,
“What the hell are you boys doing up there?”
We knew she was too feeble to climb the stairs. Plaster from the ceiling below had sprinkled down on Mrs. Crump when she was awakened from her stupor by the crash.
“Nothing at all Mrs. Crump! We’re just moving some stuff.”
When we got the film developed. There were about twenty minutes of screams, laughing, flashes of light and crashing sounds in total darkness.
—
Shortly there after I moved out and into a little apartment behind a house on Larchmont. I lived in one room with fellow Crump House boarder/Art Center revolutionary - Kirk Roberts, and made animated films in that room for a year.
We slept in opposite corners of the room strewn with paper cut out sets, and paper doll animated figures that were shot on a large multilevel glass
animation table in the center of the room.
We would spend weeks shooting single frame animation sequences that when developed would be either way underexposed or whited out by overexposure. Neither of us knew much about photography so it was trial and error… and mostly error and curses.
- Corky Peters
