Some time back, a good friend shared a nostalgia-laden song with me — Gone like a Candle in the Wind, sung by the late Randall Hylton. She did so knowing I harkened back to yesteryear’s simpler days and simpler ways with ceaseless yearning. She reckoned a portion of the song’s chorus would strike a responsive chord: “Where is the boy with the slingshot who guarded the homestead back then?”
Those words immediately set me to thinking about my own slingshot days and resurrected treasured boyhood reveries. Those thoughts, in turn, engendered all sorts of fond reflections of a “toy” that, in the right hands, became much more. Far from being a handcrafted plaything, when wielded by a skilled marksman, a slingshot could become a deadly tool fully capable of putting small game such as rabbits and squirrels on family tables. Indeed, at one point in the not-too-distant past, a meticulously and lovingly crafted homemade slingshot, sometimes known as a flip or catapult, was a staple in the back pocket of every red-blooded American boy. Other than occasions when some sort of societal dictates required temporary removal of the slingshot, such as a schoolroom setting or a Sunday go-to-meeting situation, it was a boy’s constant trusty companion. In the eyes of a rural youngster, it was also, with the possible exception of a pocketknife, his most treasured possession.
A standard summertime activity for lads growing up in the 1950s in my part of the world — and I strongly suspect the same was true throughout the Southeast and perhaps beyond — involved spending considerable time making both toys and practical items for their own use. Obviously, I have little personal insight when it comes to girls, but for them, activities ranging from cornshuck dolls and handsewn doll clothes to items of personal attire such as dresses certainly figured in the mix. Or at least that was the case with my sister and female cousins. For boys, most anything that could be made with a pocketknife — fluttermills, crude spears, bows and arrows, cornstalk catapults, popguns fashioned from elderberry stalks, gee-haw whammy diddles, and all sorts of wood carvings — held a prominent place in daily leisure activities.
Certainly that was the situation with me and my closest friends during those carefree years when we were old enough to run through the woods and play by ourselves, yet not quite of an age to hold summer jobs, become preoccupied with girls, or assume the ridiculous posturing and “that’s beneath my dignity” perspective forming part and parcel of the false front that comes with being a teenager. No matter was approached with greater care or more meticulous planning than slingshot making. In my case at least, it was a project — or more accurately, an ongoing series of projects since I averaged crafting two or three slingshots per summer for several years — that invariably involved considerable adult input and supervision. Daddy offered advice and the wisdom born of considerable personal experience with slingshots during his own youth, while Grandpa Joe took about as much delight and was just as interested in the actual process as his adoring understudy. When it came to many things, including making slingshots, he was essentially a boy trapped in an old man’s body. The only real difference focused not on enthusiasm but practical knowledge. He had a great deal of accumulated wisdom and readily shared it.
The first step in making a slingshot was a crucial one deserving of a great deal of care and plenty of welcome time afield. This involved finding and cutting the fork of wood to form the frame for the slingshot. It had to be “Y” shaped and of appropriate dimensions, with each fork of the limb the same size as well as the space between the forks being suitable. In my adolescent excursions into armament manufacturing, dogwood was always the material of choice, although other tough, tight-grained woods such as persimmon or hickory would have served quite nicely. Also, Grandpa often mentioned rhododendron wood as being, if anything, better than dogwood, but we never used it.
Primarily because Grandpa was adamant that we needed to acquire just the right piece of dogwood, our searches dealt with that tree exclusively. This was well prior to dogwood anthracnose that affects so many of these lovely trees today, so we had plenty of prospective material to examine. As we walked through woodlands checking each dogwood we spotted, Grandpa would comment, “Dogwood is about as tough and durable a wood as a man could want.” Invariably he would then reminisce about a time when hardy “make do with what you’ve got” folks used wedges made from dogwood, as opposed to metal ones, for splitting firewood with a go-devil or splitting maul.
Sooner or later we would locate a suitable dogwood fork, and Grandpa would saw it off with a tiny bow saw he had carried along for that purpose. “No need to destroy the whole tree,” he would say. “We’ll just prune out a bit for slingshot use.” Ordinarily over the course of our excursion, we’d select a half dozen or more forks, knowing that after they had been allowed to dry some of them would reveal flaws that were unobservable at the point when they were first cut. Also, that meant we had the raw material for multiple slingshots, and any red-blooded boy of my ilk felt blessed when his armory included not one but several of them.
Once we had a collection of suitable forks, they would be hung to dry in Grandma Minnie’s cannery house, the corncrib, or some other protected place. When the wood was cured and ready for completion of the process of constructing a slingshot, quite a bit of close work with a sharp pocket knife was required. The “Y” of the dogwood fork had to be balanced perfectly in weight, size, and shape. Otherwise the slingshot would not function properly. We usually left the bark intact on the forks but removed it on the handle and at the point at the upper end of each fork where the rubber from an old inner tube was to be connected.
That was in an era during which vehicle tires actually had tubes, and even the best of them after quite possibly having been patched multiple times had to be “retired” from the tire and travel business. Yet for frugal folks who could find a use for anything and repair everything, they remained of considerable utility. In the heat of summer, they were grand for floating along a stream, and as long as you avoided dry rot, a single tube provided enough rubber for a couple dozen slingshots. Moreover, if you knew the proprietor of a local tire repair place, they could be had for a nickel or dime or maybe even for free.
Using the same pocketknife that had whittled the frame, two equal-sized strips of rubber about a foot long would be sliced from an inner tube. Their precise length depended on the size and strength of the boy for whom the slingshot was being made. For Grandpa and his adoring understudy, the slingshot “fitting” process was just as important and approached with the same level of care as one for a custom “British best” shotgun. One end of each of the rubber strips would be secured to the dogwood frame, usually with black nylon fishing line of the type commonly used on casting rods of the time or something of similar strength. A leather patch to hold the slingshot ammunition would be affixed to the other end. Slits in the patch provided a way to tie it to the rubber.
Once all of this was in place, the slingshot was ready for action. Some test shots might reveal a need for minor adjustments along somewhat the same lines involved in zeroing a rifle scope. Usually any adjustments required could be determined by a few shots at a large piece of cardboard serving as a makeshift target. Once all seemed to be in order on the accuracy front, then came the fun and sense of self-satisfaction provided by having produced a fine tool and useful weapon.
One decided advantage to using a slingshot was that you always had an abundance of ammunition. For the most part it was free. A pocket full of carefully selected river rocks or large pea gravel purloined from some driveway or parking area was standard. But for pinpoint accuracy you couldn’t beat marbles or ball bearings. Problem was the former cost 15 cents a bag and the latter were mighty hard to come by. To this day, many decades after the fact, marbles periodically turn up in the garden adjacent to the home where I grew up — now the residence of my brother and his wife — and I have no doubt that an excursion in the general area with a metal detector would unearth a goodly number of “steelies,” as we called ball bearings.
Ample lack of practice notwithstanding, my personal performance as a slingshot marksman was mediocre. However, I had two first cousins once removed, both a few years older than I, who were flat-out sharpshooters. They could hit a sitting rabbit with a high level of consistency and occasionally managed to bag a much more demanding quarry in the form of grey squirrels. They were masters, and lest anyone doubt what a slingshot can do in the hands of a sharpshooting wizard, years ago I saw a television program that featured an elderly fellow who used one to cut down cornstalks, shot after shot.
Matters of accuracy notwithstanding, I got plenty of practice. Those countless practice shots filled many idle hours and were amply buttressed by boyhood flights of fancy. In my mind, with my trusty slingshot, along with jeans pockets filled with ammunition, I warded off attacking invaders, punished transgressors, and protected hearth and home. A slingshot rested in the back pocket of my jeans most of the time I was out of school. I fondly look back on that lost world and realize that today’s youngsters are unknowingly missing something which was once an important part of the joy of youth. Or, as the rest of the chorus to the Hylton song mentions at the outset, “Where is the life that I used to call mine? It’s gone like a candle in the wind.”
Slingshot memories, like so much more linked to simpler days and simpler ways, are indeed flickering flames, ones largely gone from the world in which we now live. Yet for me, they still burn as bright and light memories in warm, winsome fashion. Maybe to some degree that illumination is a mere filament of imagination reminiscent of Mark Twain’s words, “The older I get the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” But in the halcyon days of my youth, slingshots were not only real. They were an integral, important part of being a boy.
Jim Casada is a full-time freelance writer who has dozens of books and thousands of articles behind him.
