NOON-Chucks! Thrillseekers! Head Wounds!

One cold day when Kurt and I were about 6 and 9 respectively we were huddled together in front of the boob tube watching "Thrill Seekers." This was a syndicated show out of Spokane (that's Spoe-CAN..Not SPOE-kane). Anyway, Thrill Seekers had obviously been made for Karl Scholz's personal enjoyment because it had all manners of stupid and futile life-threatening and violent stunts performed for the camera by people who are no longer alive.

But on that day it was as if God himself had spoken to me through Chuck Connors (late of "Branded" fame). The Lord's message was hidden in a segment featuring a 547th degree black-belt Karate-guy swinging two chunks of metal attached to each other by a chain.

Chuck Connors soberly informed us that these were an ancient Japanese weapon called NOON-chucks, and that this was incredibly dangerous so we should not try this at home.

You gotta be kidding, Chuck! Watching that karate-guy swing those miraculously dangerous sticks in slow motion around his head and under his armpit and over his shoulder to culminate in a dramatic downstroke which terminated by blasting a red fireplace brick into dust simply made me NEED to check these NOON-chucks out.

Kurt and I grabbed our coats and the only tool we could find and blasted out of the house on a mission.

In search of suitable NOON-chuck building materials Kurt and I schlepped out across hill and dale with a broken aw blade. The best we could do was to cut some stems from a shrub. They were decidedly unsuitable given that if we pounded in a fence staple with a hammer the green wood spit instantly. We tried to swing them around anyway...which just ended in the free end of the NOON-chuks flying off, and Kurt and I trying to get behind the same cover before the newlyfreed stick's orbit decayed.

Then...A miracle. I became for an instant a NASA scientist. Everything was clear. The plans for the perfect set of NOON-chucks simply appeared as if by magic in my head. I would cut a piece of chain from the dog's run, and make the perfect set of NOON-chuks NOT from wood...but frommetal.

Kurt and I stole silently and stealthfully into the neighboring property where a bunch of old trucks were abandoned. Ok, we probably weren't all THAT stealthy or silent. In fact we were probably bitching at each other. But we climbed the fence and went over to the wrecked trucks.

We happened upon a rear-view mirror mount for what might have been a rare 1932 Schmedlap Diesel Freight Master Truck. We sawed four pretty much equal pieces of the mirror mount out over a period of hours and at a high price in blisters (but it was worth it... we were Thrill Seekers).

With our new-found prizes we sneaked home...Knowing full well that Mom would summarily snatch any crafts project from us on the misguided (OK...Not so misguided) notion that we were up to no good. Which, of course we were.

We surreptitiously drilled holes near the end of each end of our NOON-chucks and attached a piece of dog chain with a stout piece of electric fence wire that Dad had forgotten to bury in the huge pit in the back of the property.

Success! Eureka! Our NOON-chucks were complete. Now we had something truly dangerous to play with, and that made me deliriously happy.

Looking about for something to hit with them, I realized that if the ever-vigilant and watchful, all-knowing Mom saw us with these she'd throw them in the burn barrel just for general purposes. With this in mind, Kurt and I slunk off to the barn, safe from the parental watcher's prying eyes. After all, this was a cold, lousy day. She wasn't leaving the house, BUT after the heavens opened up to show me the way I wasn't about to squander the providential good fortune to have seen, built, and now owned a pair of real, live NOON chucks.

So, NOON-chucks concealed up the sleeves of our identical green Frostline goose-down jackets, Kurt and I sneaked to the barn.

I decided that the safest thing to hit was the small chunks of shrub stem that we had originally mangled in our NOONchuck making efforts. At this point bricks seemed like a rather advanced technique.

On the TV show, the karate guy placed two bricks about 8 inches apart from each other and laid the object to be broken between the two. I decided not to reinvent the wheel at this point, so I did the same. I laid the green stick between two bricks and with a hearty "HAI-KARATE" I lashed downward with all of my might. The green stick simply caught my NOON-chuck and threw it back at me, hitting the nearest portion of my anatomy (my forehead). When I finally stopped seeing stars, I stood back up, brushed myself off, and threw my NOON-chucks into a pile of junk and left for the house, fully intending never to use them again.

An hour later Kurt came in, calmly hung up his coat and announced that he could break bricks with his NOON-chucks. I gave him a lot of crap, but could tell by his patented smugger-than-thou look that he was on to something.

He took me out into the barn and set up a brick (leftover from our fireplace, in which we used bricks leftover from the Harold's Women's store fire). Then he calmly and efficiently broke that brick into two clean pieces. As I watched the pieces fall I noticed that this wasn't his first such success. Hell, he was ankle deep in broken bricks.

We kept those NOON-chucks pretty well secreted away from prying eyes for several years. And we broke a lot of bricks.