My "Lab" and the Secret Room
When I was in Junior High School the next door neighbors built a playhouse in their back yard. This was not your small sized child's playhouse but it was a small "house" about ten feet square and a full eight foot high ceiling. When the neighbors moved away we bought the playhouse from them. To move the playhouse into our yard, Dad borrowed a chain wench which we attached to the base of the chinaberry tree and then to a rope around the playhouse and pulled it over into our yard. This playhouse became my "Lab". Dad built a bench on one side and several shelves in it and ran a wire from the house to it so it had electricity. In a year or two I had it filled with all my "equipment", electronic gear, old TVs and radios, wood working projects, chemistry projects and rocket projects. I spent many hours building and tinkering with all sorts of projects in my lab.
In 1963 the movie "The Great Escape" came out and it inspired me to make a secret underground room like in the movie. I cut a hole about 18 inches square in the floor of my lab, made a trap door and then dug out a hole under the building. I took the dirt out a little at a time, like in the movie, spreading it out in the yard and flower gardens. With the hole about five feet deep and about five feet square I then covered it all in carpet. I then ran some wires from a small transformer in my lab above to some lights in the room. It was quite cozy. At some time I let David in on it and we would hang out in secret room. A year or so after building the secret room I had found several Playboy magazines out in the woods by the lake and I stashed them in the secret room. Somehow my sister Brenda found out about the secret room and my stash of Playboys and she told Mom and Mom made me gather them up all and she burned them in the grill.