Show FLOYD GIBBONS adventurers 7 club holocaust in the cellar by FLOYD GIBBONS famous headline hunter y aou OU know boys and girls some of us go out looking for ad venture and the rest of us are smart enough to sit around and wait for adventure to come looking for us about 90 perl per cent of all the adventures have happened to people who we terenti renti looking for them and about 80 per cent of them accor according dingi to my figures come to people in their own kitchens and dining rooms and living rooms now here heres s a story I 1 got the other day from gladys it IL strom and gladys had to go farther than most people to find the big thrill of her lifetime it didn dian t come to her on the ground floor of her home she bad to go down into the cellar to find it it gladys remember remembers the exact date of her experience it was wa december she had climbed out of bed as usual at about 6 30 that morning and the first thing she did after she he came downstairs was to attend to the furnace composition fuel the day before a and d she had bad bought a newfangled new tangled she threw several shovel fuls on the fire she had bad never used the stuff before but she figured that you handled it pretty much the same way you did coal but you t supposed to use it like coal that was the part gladys didn dian t know and as a result she put too much of it on the fire it all started with her forgetting the furnace when the furnace was filled gladys went off and forgot about it she didn dian t think of tt it again until about 8 0 clock when her three chil dren were just about ready to go to school then she noticed that the house seemed colder than usual she felt of the radiators and sure enough they were stone cold then she knew there waso something wrong with the heater and went down into the cellar to see what it was she was within three feet of the furnace was reaching out to opens open the door when the door blew open of its own accord and a terrific blasts blast r A terrific blast hurled her across the cellar picked her up bodily and hurled her across the cellar she landed against tol knocked unconscious but she struggled to an ice chest and was almost I 1 her feet again explosion made the house do the the whole house was rocking from the force of the explosion the tho door was blown off and so were the draught pipes at the top of andi the furnace great sheets of blue flame were shooting out of the door and out of the holes where the draught pipes had been they were reach reaching ingi up tip licking at the ceiling I 1 and although gladys wanted to do nothing so much as to j drop back to the floor again she knew that if she did the house would be on fire in another ten seconds moving in a daze she reached with trembling hands for one of the battered draught pipes fighting her way close to the blazing furnace thail she tried to put the pipe back in place and thus pen up the flame that was shooting out of the empty hole there was no trifling about this explosion the damage she noticed now was a lot worse than she had origin originally thought there was a big gaping crack running across the entire topi top of the furnace and looking up she saw that the brick chimney had been blown 0 to o pieces at the spot sot where the furnace pipes went in there was a hole big enough tor for two men to crawl through somehow gladys managed to get that draught pipe back in place she had burned herself terribly in the doing of it but she had accomplished something there was still another draught pipe and she tackled that when it was in place alongside of the other she picked up the hot iron door of the furnace that was the point where gladys memory went blank on her the furnace door got put back into place somehow but she doesn doean t remember doing it or how bow she did it nor does she remember any of the other things she did from then until the firemen arrived blast sent this little boy for a ride upstairs in the kitchen gladys nine year old boy was eating hia his break breakfast ast when the explosion occurred the blast threw him from hie his chair and the cat lying nearby on the kitchen floor was lifted about a toot foot in the air the doors of the kitchen stove were shaken open and the heavy iron lids on top rattled and danced the other two boys playing in the next room ran screaming from the house and the bors hors began telephoning for the fire department when the engines arrived the firemen found gladys still reeling about the cellar moving in a daze around the still blazing furnace but gladys doesn doean t remember anything about that doesn doean t rp remember member a thing from the time she started to put back that furnace door to the time when she came out of a dead faint upstairs with a couple of firemen giving her a first aid treatment gladys sr sl ent a few days in to the hospital as a result of her ad adventure ventur and when she got out the first thing she did was to chuck all that newfangled tangled stove fodder out the back window she chasn t used any of it since and I 1 don t blame her 0 service |