The ole cellar and cellar house is all that's left of my original homestead that was built in the 1930s. During my childhood it was the guest room, frequently used.

As a young boy and teenage, imbued with the devils of curiosity, I put the space to use, often to the dismay of my parents.

It was used as a movie house with screen, a large chemistry lab (you could get those ingredients back then), a home darkroom for photo processing, a 3-watt illegal AM radio station to broadcast to Hur and the Husk Ridge, short wave equipment and CB radios (starting in 1957) and record players, including a cranked-up ancient one once owned by my grandfather Weaver (Still Works), and then came rocket construction.

The cellar house was a busy place.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing that happened was the making of homemade gunpowder, placing it in a bowl and igniting it. BAM, it worked, blew up, singed the faces of my buddy and me, rattled the house and highly disturbed my mom - "You're going to burn the place down!"

Being of unsound adolescent mind, I blew-up a round dynamite cap with a hammer, constructing a radio antenna, which knocked a large hole in the concrete behind the house, and sent me to the hospital with embedded fragments in my body, but eyesight in tact.

We made Molotov Cocktails, the favorite weapon of sectarian violence and political discontents, placing the bomb on a fence post and igniting the wick. My buddy Bill Barnes (who later was a surgeon) and I hunkered below a road bank, waiting for the blast.

It was slow, and Bill raised his head to inspect the burning fuse, at which time the bomb went off with a shard of glass parting his hair.

The Calhoun Rocket Boys of the 1950s blew up a lot of things.

Perhaps the most ingenious cellar house project was the development of illegal WHUR-AM radio after my buddy Ronzel Lynch raised an antenna and built a homemade control board connected to the antenna. We started playing the new music of the 1950s - rock and roll - but to get the neighbors to listen we settled on gospel music.

In the 1950s we obtained one of the first CB radios to receive a license in West Virginia, expanding the horizons by erecting a beam antenna on the highest part of the hill, creating a remote transmitter to promote a ground signal (five watts) as far as Akron, Ohio and Tennessee. My dad continued with the hobby until he was aged, in the cellar house.

We got into the movie business in the 1950s, graduating from 16mm silent films to full-fledged soundies. The neighbor kids would come and watch. Then Ronzel teamed with me to re-open the old Orma movie house in 1957 for a summer.

We still have a few photos developed in the cellar house closet, perhaps the most notable one taken of Grantsville poet Aunt Nettie Stump sitting on her front porch in 1956.

And then the ole cellar house was used for bursts of sleep, its most quiet time.

Now it exudes material for the memory banks and writing, and no one got killed.