Grandma Ferguson Takes Water Fights to New Level
by Thomas Clayton Ferguson III

Growing up, most the time that our family went to visit my Grandma Ferguson meant quite a car ride.  We lived in Jackson which is near Milwaukee in Southeastern Wisconsin.  She lived in the Northern part of Upper Michigan in the city of Hancock.  Just the car ride took an entire day.  We did make several trips, usually at least once a year in the summer.  There are lots of memories, but in most cases the memories are all jumbled together and it is nearly impossible to remember on which visit we did a particular thing in which I have a memory.  Yet, there is a exception.  I remember our trip to visit her the summer of 1986. 

It started out like most.  We arrived after the long trip.  After the long trip, we were out of the car and playing right away.  Grandma had come out to greet us.  After getting all the pent up energy out of our systems we were ready to head in to visit a little.  But as we were going to go in, Grandma told us to keep playing and she would be right back.  When she came out the door she was holding a large black gun.  She then proceeded to shoot us kids with water.  We were all very surprised.  First off, never would we have thought our Grandma would have a squirt gun and use it.  The other thing is this squirt gun shot a large amount of water a long ways.  Before that moment, every squirt gun we had ever encountered shot five to ten feet.  Here was a quirt gun that shot water five times farther.  This was a time where the Super Soakers were not invented yet.

Grandma's squirt gun looked very much like a real gun called a uzi.  It also made a noise, which sounded a little like a gun.  The noise was created by the pump, as it was a revolutionary leap in water fight technology, a squirt gun that was battery operated.  The battery pump made a large amount of water to shoot long distances.  Until we got blasted by her with the squirt gun, we had no idea such a toy even existed.  Grandma Ferguson worked and lived at a Christian boarding house for college students from the local colleges.  It had become a big thing with the college kids and my Grandma bought one so she could join in on their water fights.  This is how she came to get a squirt gun with such cutting edge technology.

It was not long until we all piled in the car and drove to the mall so we can get our own uzi squirt guns. 

We wound up spending a lot of time during the visit having water fights.  Grandma of course joined in a few of them as well.  It was quite literally a blast, blast of water that is.  And twenty three years later, the memories are still very vivid of that trip.  And thanks to her, we left with the coolest squirt guns.  Squirt guns that helped us rule the neighborhood water fights when we returned home.