Boomtown by Nowen N. Particular Page A

fried chicken.
    â€œChang was absolutely mortified. He loved that chicken. But it gave him a crazy idea. Nobody knows how he did it—it’s still a carefully guarded Fireworks Factory secret—but somehow he came up with a way to turn regular chicken eggs into exploding chicken eggs.
    â€œIt took some trial and error. At one point, he must have used too much gunpowder because he blew the roof off his lab and knocked over his neighbor’s fence. Scared the fur off his dog too. But after some more tinkering, Chang got the mixture just right. The eggs were golden yellow with gray speckles and had an extra thick shell. If you were careful and handled them correctly, they were more or less safe. He decided to call them Hen Grenades.
    â€œHe contacted the U.S. Army and was soon doing a brisk business supplying the military with the little egg bombs. Very few people know this, but them eggs were an important secret weapon during the first World War. The Allies in France were able to sneak ammunition through enemy lines disguised as break-fast, a dozen Hen Grenades at a time.
    â€œâ€™Course, not all of Chang’s ideas were successful. There was Chang’s Dandruff Destroyer. It was supposed to get rid of dandruff—that it did . It also removed a person’s hair. Very bad.
    â€œThere was the Chang BOOMerang. Throw it at crows to scare ’em out of your fields, and then it comes back to you. Unfortunately, there was a slight problem with the timing mechanism. Very, very bad.
    â€œThen there was Chang’s Bee Blaster Kit. It included a ten-foot pole and a long fuse so you could insert a blast pack into a bee’s nest to scare ’em off. Chang had to give out quite a few refunds for that one. It was very, very bad.
    â€œIn spite of a few setbacks, most of Chang’s inventions worked. Of course, in order to support all of his operations, he needed a steady supply of raw mate-rials. Chang stumbled onto a rich deposit of sulfur, leftover from volcano explosions in the area. The second ingredient—charcoal—he got by burning oak and hickory trees, which were all over the place, and Chang’s neighbors were more than happy to donate ashes from their stoves and fireplaces. For the final ingredient, Chang demanded the highest-grade salt-peter. Chang got permission from the miners to gather bat guano from inside the mining caves that dotted these hills like rabbit warrens.
    â€œSoon he was producing his own black powder out of a small barn on his property. It had two vats for distilling and a big grinding stone. But the more his inventions caught on, the more he needed to expand his operations. In a few years, his powder factory was the biggest business in the area, with demand for Chang’s Super Rich Black Powder coming from the railroads, the military, and mining companies all over the country. An entire cottage industry sprung up around it: a dynamite-making business, a gun-smith and bullet-making company, and, of course, Chang’s Famous Fireworks Factory, where some of the best fireworks in the world are still being made.

    â€œIt was at that point, in 1878, when the citizens, under the leadership of Councilman Alden Purdy, drew up the town charter and filed papers with the state applying for recognition as a duly formed township. In gratitude for the important contributions Chang had made, they wanted the new city to be named after him: Changville, Changton, or Chang City.
    â€œBut Chang refused. He was a shy man and didn’t want the credit focused in his direction. He said, ‘We built this town together—not just one person, but all of us. Many thanks, but I don’t want the town named after me.’
    â€œThat’s when Councilman Purdy, soon to be Mayor Purdy, made a brilliant suggestion: ‘Let’s add an “e” to the end of Chang’s name and call the town Change .’ Everyone agreed, and Change, Washington, was born