A majority of Americans and American Manufacturers could see the handwriting on the wall in 1945. The war would soon be over, but nobody knew exactly when. War-time scrap metal and newspaper drives were still an everyday occurrence. Gas was still being rationed and everyone was still doing their part to contribute to the success of our military men and women, realizing that Japan would fight on as long as they could. August 1945 changed all of that. The atomic bomb brought a quick end to the hostilities and America struggled to shift back into commercial manufacturing while trying to re-purpose some of the war production surplus. Such is the case with the Curran Artware Manufacturing Company of Downers Grove, Illinois, which received a government contract during wartime to produce hand grenades.
Illinois was a hotbed of military ordinance during the 1940s with two explosives facilities just a few miles down the road from Curran Artware Manufacturing. The Joliet Arsenal’s Elwood Ordinance Plant loaded explosives into artillery shells and other munitions, while the Kankakee Ordinance Works, run by DuPont and later, US Rubber Company, produced the TNT that was loaded into the ordinance in Elwood.
Curran Artware produced thousands of hand grenades and many of them were used on the battlefield, however, after the end of the war, Curran was left with thousands of these grenades and their firing mechanisms with no prospect of selling them to the Armed Services or our Allies for the foreseeable future (Korea was not on anybody’s post-war radar at the time). Instead of tossing the components or melting them down into other items, someone at Curran came up with a novel idea. Why not use these parts to make something else?
The result was the all metal 155mm Howie Cannon, a tin toy cannon that looked like a howitzer and could fire wooden bullets. The “cannon” of the toy was the fuse/detonator from a hand grenade, with the rear support made from the grenade spoon. Tin balloon wheels were added to a simple axle that passed through the detonator where the firing pin would have normally been. A thin piece of copper wire was bent to furnish a crank mechanism that retracted the spring within the detonator, which in turn released the explosive pin inside the barrel when the handle was rotated. The explosive pin strikes the “bullet” and shoots it across the room. Thousands were sold, helping Curran stay solvent and gave them the ability to hire some of the returning veterans as well. We cannot say what happened to the company, perhaps one of our readers from this area knows, but we believe they were purchased and still exist in Downers Grove today as the Lindy Manufacturing Company, which was founded in 1953.
The toy is a great example of the Yankee ingenuity that was prevalent during World War II and afterward, as the United States recovered by repurposing and re-tooling wartime technology into practical items for the next generation of Americans it was just beginning to create.
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