The house my mother grew up in, and the block surrounding it, had to get evacuated twice. You wouldn't naturally think Pulaski Street in Chicago would be a great place to find bombs but you aren't counting on my grandfather, who twice had a shell land in his foxhole on Iwo Jima and fail to explode. Believing them to be his lucky charms, he brought them home with him after the war and put them in his basement, next to his collection of nails.

The CPD bomb squad said, after disarming the second one, "If he has a third one down here, it is your problem."