The Olde Town Festival premiered in Covington in 1984. It was a week-long series of events, concerts, contests, and demonstrations of old-fashioned arts and skills. The festival organizers needed a kick-off ceremony to start the week, so I pitched in by building a "time machine," setting the clock hands back 80 years, then having some kind of mishap that prevented the town from coming back to the present time for an entire week.
Mayor Ernest Cooper played along with the gag, and I proceeded to create a makeshift time machine out of an old television cabinet, line the inside with hundreds of matches head to head, and when the appointed moment came, I lit the first match and the whole time machine/television cabinet disappeared into a cloud of flame and smoke. It worked perfectly. It looked just like the machine had malfunctioned bigtime.
I had a fire extinguisher on hand, of course, and out of an abundance of caution and/or dramatic effect, I hit the time machine with a burst of fire extinguisher. That was the first time I had actually used a fire extinguisher, however, and it spewed out a cloud of powder that not only covered and extinguished any flames, it also covered the mayor, myself, and anyone standing within several feet with a dusting of powder. I supposed it would have been a good idea to test that part of it ahead of time.
Here are some pictures...
