Okay, so the story as we know it about the Looby bombing is that someone with 5 or 10 or 20 sticks of dynamite wrapped into a bomb drove in front of the Looby house and pitched the bomb from the car toward the house, trying to get it through the dining room window but missed and thus the bomb landed outside the house at the corner of the house, pretty much destroying the whole front half of the house and a good portion of the neighbor’s house, blowing out windows in nearby buildings, but leaving Councilman Looby and his wife alive in the back of the house.
I went out to look at this yesterday, though the house is long gone, and it is, at the very most, thirty feet from the street to that window. In the picture on the left, the guy in the foreground is standing in the street.
Also important for this–the internet tells me that a stick of dynamite weighs half a pound.
Now, I, as a weak person with no throwing skills, believe that, if I hung out of a large old car window, I could overhand toss 3.5 to 5 lbs of anything and hit that window. I also believe, depending on how far out I was leaning, I might have enough room to underhand lob it. I don’t know if I would be strong enough to throw it hard enough to break the window, but it’s a rather large window. I might not be able to get ten pounds from the car to the window, though. But a man could, right?
Now, if I’m in the car, it seems like the only way to get the bomb to the house is that kind of back-handed newspaper-delivery flick, because otherwise, the car is in the way. But even still, it seems like, if that went awry, the dynamite would end up on the porch.
Also, as an added factor, now the street is lined with parked cars. It’s not in the pictures, but obviously, those pictures were taken in daylight and people could have moved their cars out of the way before then. On the other hand, there weren’t reports of any destroyed cars.
So, my questions are these: there’s a huge difference between five sticks of dynamite and twenty. How much dynamite do you think that explosion was actually caused by? Does the “They threw it from the car” theory make sense? But if they didn’t throw it from the car, why didn’t they place it better? And, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that they did throw the bomb at the front window and it did bounce off and kind of roll to the corner. Does that tell us something about where the car was in relation to the house? In other words, can we guess that the car was headed toward 18th maybe more in front of the porch than the window?
Basically, dear readers, what do we see when we look at those pictures?
Tiny Cat Pants 