When my dad was a small child, gas stoves were standard but lacked igniters. Thus, every family in every home in my dad’s neighborhood sported a book of wooden matches to get the job done.
Two doors down from him lived a young kid, let’s call him Denny, who liked to take his mother’s box of matches and start fires. He’d start one out in the yard. He’d burn his toys. He torched his sister’s dolls. Then he sprayed them with water and sought praise from his poor mother for putting out the fires. Nobody knew where Denny’s dad was. And everyone in the neighborhood tried to help that poor single mother. It was the '40s. People cared, I guess.
