My Story Part 125 – Happy Fourth Of July!

Reprint from 2012

Many of you will be celebrating by attending picnics or fireworks displays. I’m doing both today, at three o’clock there is a friend’s cookout that I have attended ever since I was a teenager. We use to camp over at his parent’s house each year and we would start off the day with fireworks and end the day with fireworks, in between there was fireworks and a cookout. Not much has changed since then. We meet instead of his parent’s house at his house for a cookout and then at night to shoot off fireworks. He likes fireworks so much that he became a professional and does fireworks shows, once I helped him set up a show for a town’s bi-centennial celebration and I got to sit by him at the control panel when he shot off the fireworks.

There would be able 5 or 6 of us that use to camp-out the night before, I use to ride my bicycle down to his house and we never got to sleep that night from all the expectation of the next day. As we got older, we got bolder and the fireworks got bigger. This was the Vietnam War and several of my friends were in the Guards and one 4^th of July morning we set of a purple smoke bomb as the smoke drifted across the local pond as we played Jim Hendricks’s Purple Haze… it kind of was the talk of the town for a couple of days.

Another Fourth of July not too long after that, my friends brought back some artillery simulators from their 2 week training and we shot one off at a friend’s house and a few minutes later a police car pulled and he told us that the neighbors were complaining and to go someplace else to shoot off our fireworks (You have to realize that back then the size of the town was only around 5000 and everyone knew everyone in town. Also there were only 2 or 3 cops on duty at a time). So we headed over to another friend’s house and after a while we shot off another artillery simulator and up drives the same cop, he said that the neighbors are complaining here also, so why don’t we go out in the woods and shoot off our fireworks there. So once again we packed everything up and moved our picnic out in to the woods in a clearing. We were having a good time and my friend said watch this and threw another artillery simulator, but instead of going BOOM! It went pop… And Ah… Well… Um… I guess the statute of limitations has run out… we… um… set the woods on fire. The artillery simulator was a dud and it threw burning embers in a 20 foot diameter circle and I never knew fire could burn so fast; we didn’t ever have time to pack up the coolers. We fire spread almost as fast as we could run. That night at keg party where most of the volunteer fire department attended, the talk was about the fire on the mountain.

Now things are tamer, my friend’s children and their grandchildren are there, the adults sit around with their cool drinks and the kids play in the pool. Once in a while one of my friends will say, “Do you remember…” and they don’t even have to complete the sentence because we all know what they are going to say.