Some July 4th Memories

I hope you're all having a very Happy 4th of July today. As I was thinking about the 4th a lot of memories came to mind. Here are a few of the more memorable years (with dates if I remember them):

Sometime in the early 60's - Our family planned to shoot of fireworks in our back yard but the June bugs were everywhere (they had hung around for a few extra days). They were so thick my mom and sister wouldn't leave the house, so they stood in the back screen door and watched my dad and I set off the fountains and sparklers.

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Mid-60's - I remember going with my family to Angel Stadium to see a huge professional show that included aerial mortars along with all kinds of standing displays. They were entertaining, but the design of the stadium was such that the smoke generated by the floor displays tended to stay in the stadium, making for a smoky fog that sometimes was tough to see through.

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Late 60's - We joined with another family, each buying a large box of fireworks. We were at the other house and fire everything off, throwing the spent sparklers, fountains and such into a large metal wash tub on the front lawn. There wasn't any water in the tub, and when the evening was over, we picked the tub up and found that it had gotten so hot it had burned a perfect hole in the lawn.

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1970 - I spent several weeks with family in Oklahoma and on July 4th we went to the country club where my uncle was a member.  We sat on a fairway of the golf course while fireworks were shot off an adjoining fairway.  At one point we heard the mortar go off but there was no explosion overhead as expected...until a moment later when the shell exploded on the fairway behind the crowd.  It had launched over our heads and landed behind us.

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1971 - Oklahoma again, this time with the whole family. In Oklahoma City it was legal to buy bottle rockets and firecrackers. My cousin and I had a great time, though I did try and blow my fingers off at one point. Fortunately, I was unsuccessful.

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1975 - I had just started working at Disneyland a few days before and was assigned to Main Street beginning about 4pm. The park was unbelievably crowded. I believe park capacity at that time was 55,000, and the crowd estimate that day was 85,000. I worked the ticket booth area for awhile, and then the Main Street area up through the Hub (the area where the various lands split off from Main Street. At 9pm the fireworks started, and I had been told that I was not to stop and watch but keep moving. It was impossible. I was literally pinned in shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists and couldn't move a step. Everybody had crammed into the Hub to see Tinkerbell fly, and I think they all thought there would be a special fireworks show that night (there wasn't - it was the same show they did all summer).  I wrote about my summer at Disneyland here.

That day had been so tough on the employees that Disney struck a special medal and gave it to everyone who worked that July 4th. Unfortunately, mine was stolen some years later. I wish I still had it.

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1977 - I spent the holiday weekend with a family quartet in Fayetteville, AR. On the 3rd we traveled up to Southwest City, MO to sing for the local city celebration. Small town America at its best. The fireworks show consisted of one mortar, followed by applause and a two-minute or so delay, followed by another mortar. It went on like that for 45 minutes. They served watermelon right out of the back of a guy's pick-up truck. Great fun. On the 4th we sang twice, including an evening concert at a tiny Pentecostal church outside of town. There were horses tied up outside.

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1986 - My dad had a heart attack on June 26th followed by an angioplasty. He was home by the 4th and all of us, including my future bride, sat in the front yard of their Huntington Beach home watching the neighbors fire off their fireworks. We were pretty glad to all be together.

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1988 - Fireworks were banned in Tustin where we lived, but we decided to flaunt the law and bought a couple of boxes of sparklers in nearby Santa Ana. We had recently gotten a video camera, and on our first tape I have pictures of my pregnant wife waving sparklers around in our condo's tiny backyard, hoping a police chopper wouldn't fly over and bust us.

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1990 - We had recently moved into our Mission Viejo home and our 20-month old daughter had come down with chicken pox a day or so earlier. We couldn't go out and join others in watching a professional show, so the three of us sat in the upstairs window and watched for whatever fireworks we could see. She gave us a running commentary on the whole thing.

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Late 90's or early 00's - For several years we went down to the lake at Laguna Niguel Regional Park and watched the professional aerial show they did there. Two of those years stand out. The first was the year a misfired shell landed on the brushy bank across from the island where they were shooting the show. It started a brush fire and things were delayed for awhile while the Orange County Fire Authority put on a firefighting demonstration for us. The second year was another misfire, but instead of setting the brush on fire, the entire show went up at once. We had about 30 seconds of serious explosions and color...and that was it.

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2006 - We scheduled a visit to my daughter's future college for the 5th, so we spent much of the 4th in San Francisco. We headed to Sausalito for dinner and were going to watch the SF fireworks from the waterfront there, but the crowd pouring in to Sausalito convinced us that if we stayed there we'd be trapped for hour. We snuck out of town before it got too crazy.

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2007 - My kids had never lived in a town where fireworks were legal, but for this particular year, we visited my wife's cousin in Fillmore where you can still buy the good stuff and shoot it off legally. We had a great night and the kids had a lot of fun...even though they weren't kids anymore.

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2009 - We visited the Laguna Niguel Regional Park again but couldn't take our usual place along the lake because of health issues with my dad.  As it turns out this would be his last 4th of July with us.  We shot this photo before we left for the park:

My kids took on their cousins in Wii sports.  It's pretty rare to be able to get my kids together anymore.

This year will be a little quieter.  My sister's family is on vacation in Costa Rica and my daughter is at school in Northern California.  We'll spend the evening at mom's house cooking up some traditional July 4th food and hoping we can see some fireworks from her back yard.