When we were kids growing up in Brooklyn, the Fourth of July was a lot of fun. We had a backyard, although it was concrete and more like an alley than an actual backyard. In that backyard, my dad had his barbeque. Unlike Frank’s family, our barbeques weren’t feats involving a bonfire. Ours were confined to lighter fluid. Considering how accident prone my father is, it’s really pretty amazing that he never set himself or anyone else on fire.
My aunt, uncle & cousins would come over & we’d have those things that I think were called Cracker Balls. They came in assorted colors and exploded when you threw them on the ground. I could never throw them hard enough to explode so I’d have to stomp on them. I was always a bit leery of doing that, afraid I’d catch on fire or something. Then there were the sparklers, yet another thing I wasn’t too thrilled about. I loved how they looked, just as long as I wasn’t the one holding them. I didn’t trust those sparks shooting out of them.
Back in the 60s & 70s, fireworks were illegal in NY, just as they are today, but the police didn’t really bother you much about it. That meant from dawn until the wee hours of the night, you heard firecrackers going off along with the random M-80s thrown into the mix. I always thought to myself, “This is what it must sound like during a war.”
By nightfall, the air was literally thick with smoke and my mom would put a fan in the window when we went to bed in a vain attempt to clear the smoke from our bedrooms.
We had a dog named Scrappy back in those days. Scrappy was a little nuts, although it’s easy to understand why, living in a house with 4 kids who did things like this to him:
Scrappy loved the 4th of July. He loved fireworks. Normally this would be a good thing. If your dog isn’t terrified of firecrackers, you don’t have to worry about him trying to climb into the bathtub to hide. However, he didn’t simply like them. He LOVED them.
There was a guy on our block who had tons of fireworks. We lived on a dead end street. This man would take a garbage can, not those plastic ones like everyone has now, but a metal one, & put it at the end of the block, where our street intersected with 58th Street. He then would fill the garbage can with all sorts of different fireworks. Next he would pour something on top that I think may have been gasoline & he lit the whole thing up. Things exploded and shot out of it for a good 30 minutes.
One 4th of July, Scrappy somehow escaped from the house just as the fireworks were going off and he made a beeline straight for the garbage can. Our entire family charged after him, screaming his name, certain he was a goner. I pictured him grabbing a stack of rockets in his mouth and just taking off into the sky. He was, after all, a pretty small dog. Luckily, someone was able to grab him before he leaped into the barrel of pyrotechnics. And so, tragedy was averted & everyone went back to enjoying the show.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone!
