Blowing Stuff Up

There were three unrelated incidents that led to my respect or fear of personal fireworks.

Our family was visiting my mother’s clan in Chicago and I was introduced to Billy, a thirty-year old who had three fingers on one hand.  He had lost two fingers in a fireworks accident as a kid. It made an impression on me.

A year or two later I read a paperback book called “Follow My Leader” by James Garfield.  The book details the story of Jimmy Carter, a young Boy Scout who is permanently blinded by a firecracker. The book, which is still in print, probably doesn’t get a lot of checkouts from the library these days but it was a cautionary tale that made an impression on me.

Neither of the events above made a lasting impression though because we were shooting off fireworks ourselves just a few years later.

Like most states north of the Mason-Dixon line, New Jersey deemed all fireworks illegal with the exception of sparklers. That didn’t seem to stop the 13-16 year-old crowd from obtaining them. It just made the purchases more exciting.

My favorite experience was the day an older kid (at least 16!) approached us in the park and offered to sell us firecrackers.  “Give me $5 and I’ll get them from my basement,” he said. We followed him to a house on the edge of the park and gave him our money.  He went inside and just never came out.

It took about ten minutes to realize we had been swindled.  As you can imagine, our options were rather limited. We could knock on the door and demand our money back but even two dumb kids like us knew the answer would be “what money?”

We could indignantly tell our mothers that we wasted $5 buying illegal fireworks but we knew the answer would be “that’s what you get for dealing with criminals or something like that.”

Instead we quietly sulked away and ate a few less sundaes at Friendly’s that week.  I recently drove by that same house in Montclair, NJ and remembered that incident like it was yesterday. Maybe I should have stopped to ask for my money back or threaten exposing his crime to readers of the Allen American Newspaper.

Most readers my age know that firecrackers were only a gateway explosive.  Cherry bombs “blowed stuff up real good” and the waterproof ash cans were great for blowing stuff up real good in water. M-80’s were a whole different explosive.

According to Wikipedia, the M-80 was originally created for the military as a simulator for live explosives. The M in the name stood for Military and the 80 referred to the size of the tube. They typically held 3 -5 grams of explosive. It was the damage to property and people by M-80s that led the U.S. Government to pass the Child Safety Act in 1966 banning the use of most consumer (Class C) explosives.

I never actually bought an M-80 but the older kids would recklessly set them off at the local park and schoolyard around the Fourth of July. Rumors that an M-80 was equal to a quarter stick of dynamite (not even close) were enough to keep us at a safe distance.

The only thing more entertaining than blowing stuff up was watching stuff fly.  Fireworks with names like bottle rockets and pinwheels added suspense to the backyard activities because they were so unpredictable.

Unpredictable and unsafe – it sounds like a recipe for trouble but there will always be a new crop of kids looking for a thrill as they blow stuff up.