Fourth of July and Manor Ridge Pyro's

Boom!

What would the Fourth of July in Manor Ridge have been without fireworks?

In a word - unthinkable.

For me, it was the one time per year our next door neighbor, Mr McGaw would bring out his carbide canon. For those unfamiliar with this especially cool instrument of destruction - it was (is) a small iron or steel canon that is primed with carbide powder and then ignited with a spark. The resulting Boom! was very cool and I always looked forward to Mr McGaw bringing it out on the Fourth and firing away.

For us kids, it was sparklers. And I am not talking about the crappy, impossible to light, wimpy sparklers they sell today. No sir. The sparklers we had were like welding rods! Light one of those and it was all you could do to hang on! The sparks were hot, bright, lasted a long time, and were awesome. Run around and make a tracer with one. Or better yet, toss a sparkler high into the air and watch it streak across the sky. Then try to pick it up without touching the "business end". And of course there was always the danger of a sparkler ending up in someones head, or even - in their eye! Of course objects taking out ones eye was a widely believed fact by all Manor Ridge mothers, yet in all my years of sparkler throwing (or shooting BB guns, or throwing lawn jarts, or the thousands of other things we did involving projectiles) I never witnessed or even heard of anyone losing an eye. Still, our mothers warned us "you'll put someones eye out with that ________."

But I digress. Sparklers were just one of the many Fourth of July traditions we held. Another was concocting our own cap bombs. These were made by taking an ordinary roll of caps for a cap gun, and unrolling them and overlapping each "dot" of powder on the cap roll onto a pin. The key was to pierce each and every dot of powder with the pin, then slowly pull out the pin without setting off the entire roll of caps in your hand (something I did several times - always leaving a nice black burn mark on my thumb or finger). Once the pin was extracted, you had an accordion of punctured caps in your hand. This would then be squeezed tight and you would wrap it with Scotch tape to hold it together. A match was placed on the top and taped into place as a fuse. Light the end of the match and when it burned its way up to the top of the match bomb - Boom! (well, a loud pop was more like it, but it was still cool).

Later we would move on to bigger and better home-made pyrotechnics.

A very nice smoke grenade could be fashioned by taking an entire box or two of Ohio Blue Tip matches (bought at Wagners of course) and breaking off each and every match head. This took some time but if you had 3-4 Manor Ridge pyro's working together, it could be done in about an hour. Then you would customize one of the boxes by taping the striking surfaces of the other box onto the inside of the box (so then match heads had something to strike when it was thrown). Then all of the match heads would be crammed into the prepared box. The box would be heavily taped shut and when thrown with great force against the ground (preferably macadam or concrete), at least one match inside the box would strike the ignitor surface, and then ignite all of the other matches inside the box creating a classic Manor Ridge chain reaction. The resulting white smoke billowing from the box was impressive.

Later we moved on to chemical engineering of our smoke bombs.

This required two primary ingredients - saltpeter (ammonium nitrate) and sugar. The one was readily available at no cost in moms kitchen. The other required a purchase at Wagners. Yes, the Wagners always had a box of saltpeter ready for us (located behind the penny candy counter on the shelf of household items and groceries). We always wondered what the Wagners were thinking when we would buy them out of saltpeter, but they never asked and always sold it to us.

Mix the saltpeter and sugar in the proper ratio, wrap a measured portion of the mixture in tissue paper, light the tissue paper with a match and throw it. Very cool. Of course you could do so much more, especially if you could get your hands on sulfur and charcoal (which of course we did). Then you could try to make your own homemade gun powder!

Now this being the days before the Internet, learning how to make saltpeter and sugar bombs, let alone real gunpowder, took some actual research (as in, reading books). Us being the pyro's that we were, this was no obstacle. We found the proper ratios of ammonium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal, and set about hand grinding each ingredient into as fine a powder as we could make them. Mix the powders into the proper ratios, and you had something close to actual gunpowder. This could be used in all manner of explosive devices. In fact, we kept a book of our pyrotechnic inventions, giving them clever names such as "the green grenade" or the "saltpeter eater".

The saltpeter eater was my design and I was quite proud of the result. The saltpeter eater was our homemade gunpowder stuffed into a steel soda can with a hole punched in either end of the can. Into each hole went a sparkler (as a fuse). The idea was - by lighting each sparkler, you could get the can to spin wildly (in theory) as each sparkler burned its way into the can from either end. I envisioned a spinning whirly gig of flaming joy. What we got was something unexpected, and very cool (and dangerous, but that's what made it cool).

At my friend Matt's backyard driveway/basketball court, we set the saltpeter eater on the macadam, and Matt and I each lit a sparkler. We stepped back (good idea) to watch and wait. The sparklers did their job and burned like a fuse into the can. Then there was a bang, and the saltpeter eater simply disappeared in a cloud of smoke! Where did it go? We had not the slightest clue until a moment or two later when the can came clanking back down to earth in his backyard. We blasted it into the atmosphere! Far more cool then something that simply spun around emitting sparks and smoke.

The use of saltpeter and sugar and homemade gunpowder was common knowledge all over Manor Ridge. Once we went and visited our friend Norm who lived in Fairway Park. At that time, there was an open field next to the Manor Animal Hospital (what is today apartments). On a hot summer day, Norm and his friends had concocted their own device - essentially a pipe bomb. One end of this pipe filled with homemade gunpowder was shoved into the dirt in the middle of this open field, and the other end was lit with, as always, a homemade fuse. We stepped back (very good idea this time) to watch and wait. Boom! And I mean Boom! It blew a hole into the ground and it is fortunate none of us was hit by steel pipe shrapnel.

Improvised fuse using sparklers, matches, and all kinds of other homemade inventions worked, but there was nothing like actual fuse. You know - a real fuse - the kind that Mr Phelps lit at the opening of every episode of the Mission Impossible TV show. And we had real fuse on occasion, thanks to another mainstay of the Manor Ridge community - Smitties Hobbies over at the Manor Shopping Center. Real fuse was precious and seldom used but was cool as anything to watch. My friend Jim still has some actual fuse from Smitties, and not just any fuse - fuse that burns underwater! How cool is that?! Of course today you could never buy real fuse, let alone underwater fuse, but back then, in the hay days of rocketry, fuse was very available for hobbyists. Or for Pyro's.

Another pyro tool was lighter fluid, also widely available back when 70% of the adult population smoked. Wagners was also the stop for this essential tool of the trade. Once we fashioned a tennis ball cannon out of soda cans (see "Glass, Steel, and Aluminum") which required lighter fluid as the ignition source and accelerant. After blasting many tennis balls high into the air, one failed to ignite. We placed the match at the end of the canon......nothing. Did we forget to add lighter fluid? My friend Glenn decided to have a look (literally) and peered into the business end of the canon and Boom! Out blasted the tennis ball, just missing his head! The flame did manage to singe away his eyebrows and part of his long blond bangs. In other words - "we almost put out Glenn's eye!"

As you can see, the use of pyrotechnics was a year-round vocation for us, but there was nothing like the Fourth of July to make it .......sanctioned.

Of course Fourth of July's in Manor Ridge were also known for picnics. Every house had one and on the Fourth of July Manor Ridge backyards would be filled with families. Picnic tables were set up under trees to get some shade and out would come food prepared by your mom, your aunts, and your grandmothers. Dad would slave over the charcoal grille (no propane grills in those days just good old Kingsford charcoal and lighter fluid). Dad made the hot dogs and burgers which the flies and bees feasted upon along with the people in the hot summer sun. There was no point eating inside "to get out of the heat" because the inside of the house was just as hot as the backyard.

Then that evening it would be off to Mountville for the annual fireworks display. You had to get there early to lay out your blanket on the grass and get a spot. It seemed like forever until it was dark enough for the fireworks to start. After the show all the cars would leave and there would be a massive traffic jam - one of the few such traffic jams we ever experienced because there was so little traffic on the roads in those days.

Back at the house there would be more sparklers and cap bombs and of course, blasts from Mr McGaw's carbide canon as the lightning bugs lit up the July evening.

As soon as it had started, the Fourth of July gave way to the Fifth of July and unused fireworks as we returned to the tedium and routine of summer vacation.