It’s a cloudy 4th of July morning as I write this. It should be a fairly quiet 4th for me this year, which is fine. I’ve had some great ones as an adult. A night spent setting off fireworks on the beach in Myrtle Beach and looking down the waterline each direction and seeing literally hundreds of others doing the same thing for miles comes to mind as a good one. A few years in Indianapolis I’d catch the AAA Indianapolis Indians game downtown and watch the city’s fireworks display from the ballpark. Those were good days too. Still, none of these can really compete with the childhood 4th of Julys.
Like Memorial Day, Independence Day was another excuse to throw a neighborhood party. I’ve mentioned before how I grew up in a great subdivision for a kid, and we took full advantage. If you saw our typical 4th of July in a movie today you’d almost think it was idyllic, maybe even cliché, but it was all true, and it’s why I wouldn’t trade my old neighborhood from the late seventies and early eighties for anything.
It actually started weeks in advance. There was a temporary fireworks stand that would pop up in a parking lot on Edison Street in South Bend, or maybe it was in Mishawaka. Either way, this stand would appear each summer peddling fireworks right on our route home from the day camp at which my sister and I spent our weekdays. Mom would stop and buy the family fireworks there every year. Actually, we begged to stop a lot more often, and mom soon outsmarted us by spreading the shopping out over several trips instead of just one. The stand was always run by the same woman, and each year she’d comment on how much Corrie and I had grown in the last year and give us free fountains, which were probably part of her “buy one, get two free” deals anyway but made us feel special.
I don’t know if my memory is just rosy for this time or what, but I simply don’t remember very many rainy days. It seems to me the 4th was almost always warm and sunny, which is remarkable in South Bend.
That’s good, because the day of the 4th itself was as busy as the nighttime. The kids often decorated their bikes with red, white and blue ribbons and crepe paper. We spent an hour or two riding around the neighborhood with our new patriotic wheels. The adults meanwhile would be preparing for the nighttime. I believe bourbon slushes were frequently involved.
Some years we even managed to put together a 4th of July picnic and bar-be-que on one of the cul-de-sacs in the subdivision. It would be full of grills, coolers and folding chairs as dozens munched on bugers, hot dogs and potato salad. I believe some canned adult beverages were frequently involved there too, but as a kid you didn’t really think of that too much. Nor do you think about the neighborhood gossip that went on. I didn’t find out about any of that until years later while reminiscing. Turns out there was the usual neighborhood drama, marriages on the rocks and rumors of affairs and drinking problems, but I was young enough back then to be happily oblivious to all that.
There were often other things happening too. One year I walked down the street to the Lowe’s house (our best friends on the street were the Lowes and the Markiewicz family) and saw Mike Lowe out on his porch working with some contraption. I investigated and found Mike had gotten himself an old-school ice cream churn and was going to make homemade desserts for that night. He was out there for hours cranking away at this handle with the ingredients inside, the churn surrounded by ice. Homemade ice cream? What could be better than that?
Sundown couldn’t come fast enough though, that’s when the big fun started. The Lowe’s driveway was usually home base for the fireworks. The Markiewicz family would be there, as would several other families from the street, making for a pretty busy front yard.
As the light melted away, the parents would break out the sparklers. While the girls would twirl them around (they made really cool trails in the darkness if you whipped them around fast enough) I made up a challenge for myself. I decided I’d be close to being a grown-up if I could light my sparkler and run all the way around the Lowe’s house and back to the driveway again before it burned out. If I were able to go around and get a foot back on the concrete with a little bit of spark left, I was a winner. It took me a couple of years but when I was seven or eight I did it. I knew I was on my way.
Bottle rockets were of questionably legality, so of course we stocked up on those. The Sherriff would roll through the neighborhood on patrol once a night on the 4th. We could see him coming though, and the dads had a system though and the metal pipe we used as a launching pad (and the wooden ladder on which the pipe leaned) disappeared into the bushes quickly when he rolled past.
I loved the fireworks. I enjoyed every bang, spark, burst and screech they made. The dads who fired them off were the coolest guys in the world to me. I was particularly proud when I was deemed old enough to light a few myself.
After a vigorous day of bike riding, picnicking and fireworks (and the bourbon slushes for the grownups) we were all pretty worn out. The homemade ice cream? Well, that didn’t quite work out (I think there ended up being chunks of butter in it or something. That stuff’s trickier than you’d think to make by hand). Sleep came very easy for us.
So while I’ve had some terrific Independence Days over the years, I still feel nostalgic for the childhood ones, where I was surrounded by family that loved me and friends that cared about me. I felt safe (despite the presence of explosives and lawn darts we never had an injury) and happy in our neighborhood. Some kids I knew talked about taking vacation over the 4th of July holiday. I always felt sorry for them. Why would anyone want to be anywhere but the Greenview North subdivision on a day like that during that era? I’m still wondering.
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