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He was so irresistibly drawn to Fireworks that, as I have mentioned, he became the proprietor of a Fireworks Stand early in my youth, and this made him a marked man in the neighborhood. A Fireworks Stand is a unique commercial establishment that has, like the May fly, a short but very merry life. For those who have never seen a Fireworks Stand a brief description would not be too far amiss. They were usually wooden stands, ex-fruit dispensaries, or what-have-you, covered with red, white, and blue bunting, over which a large red-on-white sign simply stated FIREWORKS. The interior of these stands was usually a blazing inferno because the July sun knows no mercy. They were dusty and hot, but the shelves were lined with the greatest assortment of bliss and ecstasy this side of the Biltmore bar. Space does not allow a full description of all these magnificent creations. The Mount Vesuvius, for example, a silver cone that when lit and placed on the ground spewed forth a great shower of gold, blue, and white sparks high into the air, emulating the eruption of its namesake. The racks of slender, sinuous Roman Candles, of several calibers, and the lordly monarch of them all, the Skyrocket. Skyrockets were available in a wide variety of potency and weight, just as the rocketry of our Space program of today. The tiny twenty-five-center hardly larger than a Five Incher, wired to a yellow pine stick topped with a red nose cone, was made to be launched from an upright, empty quart milk bottle, and on up the scale to the big Five Dollar Rocket that stood a full four feet and was launched from a special angle-iron and handled with extreme care, it being possible to bring down a passing DC-3 with the proper hand on the sights.

The Pinwheels also came in many sizes and colors and could, if misused, be spectacularly disastrous. I personally saw one Pinwheel climb right up the side of a garage, over the roof, and spin a block and a half down the alley before it finally burnt itself out, and then only after burning down 300 feet of fence and two chicken coops.

There were many other forms of fireworks of a lesser nature, such as Red Devils, which were a particularly nasty piece of business, being red paper-covered tablets designed to be scratched on the pavement and ground under heel to a sputtering, hissing, general nastiness. They did not explode; merely hissed and burned and gave stupendous hotfeet to anyone who happened to step on them. Of course there were the more prosaic Firecrackers and Cherry Bombs of all sizes and varying degrees of destructiveness, and the odds and ends for grandmothers, girls, and smaller kids; the Sparklers, the Cap Guns, and the strange little white tablets, aspirin-size, that when lit produced a long, sinuously climbing white ash and were called “Snakes.” All of these and more my father dispensed over the counter from his Fireworks Stand out on the state highway, where the heat waves rose and fell and the Big Time Spenders bought the stuff by the bags full for their blondes and their egos.

I was considered unbelievably lucky that my Old Man not only owned a Fireworks Stand with all that great stuff on the shelves, but that I actually was allowed to slave away my life in it. Some of my golden moments were spent dispensing Torpedoes and Cherry Bombs and black powder Five Inchers to various slope-browed delinquents of all ages on long, hot, late June and early July afternoons when other kids were out hitting out flies and fistfighting.

As the actual Fourth drew closer, our stock of fireworks slowly dwindled until the actual day of the Fourth itself, our peak moment. Fireworks Stands work strictly on speculation and my father ordered his stuff from the General Motors of the fireworks world, an outfit called the Excelsior Fireworks Corporation. They did not take any unsold material back, which meant that as the Fourth drew to a close what was on the shelves was ours to shoot, to explode, to detonate, to