Julia Sneden Wrote: Going Forth On the Fourth After Strict Blackout Conditions and Requisitioned Gunpowder Had Been the Law

Chemistry of Sparklers

It doesn’t sound like much these days, but to us the Fourth of July parade was a bright, patriotic moment during the dark days of World War II.

In later years, we could sit on our hill top and look down at the firework displays from three different towns strung along the edge of San Francisco Bay. The sparkles were sufficiently far away to allay my fears, and the small clouds of colored stars hovered briefly below us. The occasional faint, distant booms didn’t bother me at all.

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Many years later, my father told me about the Fourth of July that took place in 1910, when he was 4 years old. He grew up on his grandfather’s prune ranch, in thrall to a slew of young aunts and uncles. Each Fourth, the uncles staged a display of fireworks for the family and the working crews (and their families) that lived on or near the ranch. The uncles would fire their pyrotechnics from a metal, flatbed wagon which was, perhaps, normally used as a drying bed for the prunes when they were harvested.

My own children seemed to be content with sparklers, at least when they were little, and a few (“keep them away from Mom”) firecrackers. Our town’s fireworks display took place in the stadium at the fairgrounds, but we learned that we could stand on a street corner nearby and watch the fireworks as they arched up over us. That was about right for me: they were close but not too close, and the crowd that gathered on the street corner was much smaller and more manageable than the crowd at the fairgrounds.

Being outdoors on a humid North Carolina night amid fireworks and fireflies has become my favorite July Fourth memory. Oh, these days I am happy to watch the various displays on television, in air-conditioned comfort, but it can’t replace seeing my boys’ awed faces, or the sound of their “oohs” and “wows!” or the relaxed, casual feel of the impromptu crowd.

It was Carl Schurz, a 19th century German immigrant who grew up to become a US Senator and later on was the Secretary of the Interior, who gave us the famous remark: “My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.”

That seems to me to be a sentiment that can be shared by Americans of any political stripe. Certainly they are words to hold close on this, the signing of our Declaration of Independence.

Happy Fourth!

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Julia Sneden Wrote: Going Forth On the Fourth After Strict Blackout Conditions and Requisitioned Gunpowder Had Been the Law

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