My sainted American Civics teacher, Miss Whitehead, told us that the reason that fireworks were such a big part of the Independence Day celebration is that the fire and explosion was symbolic of our nation’s birth in the gunfire of revolution. Far be it from me to argue with Miss Whitehead, but fireworks are used to celebrate a lot of things.

Part of this is due to the beauty of an aerial display. Part of it is because on a visceral level, we just like making loud noises and blowing things up.

I like fireworks. I have been known to spend a pretty significant amount of money on commercially available fireworks. I’ve spent the evening anchored in the middle of a flotilla of hundreds of other boats to get a better view of a fireworks display.

But there was a time where my involvement in fireworks was a bit more, shall we say, active. My older sister, peace be upon her name, had a friend. Friend’s husband Bill as a chemical engineer. And a pyrotechnic maniac. As opposed to a pyromaniac, who gets off on starting fires, the pyrotechnic maniac has desires for fireworks not readily available to us among the peasantry in this fine nation, even back when I was a high school student. So he endeavored to make his own.

He was quite successful at it, too. My active participation in manufacture was to engage my high school industrial arts expertise to machine a core mould out of a bar of solid bronze. Core mould? That’s the thing one uses to form the rocket motor of a solid-fueled rocket. You know? Sky rockets? Yeah. Like that. Except this one was an inch and a half in diameter. I know because I had a section of 1.5″ inside diameter cardboard tube to make sure things fit. The “bronze” part is because when one is stomping a mixture of black powder and iron filings into a cardboard tube by hand, it benefits one’s lifespan to have no sparks. Bronze doesn’t spark.

The resultant rocket had a range estimated at over a quarter mile if one was shooting for range, but it also could loft a quarterpound of flash powder several hundred feet into the air for a very satisfying bang.

Bill was astute in his pursuit of fine fireworks, dispatching my sister and his wife to Houston when he found a supplier for the thick-walled paper tubing he required for his productions. This being the days before UPS, he was at the local rail freight office so often they knew him on sight, picking up fuse, chemicals and such, and this was also at the time when you could walk into the local chemical supply house and buy things like potassium chlorate and barium nitrate without finding yourself on the floor being strip searched.

Hell, you could walk into the local grocery store and buy saltpeter (potassium nitrate) by the pound because it was sold for curing meat. Flowers of sulphur (pure powdered sulfur) was there in the drug store as a common curative, and you had two of the three ingredients to make black powder. All you needed then was a bag of charcoal. Don’t ask how I know this.

So we had this friend, Bill. He’s the guy you WANT to show up for the Fourth of July. Or New Year’s Eve. And he does. And when he opens the trunk of his car, you see fireworks nirvana. The legendary “M-80”? Piece of cake. Bill had supercharged M-80’s. Cherry bombs. Oh-my-gosh-I-don’t-know-what-to-call-its, one-inch diameter versions of M-80’s on steroids. And those rockets.

And on the last memorable holiday that I had the pleasure of joining this happy crew, he pulled out a gallon milk jug with a foot of cannon fuse stuck out the top. “What’s that?” “That’s all the leftover flash powder and stars I had after I finished the other stuff.” It was probably three or four pounds of flash powder. It was as spectacular as you might begin to imagine, and left a three-foot crater in the middle of a gravel road.

Shortly thereafter I joined the army, and after pulling the trigger on a 105, some of Bill’s stuff was lost in perspective, but I still remember those fine days when “Watch this!” was a personal and social thing.