Editor’s note: This is another column in Bill Boyd’s new series, “The Way It Was,” about growing up in Marysville. Bill continues to work with the Union County Historical Society to obtain information for his stories. With Marysville and Union County celebrating Bicentennial anniversaries in 2019 and 2020, respectively, these articles help depict what life was like in those early years.
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With the exception of Christmas, my favorite holiday as a kid in the 1930s was the Fourth of July. What I remember most was the fireworks. I’m not talking about organized nighttime displays. I’m talking about the firecrackers that kids started exploding as soon as it got light in the morning and continued all day.
Actually, kids started to buy firecrackers a couple weeks or so in advance. A lot of fireworks were sold in tents that suddenly appeared in gravel parking lots and at roadside stands. You could be driving down a road and come upon a tent with a sign in front that simply said “Fireworks.” If you stopped and went in, the place would be loaded with every kind of fireworks imaginable.
When I was about six years old, I was fascinated by firecrackers. Although I was too young to use them myself, I would walk to the Stevens house two doors west of us. The two Stevens boys, John and Jim, were older and loved firecrackers. I would go to their house and sit in the grass while I watched them do all kinds of firecracker stuff.
Sometimes they would take empty tin cans and turn them upside down over big firecrackers. Then they would light the fuses and see how high they could blow the can into the air. Or they would dig a hole in a sand pile beside their garage, and then insert a firecracker and blow sand everywhere.
The Stevens brothers had a little, shorthaired black dog named Pepper. He was really scared of firecrackers. Sometimes he would hide under the bushes when he got scared. Other times he might come up to me as I sat in the grass and try to get very close to me. I would put my arm around him, and then I could feel his trembling stop.
I’m sure there were a lot of kids who got burned or hurt in other ways by firecrackers. The next day’s newspapers often contained stories about that. My mother would read those stories and then she tried to impress upon me how dangerous they could be.
The only kid I ever knew who got hurt was with a group of boys over on Locust Street. For some reason, they decided it was neat to see the firecrackers explode up in the air. So they would hold a firecracker in one hand and a match in the other. Then they would strike the match and light the fuse and throw the firecracker high into the air.
This created some wonderful mid-air explosions. It worked great until one kid struck his match and lit the fuse. At that point he must have gotten confused, for instead of throwing the firecracker into the air and holding the match, he threw the match in the air and held onto the firecracker. It exploded, and he let out a yell and headed for home. I talked with him about it later, and he told me it felt as if he had hit his thumb and finger with a hammer. Ouch!
At some point, when I was maybe seven or eight years old, my parents let me use some very tiny firecrackers called “Lady Fingers.” They made a little “pop” instead of a big “bang.” But my parents would not allow me to use matches.
Instead, they had something called “punk.” It was kind of a stick, maybe 10 inches long. I could hold it at one end, and the other end was coated with something that my dad lit with a match. It didn’t flame up, but just smoldered. Then I could use that smoldering end to light the fuse on my Lady Fingers.
A few years later, during World War II, firecrackers disappeared because there was a much more important use for explosives. Then, sometime after the war, it became illegal to set off firecrackers. That was good, of course, and it prevented a lot of serious injuries to kids. In spite of that, I think my “firecracker memories” were an important part of being a kid in Marysville a long time ago. And even today, I sometimes get an urge to set off a Lady Finger.
Those wishing to contact Bill Boyd can e-mail him at bill@davidwboyd.com