Walter Watts
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Sky’s the Limit
« on: 2009-07-04 19:24:28 » |
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Have a great Fourth of July everyone!
---Walter
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Dick Cavett - A New York Times Blog
July 3, 2009, 10:00 pm
Sky’s the Limit
June and July always contained my two favorite days of the year.
The first of them, chronologically, was that longed-for, ached-for day when the old-fashioned roman-numeraled, one-click-a-minute school clock on the wall hit III/XV. The magical 3:15 that cued Miss Gabus, or Miss Fuchs, or Miss Swanson, etc. to utter the words, “Everyone have a nice summer.”
I can almost bring back that glorious feeling, exiting Prescott School in Lincoln, Neb., brimming with joy that months would go by without having to sit half-brain-dead in a dun-colored room, acquiring such vital knowledge as the principal export of Argentina from, alas, generally colorless teachers. Absolutely nothing in life even remotely resembles that particular thrill: a whole summer ahead.
Not all states let you out of school at the same time. I was in one of the luckiest. Our last day might even have been in May, because I recall my father’s saying, more than once, “We may not make much money [all my three parents were teachers], but by God we get paid on a year-round basis, with three whole months off. How many people can say that?”
(I’d love to know what my parents made, teaching in the ‘40s and ‘50s. It had to be a good bit more than my dad made during the Big Depression, when he beat out some 20 or so desperate competitors for the honor of teaching high school English in Comstock, Neb., to mostly farmers’ children, for a sorely, sorely needed $900 [sic] a year. For no extra remuneration, he was granted the privilege of also coaching football, baseball and basketball, and staging the senior play.)
The only problem with the last day of school (oh, how those words still resonate!) was that June still had to be gotten through before the Fourth of July.
*******
Fireworks!
The word still raises the hair on my arms. (The lower arms, mainly.) Fireworks of all kinds were legal back then in Nebraska, and the opening of the first fireworks stand at the edge of town meant infinitely more to me than the first crocuses did to the flower-worshipper, the robin to the bird-lover . . . well, you get the point.
I didn’t like fireworks. I loved them. (Pyrotechnomania?) And I don’t mean the stuff that girls and sissies liked: fountains, sparklers, pinwheels and those infantile “snakes.” I mean the big stuff. The heavy ordnance. Cherry bombs, torpedoes, aerial bombs, two-, three- and even six-inchers (jumbo firecrackers). And, once, a 12-shot repeater aerial bomb.
Because I was rich — yes, richer than a king, from doing magic shows for up to $20 a Kiwanis Club or church basement appearance — I was able, one memorable year, to buy from the fireworks catalog the “Jumbo Assortment.” The company name may have been “Spencer Fireworks,” or something, somewhere in Ohio. I’d love to know what my order in, say, 1949, cost.
And one day, a mail truck pulled up in front of the house and unloaded a box. Judging from its size, I guessed my folks had bought a living room easy chair. It was feet in every direction.
It took an hour to unpack: rockets, Roman candles, aerial bombs, “ash cans” and cherry bombs, pinwheels, bushels of brick-sized packages of every brand of firecracker. And topping everything, a single one-pound aerial bomb. Also, negligibly, a generous amount of the despised “safe & sane” fountains, sparklers and snakes. For little kids and girls.
“LAY ON GROUND. LIGHT FUSE. RETIRE QUICKLY.”
I pity anyone for whom those printed words were not a feature of youth. (Could that familiar phrase from the life of everybody who ever bought Chinese firecrackers have contributed to a current language problem? I mean the one where, seemingly, somewhere between seven and ten people in the entire populace know the difference between “lay” and “lie”?)
Let’s admit right now: firecrackers and fireworks can be hellishly, horribly dangerous.
Nevertheless, my friend James J. McConnell (then Jimmy) and I, our pockets loaded with super-powered cherry bombs, set out to do some damage. These cherry bombs were the kind you could throw into a lake, pond or stream and they, having sunk — and thanks to their waterproof fuses — would explode below the surface. They were too powerful to blow a tin can 10 feet into the air the way a firecracker would. They’d simply blow it inside out before it left the ground. As most kids know (even if not first-hand), they can be flushed down a toilet, as someone did when I was at Yale, thereby removing a considerable amount of venerable plumbing. And not just on one floor (mercifully, there were no reports of anyone’s having been seated at the time).
On this particular unlucky day, I wedged a “cherry” between the upright leg of a farmer’s heavy wooden sign and the sign itself. Standing 10 feet away proved insufficient. I thought I felt something hit my face. “Look at your shirt,” Jim said. My white undershirt was dotted with red spots where tiny chunks of wood had entered it — and me.
Failing to learn from this — and under the illusion of immortality that goes with extreme youth — we found a potentially much worse object for demolition lying beside the road. Someone had thrown out one of those concrete Christmas tree bases; at least 10 pounds of solid concrete, shaped like an immense gum drop, white, with a hole for the sawed-off trunk.
What we expected was not what happened. We tossed a cherry bomb — or possibly it was an equally powerful ash can — into the hole, and retired quickly. Baroom!! A jagged chunk of the thing the size of a clenched fist whizzed, screeching, past my right ear with about five inches of clearance. The closest I was to come to know what vets described when bullets or grenade fragments zipped past their head. One step to the left and you’d be reading someone else right now.
*******
On that July of the Jumbo Assortment, Jim and I were allowed to sleep out on his porch the night of the 3rd, which, it felt to us, had taken eons to come. I had already sold pounds of fireworks from the mammoth assortment. (Jim pointed out my business acumen. I had marked one of the items spread out on a bed for viewing — a small pack of firecrackers — as: “10c. each / or 2 for a quarter.”)
We awoke on the porch about 4:00 a.m., not having slept much. It was going to be a clear, hot Nebraska summer day. I doubt that it had occurred to either of us that God might wreck our Fourth with rain.
I should note that I don’t recall our parents ever expressing any particular worries about our detonations. My dad made the rocket trough and did remind us that his dad, in showing him and his little brother how not to hold a firecracker, dispensed with part of a finger. (We did impress girls, or so we thought, by squeezing little “lady finger” firecrackers tightly by the butt end between thumb and finger, and letting them explode without letting go.)
Jim and I had fondled and cradled and caressed the star item in the assortment: a single, one-pound aerial bomb. We began the big day with it. It was just before sunrise. There was no one else up. We lovingly carried it to the nearby grade school playground, lit it and stood back.
With the propelling explosion on the ground, the payload the size of an orange rose upward in what seemed a slow and stately ascent — and went off. Shock waves. Only a modest but gratifying number of school windows broke. We ran.
****
In later years, I had two fireworks-related adventures. I got, through some connection I’ve forgotten, to be on the Grucci fireworks barge at a display on Long Island. It was scary. Their aerial bombs made Jim’s and mine look like lady fingers. And the lighters, scrambling around on deck setting them off, were constantly showered with sparks. So were the unlit fireworks. I stepped part-way over the side and lowered myself behind some protection from what seemed like the inevitable conflagration. This was a good bit after the year a Grucci barge did blow up in the Hudson and onshore spectators, unaware of the deaths, applauded the wondrous sight.
George Plimpton was, like me, also queer for fireworks. (Mayor John Lindsay had made him unofficial “Fireworks Commissioner” of New York City.) At one of Plimpton’s annual displays at his place on Long Island, I left the crowd and sneaked down to near the fire trucks and launching area, getting there just as a rocket changed course, and, NASA Challenger-like, went sideways instead of up. It landing on an onlooker’s blanket in a magnificent explosion of red stars, winning her $60,000.
***********
Back in Nebraska. One awful year, suddenly, it was all over. The state legislature did its dirty work. Not a total ban. Just no more big stuff.
In some states, do-gooders have legislated away everything but sparklers; oblivious, apparently, to the fact that the gentle sparkler, with its 1,000- degree temperatures, causes more severe injuries and third-degree burns than all other fireworks combined.
Every year when the Fourth approaches and I long for the good old days, as I know Jim does, I find it hard to believe that the resonant date will pass and I won’t light a single fuse. I know you can’t legally buy firecrackers in New York City, and I know it’s not wise to confess to potential crimes, but if someone were to emerge from a doorway today, hawking a verboten package of Zebras . . . .
Anyway, let’s all have a great Fourth! Somehow.
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