One year we filled a plastic 30 gallon trash can with water then threw in an M-80. The water made a column that went up about 20 feet and the sides of the trash can blew out. The kid who “donated” the family trash can got grounded for 2 weeks.
You know that one kid who would quietly stick a firecracker into wet dog crap, light it, and then scurry away without warning anyone else? Yeah, that was me.
The only time I ever got hurt with fireworks was with a legal “safe and sane” California Candle. It was a fat tube that shot sparks out of one end. It did not have a base, and the label clearly stated you were supposed to hold it. The one I got was a lemon, and the side blew through right where I was holding it. I had a blister for most of the summer.
I was going to make a long explanation, but I found a Youtube video that shows it better:
It was **bigger **than that when I was a kid, imagine several families doing it at the same time in the neighborhood and there was ankle deep paper remains on the road at Christmas and New Year days when it was all over.
I’m still amazed that no one in my family got hurt then.
The sideshow lasted as long as the fireworks. We were watching Ivar’s fireworks with a bunch of other people from a rooftop in Seattle. On a lower rooftop across the street, a couple was having sex. When they were finished, our bunch applauded. The girl picked up the blanket and the guy turned toward us and bowed.
When I was 17 or so my dad gave me a grocery bag full of blackcats and cherrybombs and told me to go have fun. So me and half a dozen or so buddies loaded into my old VW bus and headed up the river to a deserted sandbar. We were miles from the nearest town and there were no houses within a couple of miles (that we knew of).
We had been setting them off for maybe 20 minutes, working on a bottle of Mad Dog, when the cops arrived. And I mean ARRIVED. I don’t know how many there were, but there were a lot of them – all in flak jackets. The K9 unit was with them. They surrounded us and threw each and every one of us in the back of a squad car, asking us about various drug use, did we know so-and-so, etc. After a while and they figured out we were just a bunch of dumb kids playing with firecrackers, they took us home. That was a fun conversation to have with my parents.
Apparently, that area is know for meth labs. Despite not seeing any houses around, a little old lady lived across the river, and had called the cops to report a gunfight. Cops thought it was a drug deal in the process of going very bad.
My wife and I were volunteering at KKFI, the community radio station in Kansas City, MO. She had a weekly show, and I was a tech.
KKFI was in a 12 story building that was several blocks from any taller buildings. The brick walls went five feet higher than the roof on three sides.
One of the things we had to do every evening was verify the tower lights, going to the roof and spotting our tower among the half a dozen other towers at 21st and Stark a mile or so to the east.
One year, the Spirit Festival was being held in this empty lot just north of the Convention Center. They had fireworks being fired from the east side of the lot. About 800 feet from where we were.
We laid down on the roof, the tall brick walls blocking all light of downtown and the taller buildings several blocks away to watch the fireworks.
That was the best view I’ve ever had of fireworks. The shells were literally exploding right over our heads in pitch blackness.
As a 5th grader many moons ago, I was an old hand at fireworks. Responsible, respectful; it’s only the fools that get hurt, right?
July 4th BBQ at home, all the dads standing around drinking illicit Coors that someone had brought back from west of the Mississippi…this was 1972…the boys all playing with fireworks.
I set a big bottle rocket in it’s bottle leaned up against a log. Not a tiny “regular” sized BR, we were shooting these big cigar-sized babies. Just like a dozen times before, I lit and ran. Easily a hundred feet away we watched as the rocket and bottle fell over, pointed at us. Before my brain could even send a message and start some synapses firing - whoosh! The rocket hit me square in my forehead, bounced back in mid-air about 2 feet still burning, and then shot over my shoulder into the woods. Everyone was laughing their ass off but my dad. He just stood there with his beer and said “I would never believe anyone who told me that happened if I didn’t see it with my own eyes.”
Luckily we weren’t shooting rockets with those little plasic pointy nosecones, or I’m pretty sure I would have been dead that day. As it was, I ended up with a big round bruise for a few days.
Many years later, as my GF-now-wife would leave my apt in the wee hours of the morning, something made me decide it would be great fun to grab a ski pole, remove the handle, and shoot bottle rockets at her car as she left. It was.
And, if you have a car with gutters on it - most today don’t’ - you can light a bottle rocket, smack it into the gutter quickly and really surprise cars up ahead of you. Kind of like having your own Cobra with Zuni rockets!
Just the feeling of joy when my dad came back from Ohio with a trunk load of
M-80s, silver salutes, roman candles and bottle rockets by the gross. In PA where I grew up those kind of fireworks were illegal but not in Ohio. My mom was frantic, she never understood such juvenile and dangerous behavior from adults, but when you were a kid the sky was the limit.
Did you know an M-80 thrown into the lake does not go out but explodes like a depth charge. My dad would do this for kicks when we had our boat.
When I was 14, I was sitting on the deck lighting ladyfingers and then tossing them. I put the lighter up to a wick, which didn’t seem to do anything. I asked, “Is this thing lit–” POW. Scared the crap out of me, but didn’t do any damage.
We never got any fireworks to play with as kids, because Mom was terrified of them, and was certain we’d set the barn on fire (which we probably would have). It wasn’t until I was dating that I even played with sparklers.
Plus the fact that I had to spend every Fourth in the barn with a radio playing loudly and rubbing down my horse soothingly while he shivered with every loud sound. He hated fireworks, and would hide his face under my arm and try to climb in my lap.
So my Fourth of July memories were setting myself up in my mom’s car with the radio on, watching the other kids shoot the fireworks and chase each other with bottle rockets.
We would drop a pack of black cats into an empty coffee can, cover them in a layer of black powder, and attach a hunk of fuse. You get a huge “whoosh” as the powder ignited, sending the black cats into the sky, and they would all be going off together. Redneck version of the fancy stuff the pros use in the sky.
In my fraternity, we would have bottle rocket and roman candle wars. Bottle rockets were used inside the house, with the risk of a bounce back off of a wall and the rockets coming back at you. I started gluing thumb tacks to the tips of the rockets, so that they would stick in the walls next to someone and then blow up.
One Canada Day, I think it was 2002, I had the honour of lighting the fireworks for my family’s celebration at our cottage. The last one, a 70-shot deal, fell over in the bucket of sand I was using for support and sent shots caroming off of trees while we all ducked and covered.
My friend across our canal burned down our boat with a bottle rocket he fired at me - it landed on the fabric canopy and set it on fire.
My friend (drunk) attempted to fire a roman candle out of my car at another buddy who was walking down the street. When it didn’t fire he pulled it backinside to look to see if the fuse burned out. It did not - he burned off both his eyebrows and a good amount of leg hair on one leg (as well as scortched the headliner in my car).
How any of us survived our teenage years is beyond me.
Simply blowing up various foodstuffs with bangers was fun (they were the simple things that you light and they eventually go BANG after a entertainingly unstable length of time)
Onion Bhajis were particularly flamboyant when they disintegrated.
We also played “pass the banger” I don’t need to explain that do I? (again, the unstable burn time gave a certain “frisson” to proceedings)
Best of all was when we turned 17 and cars gave an extra dimension. We liberated some scaffolding tubes and turned them into quasi-bazookas. We spent happy hours chasing each others vehicles over the moors of the SW Durham dales firing rockets. Those with suns roofs were at an advantage of course.
Unbelievably, no one was hurt. Some sheep were startled but that is their default status anyway. And a couple of cars ended up in becks and bogs now and again but since one of the combatants was a SWB Landy we were never too far from a tow.
My dad would do this for kicks when we had our boat.