Real Life Adventures by Gary Wise and Lance Aldrich for July 02, 2016

Never had our parents discourage us from having fireworks. We (brothers and I) were perfectly capable of buying without our parents being around and there were no boundaries on safety. If it was sold you could buy it. Sparklers were passé, M80s were what we wanted plus Black Cats and Roman candles.

I can’t believe we use to have cherry bombs and M-80s; man, we use to blow up all sorts of stuff. We had a friend that made his own explosives; Chris Cherry. He made those cracker balls that you threw down on the ground, only his would blow a hole in the ground about 12’’ inches deep. He now makes devices that disarm explosives. He was called in to disarm both the Unibomber and the Shoebomber. I always thought it was funny that a guy who made bombs had the last name Cherry.

Article on the Unibomber. http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN02-13-98/cherry_story.html

Kid, wait until you grow up and join the army. Then you can see high explosives—close up.

No fun allowed in the younger generation. Glad I grew up when I did.

J. ShortWe made our own, but nothing like that. Your “cracker ball” sounds like a torpedo, used by railroads to tape to the track to warn following trains of an obstruction ahead. They are rather unstable and the ones you described could take off a hand without warning. We were quite satisfied with colored fire fountains, magnesium firecrackers, and some rudimentary black powder rockets (nothing like the “pipe bombs” of a generation later). Incredibly, these were quite legal in the final days of WW-II.

Things were tough that year on the farm in Kansas. With the 4th of July approaching, Dad announced that there would be no money for fireworks that year.But…we still had the best, most memorable 4th ever. Dad found a piece of lead pipe about yea long and filled it with black powder (used for blasting stumps out of the ground). He jammed the pipe (bomb) into the ground good and hard and lit the fuse.I can still see it in my mind: the piece of pipe spinning though the air out over the cornfield. It was a beautiful thing.