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The Villages
Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Through the years we always found a way to have fireworks

Barry Evans
Barry Evans

Aside from the fact that July 4th still follows the 3rd, life doesn’t seem the same this year. 2020 may go down as one of the worst years around.  However, I can still look back on some of the Fourths that I well remember. One of them was when I was in the sixth or seventh grade and we lived in mighty Harrisville, Pa. There weren’t many people in that community and most of them did not have funds to buy big fireworks displays.  We did have some small stuff that went “bang” when we shot them off. We even had a few rockets that we would shoot off over the rhubarb area.

However, if we wanted to see real fireworks, we had to go elsewhere.  We were lucky in that the large community of Grove City (8,000 folks) was only about eight miles away.  They also had a college there, and fireworks would be set off inside their football stadium.  The main reason I recall this one particular 4th was that they were real fire works that grabbed your attention.  It was not just the endless shooting of exploding designs that take over the sky.  True, there was some of that, but the important stuff happened on the ground.

Some guy down on the field who we could barely see would take some action and an American Flag in all its glory would appear on a wooden structure.  Then somebody else would take some actions and two structures would light up and they would turn out to be tanks which would fire rockets at each other.  For a young kid that was something.  Memory dims, but there were other ground structures that did marvelous things.  I have seen other fireworks since then – many times considering my age, but this is the one that sticks out.  If I had a time machine, that is one of the places and time where I would head.

We only lived in Harrisville for a couple of years, but another memory from there also sticks in my mind.  The reason being is that what I would see frequently helped us be able to enjoy the 4th of July. We lived about one and a half miles out of Harrisville in a pretty rural area.  This was during World War II, and we were on a flight path of flights of military planes. It wasn’t just a few but armadas of them.

They would cover the sky and I would gaze in awe while trying to figure out if I could identify any of them.  I usually couldn’t, and neither could my best friend there, Jack Best.  We each had a fighter plane that we adopted and we would argue about which one was the best.  I never admitted it, but he went first and selected a P-38 which was what I wanted. It was the one with two tails joined together. I took the Bell Airacobra which had a cannon in the nose. I found out later that most pilots didn’t like the Airacobra.

Finally, another thing I enjoyed in that area which had nothing to do with the 4th was that there was very little light pollution around.  That meant I could see the Milky Way and all sorts of stars.  I still miss that.  The Blonde in the house does not as she grew up in Pittsburgh and never was able to see the stars like I did. Possibly why I like Star Trek better than she does!

Barry Evans writes about Life in The Villages for Villages-News.com  

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