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Below is an all-American, Fourth of July, short short story sent to us by our good friend Herb Shultz of Kingston, New York - jazz historian, trout fisherman, St Louis Cardinal baseball fan, man of letters and much else besides
Back when I was growing up during the 1920s and 1930s, my two favourite holidays were Christmas and Fourth of July. There were no laws against selling fireworks to kids, and for a month or more before the 4th, I would devote my week’s allowance to laying in a good supply of firecrackers. They came in various sizes and formats – long strings of little half-inch-long crackers packaged in crinkly red Chinese paper; individual “torpedos” two inches long with a one-inch fuse; “Cherry Bombs”, the most powerful of all, deep red in colour, about the size of a ping-pong ball. All over the city, starting shortly after dawn on the holiday, you would hear the snapping of those strings of Chinese crackers, punctuated by loud booms of the heavier artillery. I would be out there in our back yard together with my next door neighbour Jimmy Roosa adding our own explosions to the festivities, having the time of my young life. One of our favourite tricks was lighting a cherry bomb underneath an old tin can and watching the can shoot 20 feet in the air. Beautiful.
