Feliz Cuatro de Julio!!!

Greetings once again, and may you have a safe and sane Fourth! Here goes Friday Letter #105.

Holiday memories

“Cuatro de Julio! Cuatro de Julio! Cuatro de Julio!”

We could hear the Camenga family shouting the traditional annual greeting even before their car came into our driveway.

It would seem they (John and Eleanore and their children Judy, Jim, Jack and Joyce) were as excited as we Hodges about the Fourth of July celebration.

Cuatro de Julio was a Hodge holiday celebration which continued after my family’s move from Fort Lupton to Brighton. It was my Dad’s chance to play the host, which he relished.

In the years when the party was in Fort Lupton, Dad would prop a long piece of rain gutter against a stepladder.

The metal would guide the huge skyrockets heavenward – the resultant light show seemed every bit as magnificent as today’s fireworks. We would “oooo” and “aaaaa” then just as we do now.

It was a better show, somehow, because it was our very own. I remember lots of friends of my family would come to it, but the Camengas especially would laugh and have loads of fun.

In 1955 when we moved to Brighton, the fireworks show was much tamer, probably because our home wasn’t out in the “country” as it had been in Fort Lupton.

There was always beer – tall bottles of Coors Banquet in ice. But there wasn’t that much beer. Maybe enough for each adult to have two or three bottles over the course of the afternoon and evening.

It was remarkable how much fun the Camengas and the Hodges could have on so little beer.

There would be a wood fire and hot dogs and marshmallows to roast. All of our grandparents would show up, and sometimes aunts, uncles and cousins.

My fireworks specialty was the “helicopter” or the “buzz bomb.” This was a particularly nasty explosive device which came complete with an aluminum propeller held on by a thick rubber band.

You’d light the fuse, the powder would begin sparking and fizzing, and the device would spin off violently skyward until a certain point. Then it would explode with a deafening window-shattering ferocity. This delighted me then – as it would today.

One time, though, I set off my buzz bomb just a little too close to the house. It took off and flew in under the eaves. It stayed there, spinning noisily, spraying sparks, trapped. Because it couldn’t go any higher, the helicopter finally exploded – right above the bathroom window.

The window shattered, and further fireworks were parentally denied. For that night.

Later on that week, however, my brother and I used up our supply of “Black Cats” and “M-80s” and “Cherry Bombs” and even “Lady Fingers.”

We liked to set them off under coffee cans, just to see how high in the air the cans would fly. We also liked “Roman Candles,” which were hand-held devices that one could aim – at the barn, the garage, wherever.

A Roman Candle would contain several voluminous explosions which would emerge in sequence every few seconds from a thick cardboard tube. One after the other, balls of fire would emerge, arc across the pasture, and explode.

Great fun, but what to do when the commercial fireworks were gone? Ah, there’s a box of kitchen matches. We had heard at school . . .

We buried a large iron pipe vertically in the ground. We broke the heads off the entire box of strike-anywhere matches and dropped them into the buried pipe. We screwed a cap onto the end of another, smaller, pipe.

One of us thrust the small pipe, cap down, into the large pipe, with considerable force.

True to the story we’d heard at school, the match heads produced a huge explosion. The small pipe rocketed quite a respectable distance into the air.

We all knew the pipe might go up. We hadn’t thought about the idea that it might come back down.

It didn’t hit anybody – but it landed only inches from its launch point. Straight up. Straight down. Once was enough for that experiment.

To this day, I can still hear it. “Cuatro de Julio! Cuatro de Julio!”

To celebrate that memory, I’ll go home now and have a big old tall bottle of Coors Banquet beer.

Happy holiday.

-0-

Word of the week: Fusionism. The word fusion comes from Latin, (natcherly) fusio, melting or melting together. The hydrogen bomb is a fusion bomb. Now, finally, to fusionism: the theory or practice of bringing about a fusion, or coalition, of political parties.

Next week’s word: Flummox.

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