Flamingo Street Fireworks

There was a time, long, long ago on an old familiar street not so far away, when a group of boys thought it was a good idea to make their own fireworks for the Fourth of July. The adventure started, as many usually did, with one of the boys proclaiming, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea!”

Those six words set into motion one of the most memorable events that ever happened on Flamingo. How do I know? We lived there for seven years. I was the one who made that statement, and I was also the one who got blamed when the adventure went horribly wrong.

Warning to all my young readers: Do not try to do what we did. Your results will probably be the same, or even worse. I assure you, your parents and the firefighters will be just as unhappy with you as my parents and the firefighters were with us back then.

Our first mistake: Powder, not chunks.

My three brothers and I knew our parents wouldn’t like the idea of us trying to make our own fireworks, so we didn’t ask them what the ingredients were. Instead, we went to the basement and retrieved the Encyclopaedia Britannica. We were amazed at what we read – it only takes three basic components, and you can make fireworks.

For the rest of the afternoon, we set off collecting the firework ingredients, but we needed help from our friends on Flamingo. His dad burned some brush a couple of days before in the backyard, so we asked Bubba Hanks to bring some wood that wasn’t burned all the way. When he returned, we spent the rest of the day scraping the charcoal off the wood, stomping it into a powder, and filling a paper lunch bag. Unfortunately, none of us knew that, to actually work, the charcoal needed to be a fine powder and not “foot-stomped little chunks.”

Our second mistake: Mixing sulfur.

With an ample supply of charcoal in our lunch bag, we asked if anyone had any sulfur. Goofy Steeve and Neighbor Thomas both said their dads had some in the garden tool shed. They used it to dust roses and keep fleas off their dogs, so they ran off to get it. When they returned, we mixed both bags together. An hour later we had a lunch bag half full of mixed sulfur. Unfortunately, none of us knew the sulfur had to be pure, and not out of date.

Our third and biggest mistake: Saltpeter is not a salt and pepper mixture.

None of us had any money to go to the drugstore to buy saltpeter, so it was The New Kid with No Nickname’s idea to mix salt and pepper together. (The New Kid with No Nickname had just moved to Flamingo a week before—that’s why he was called The New Kid with No Nickname.) He ran back to the house, got all the salt and pepper he could find, and we mixed it up with the salt and pepper my brothers and I got from our house. Now we had our three ingredients and could finally make our own fireworks.

Our fourth mistake: A not-so-proper mixture.

None of us knew that you actually had to mix the three ingredients in the proper ratio for it to work. We didn’t even know what a “ratio” was back then, but dumping the contents of our three lunch bags into a much larger bag and then shaking it up was not the correct way to mix the ingredients for a successful outcome.

For the next week, we packed our mixture into various cardboard tubes and did our best to make homemade fireworks. Fortunately, none of it caught fire, and none of it worked – but it did smoke a lot. We soon abandoned our efforts at making homemade fireworks…or so we thought.

Why the fire department came to our house.

So, Dear Reader, you may ask yourself, did we ever make any fireworks during those seven years growing up on Flamingo? Well yes and no. But it wasn’t intentional – at least that’s what I told our parents and the firefighters who had just finished putting out our kitchen fire.

Our fifth and last mistake: Popcorn.

We may not have discovered how to make fireworks outside, but I did discover how to make fireworks in the kitchen. Just because you don’t want to wait, do not, under any circumstances, put a metal tin of Jiffy Pop into the microwave because you think it’ll be a faster way to pop the corn.

From The Wife and me, we hope you have a happy and safe Fourth of July!