Twenty Years Ago on FITK
Barry, Brian, and me, on a juvenile fireworks shooting spree, through the northernmost fringes of Minneapolis, 40 years ago. I don't remember how I hitched up with those two: Brian the carefree, Barry the heart-breaker.
Brian had just come back from South Dakota with a grocery bag of fireworks, his summers were a continuous series of explosions. I had been to his house a few years earlier, his uncle and grandfather sat in the back yard with beer and eight-foot long strings of crackers, lighting them from their cigarettes—one after another, for hours. It was in his blood.
Barry, sinfully handsome even at 15, was a Bud Abbott to Brian's Lou Costello.
It was quite dark, after ten at least, as we made our way through various neighborhoods, randomly punctuating the songs of crickets with our explosive outbursts. We arrived at the Shingle Creek park, which had a sledding hill- the perfect site for shooting Brian's “big” rocket. We were trying to figure out a way to prop it up to shoot it when we saw a squad car in the street below. We took off in the other direction, laughing, over the creek where the police couldn’t follow, and headed off to the neighboring suburb, Brooklyn Center, leaving a trail of explosions on the way.
Even the most incorrigible delinquent can weary of this past-time, so we finally found an empty lot where there was an old bucket that we could use as a launch pad for our mighty missile. All that running that we had done must have loosened the rocket’s powder for when Brian lit the rocket it fizzled a bit, rose about six feet into the air, and exploded in a shower of colorful sparks. We thought that was really hilarious. Especially when Brian noticed that his polyester shirt was riddled with tiny burn holes.
By the next summer we could drive, take part-time jobs, go on dates, and have different kinds of fun/trouble.
The most memorable skyrocket of my childhood was the one that was a dud.
Image: ChatGPT
