In the wake of the
World Trade Center’s destruction, are celebratory fireworks still OK? More than
ever. For one thing, fireworks can be used for Freudian sublimation: Take that, you rotten, sub-human terrorist scum —
POW! ZAPP! and BANG!! And just to show that our spirits (of ’76) aren’t
dampened, nor our ability to appreciate discretionary beauty, take a look at
this — whoosh and OHHHHHH! Wasn’t that gorgeous? Yes, fireworks are still
pulse-quickeningly, heart-stoppingly — and benignly — gorgeous.
Often overlooked in the excitement
are the people who shoot off the fireworks for our enjoyment. Who are they and
what are they like? To find out, I talked to people at Young Explosives, Inc.,
the Victor company that puts on the Fourth of July show for the City of
Rochester.
Sherry and Gary Michalko are veteran
fireworks people. They have both worked on the Rochester fireworks show before
— and many others elsewhere. Gary is plant manager at the company’s
manufacturing and storage complex in the town of Canandaigua. Sherry married
into the fireworks business and learned it from the ground up. This year while
Gary is doing the Rochester show, Sherry will work a show in Elmira.
When I first met Sherry, her reply
to my musty opener, “What do you do for excitement?” left me
hopelessly one-upped. How could I top shooting off public fireworks for a
living? By saying that I regularly face the mobs at the mall, and drive my car
in heavy traffic? On the surface, Sherry is modest calm personified. But her
steady gaze hints of steely nerves beneath, and maybe a reason to have them.
Gary warmed quickly to the subject
of his work. He was in the middle of preparing for an out-of-town show and an
intensity that I recognized crept into his voice. Before he got into fireworks
he was a radio and club disk jockey in Elmira; I was in broadcasting for 20
years myself. Show deadlines have a way of sharpening your senses and
perceptions.
When asked what he’d be doing if he
weren’t in fireworks, Gary couldn’t think of anything. He says he loves his job
— both at the plant and as “firemaster” at many of Young’s shows.
Jim Young runs the company now. His
father started it in 1949. Although Young Explosives manufactures and
fabricates some of its own fireworks, Jim says the company is essentially in
the entertainment business. His
father learned the Italian style of pyrotechnics from the Grucci family, one of
the most storied fireworks dynasties in America. This style features the loud salutes and the multiple-break shells that are Young specialties.
Gary has done shows with the
Gruccis. “We learn from each other,” he says. In George Plimpton’s
book, Fireworks, there’s a gripping
account of how the Gruccis won the international fireworks competition at Monte
Carlo. The reader is left gasping.
Most of the shows in this part of
the state are done by Young Explosives. Jim did the Fairport Canal Days
fireworks this year — a first time for the village. There will no doubt be
encores.
The Michalkos feel a special
satisfaction when a show goes well — when the sky is popping with peonies, chrysanthemums, palm trees,
multiple-breaking shells of colored stars, when bone-shaking salutes are echoing off the landscape,
and go-getters are chasing themselves
excitedly across the sky — when the crowds of thousands gasp and applaud from
the bridges, balconies, riverside, and rooftops.
My father liked fireworks — and
explosives that blow things up, too. Harking back to my kid-hood, a boulder
blocking a farm road sat in scornful challenge until my father decided to move
it out of the way with Alfred Nobel’s contribution to the industrial revolution
— dynamite. He placed a stick of the stuff in a hole dug under the boulder,
then, perhaps to test my mettle, let me tamp dirt into the hole on top of the dynamite. A car battery at
the end of a 100-foot wire set off the firing cap, and that ol’ rock just rose
up into the air and whooshed off into the bushes. The light in my father’s eye
was unmistakable. Explosives fulfilled something primal in his nature.
Like racecar drivers, some people
who use explosives in their jobs admit they like the rush that goes with the
risk. After a while they get addicted to their own adrenaline. But by
definition, coolness and deliberate caution must be primary characteristics of experienced demolitions experts. Same
goes for pyrotechnicians, whether on the factory floor or at the shooting
sites. Otherwise, they’d never get to be experienced.
I do have a mild bone to pick with
the typical paradigm for fireworks displays — the slow start, middle section
with virtuoso variations, then (always) a climactic finale. Most human
activities don’t follow that path. Daily life is, by definition, mundane, with
perpetually postponed expectations and only rare realization of release and
relief.
This, of course, is exactly why we
like fireworks — to see what life’s excitements could be like without the
restraints imposed by a mostly monotonous reality. Celebratory displays must be
bigger than life. Unlike the cosmos, the BIG BANG has to come last.
There’s a rich vocabulary for
pyrotechnic displays. The glossary in Plimpton’s book runs to 60 pages, crammed
with terms like girondole, hummerstars, potatoes, garniture, black shells, flowerpots, and maroons. The
last are very loud reports — to “invigorate” the audience, as Japanese
fireworks people would say. Fanciful names for oriental shells are also listed,
like Monkeys Chasing Tigers out of Royal
Palace. Such labels are usually toned down before export to a more prosaic
America.
Fireworks technology is constantly
expanding. Computers now make it possible to control firing sequences with
precision — heretofore an iffy proposition. The close timing makes choreography possible — synchronizing
fireworks with music. And new pattern
shells keep coming out. This year Young’s fireworks will feature hearts and smiley faces — good palliatives for recent pain.
Explosives, of course, have a dark
side. I have seen the perverse beauty of military fireworks — tracer bullets
like great fans of bright pearls, drifting upward lazily at twice the speed of
sound, probing for enemy aircraft, transporting their tight packages of
destruction, reaching up with delicate fingers of death. And the dirty bursts
of ack-ack and the flipping-over-and-falling of giant aircraft midst the
monstrous happenings of war.
But fireworks were used at
celebrations long before someone thought of putting explosive powder in gun
barrels to propel projectiles. The escalation to lethality is not a logical
necessity.
The name, Young Explosives, is somewhat misleading. The company doesn’t make explosives other than for
fireworks. It puts on 300 to 400 shows a year. They’ll do your wedding if you
like. For this year’s Fourth they’ve got more than 30 shows scheduled on the
same night.
In the Rochester display, 3,700
shells will be fired. Although the total tab including advertising and
publicity will be $50,000, commercial sponsors are picking up $43,000 of that
in eager response to the city’s pitch for a joyful celebration to offset the
Trade Towers’ emotional pall.
During a show controlled by
electrical panels, as most big shows now are, the mortars that fire the shells are used only once. Mortars are
stovepipe-like tubes very similar to military mortars (one of which took a
chunk out of my leg in a previous life).
Shows are designed with proprietary
software on a PC in the Young company’s own studio, the music and shells synced
to cues on a CD. For the Rochester show, the CD is prepared by one of the three
radio stations that will simulcast the proceedings — WBBF, WBEE and The Buzz.
Once the sequence of shells is determined, and the fireworks components
assembled, it takes two days to set up the equipment on site.
The show itself is run by a laptop
computer. Signals are sent through firing wires to the squibs (electric matches) that ignite the lifting charges which
send the shells high in the air. The lifting charges in turn ignite time fuses
in the body of the shells, setting off the main charges at the peak of the
trajectories. Except for two firing sites on the tops of buildings, the mortars
will be shot from trailers.
Not the least of the work in
preparing for a show is getting all the permits and licenses from federal,
state, and local regulatory agencies. Some streets will be blocked off and a
couple of Rochester Fire Department trucks will be standing by — just in
case. Ian Scott, an employee at Young, told me a show can go on in a driving
rain — with foil caps over the mortar mouths — but the Fire Marshal can
postpone a show for high winds.
Since the Trade Towers disaster,
security in the fireworks business has been ramped up considerably. Employees
of less than three years must now go through a thorough background check.
Anybody from any of the 30 or so countries on the president’s terrorist list is
meticulously scrutinized. A tendency to profile immigrants from these countries
is inescapable.
Gary reminds us that it was
agricultural fertilizer, not the black powder used in fireworks, that
demolished the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and in the Trade Towers attack,
explosives weren’t used at all. But the public image of explosives generally
tends to give the fireworks business a bad rep, and a bad rap.
Every year the employees at Young
Explosives go though a mandatory full-day safety course. Everybody knows the
rules and follows them. When I talked with Ian Scott at the plant, he showed me
a grounded metal plate on the wall just inside the door that workers routinely
touch to discharge static electricity.
The Young Explosives company has an
excellent safety record, so their insurance rates, though steep, aren’t over
the top. Making fireworks and shooting them off, Gary Michalko says, is less
dangerous than clerking in a convenience store.
A personal postscript: the Fourth of
July is a “patriotic” holiday. It celebrates America’s independence from
England — and the birth of democratic ideas that are still works in progress.
Patriotism simply means loyalty to
one’s people and the land where they (we) live. In my book that doesn’t mean
unconditional loyalty, not “my country, right or wrong,” but a thoughtful
loyalty that acknowledges problems and tries to fix them.
In America, we the people are diverse by design, so loyalty
gets pretty complex. The land we live on, too, is diverse, and remarkably
beautiful. If we all try hard enough, it can stay beautiful. Wanting to protect
it, and to brag a little about the best of what we’ve got, and what we’ve
accomplished in 225 years, is, to me, perfectly reasonable.
But a terrible truth of the 9/11
catastrophe is that to make their point the attackers played right into our
fascination for violence — as if to say, “OK, if you people get off on
violence so much — as shown so gratuitously in your movies and TV (which you
gladly export to the rest of the world) — we’ll give you violence. Take a
look at THIS! And THIS!” Nobody could not look.
Extremists give patriotism a bad
name, as do the anti-patriots who sneer at any pride of home or place. I myself
am an expert on patriotism. My neighbors (read draft board) sent me off to war. They gave me a gun and told me to
go to a faraway land and shoot people. I was too young to understand why I was
there.
Many years later, I’m still too
young to fully understand, except that it does seem to be OK to want protect
the things we value — as best we can.
For my money, our Fourth of July marks one of the most remarkable events in
human history, and it’s worth celebrating — even if the rockets’ red glare and the
bombs bursting in air,as in our
national anthem,don’t represent the
best of what we have to offer.
Let the fireworks begin!
© Warren Wightman, 2002
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2002.
