The Fourth of July, when we were kids, meant getting out of bed to watch fireworks. Mom and Dad would put us to bed at the usual time, then wake us up again when it was dark and time for fireworks. We could see Ann Arbor’s display through the picture window in our living room. We’d sit on the floor with Mom and Dad—you could see the sky better from down there—and ooh and ahh as we watched the designs in the sky.
My friend Sue’s yard backed up to Buhr Park, site of the city’s fireworks. She loved being able to step out her back door and become part of the excitement of the Fourth. When our family moved into Sue’s neighborhood, our view of the fireworks was so good that our parents routinely invited people for a watch party.
What I remember most about those parties is that the WWII vets among the men did not like the sound of fireworks. Apparently, some of them sound like incoming mortars. The men didn’t make a big deal out of it, but you could pick out the vets by their responses to that sound. They knew they were safe, but their bodies wanted to seek shelter.
The town of Golden, Colorado launches its fireworks show from Table Rock. It’s even more dramatic than it sounds, because householders and businesses turn off the outdoor lights for the occasion. We were in Golden visiting an aunt and uncle for the show in 1965, but what I remember most about it was Aunt Joy’s story about the 1964 celebration.
A gas station down the hill had forgotten to turn off its lights. As the show got started, Aunt Joy went into the house to given them a reminder call. While she was doing that, a spark landed on the stack of fireworks yet to be used, and the entire inventory went off at once. Because our aunt was inside on the phone, she missed the most spectacular pyrotechnics ever seen over Golden, Colorado.
Daughter Number One lives in Wyoming, in a town that shoots its fireworks up from the floor of a canyon. Those there to watch the show seat themselves on the rim of the canyon, which means the exploding designs are a lot closer to eye level than in other places. Sparks ignite the occasional bit of sagebrush, but there are folks down there with fire extinguishers who hustle on over and put the fires out.
We’ve visited D#1 during the Fourth-of-July celebrations before and enjoyed our excellent seats at the top of the canyon. She chafed a tad because there were other spectators within sight. They’re used to having lots of room out there.
My friend Bitsy says her best view of fireworks may have been the one from an airplane. She flew west over the state of Pennsylvania one July fourth, and looked down on the fireworks displays of town after town along the way. She says that by the time Pennsylvania was behind them, the fireworks were completed.
Don saw a series of displays also, years ago, when he was driving east along Lake Erie in Ohio. They kept him company on the long drive through a flat place in the dark.
My sweetheart and I had the good fortune to be staying with friends at their cottage in Canada, one Fourth of July. We sat out on the beach that evening, with our feet in the waters of Lake Huron. Looking west, it was our great pleasure to see the municipal celebrations of quite a few American towns—nine of them, as I recall.
We couldn’t hear the fireworks, so we could chat comfortably. And D#1 would have appreciated that there was not another spectator to be seen.
Don and Bitsy have also seen the fireworks shows of big cities. Don’s been to the display put on jointly by Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan to celebrate both Canada Day and the Fourth of July. It’s one of the biggest displays in North America, drawing crowds on the order of a million people to watch the fireworks bursting over the Detroit River and reflecting in the water. Bitsy’s seen the show over New York Harbor.
As kids, though, our favorite part of the Fourth may have been sparklers. For our family, sparklers seemed thrilling and up-close-and-personally dangerous. They had the same effect on D#4, a generation later. Her dad made a little wooden barge with holes for sparklers to stand in. He’d light the sparklers and send the barge bobbing across our pool. Ooh. Ahh.
Happy Fireworks Day.
3 July 2026