Fireworks in the Fifties
by Jay Myrdal
As nearly everyone knows, at least in the Western World, the fourth of July is America’s Independence Day and is always celebrated with copious amounts of fireworks. Although health and safety concerns have mitigated it somewhat, personal backyard fireworks celebrations have been very common over the years. In fact, in the 1950s, public displays were much less common, and the back yard barbecue with its home-made fireworks party was ubiquitous throughout the country.
If you are going to have a display you first have to obtain your pyrotechnics. The laws on fireworks sales vary from state to state and have tightened up over the years but in Montana’s 1950s, the rules were quite simple. They banned the larger firecrackers like cherry bombs and M80s (a very loud military firecracker used to simulate artillery explosions) and they also limited the size of the rockets that could be sold. There didn’t seem be any rules on how they were sold or who could sell them. The primary and most important part of the law was simply that fireworks could only be sold during the three-week period in advance of big day itself.
Fireworks were completely banned within Missoula’s city limits, but no restrictions existed outside its official boundaries. Fireworks thus, were purchased from roadside stands set up on the main roads in and out of town.
My family have always been enterprising and in 1957 when I was about fourteen, my cousin Swain, who was four years older, got permission to build a rough wooden and canvass roadside stand on Highway 93 South, a few thousand yards outside the city limits. He then found a wholesaler, stocked the stand with a selection of fireworks and opened for business at the start of the legal window. He needed some help, and I was very keen to get involved. I loved fireworks, I mean really loved them. I was a born pyromaniac. I was only fourteen but I had already been experimenting with crude gunpowder make from sulphur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. Now I was behind the counter surrounded by all manor of exciting chemistry.
Unsurprisingly, at quite times we found ourselves unable to resist testing a small but effective portion of the stock. A particularly good experiment was to see how high we could get a Coca-Cola can to fly up in the air using a single firecracker and how much higher it would go if the inverted can was sat in a puddle – the firecracker poked through a hole in the side… Very high it turned out, the water seal did indeed work, and we could launch an old-fashioned heavy steel coke can a good forty or fifty feet into the air. We found lots of other exciting and only moderately dangerous things to do when we weren’t busy selling our diminishing stock. By the time Independence Day finally arrived we had enjoyed ourselves, made a bit of money and had, pre-planned or otherwise, plenty of stock left over to present our own, personally managed, fireworks display to our friends and family. Great fun.
When the next year rolled around Swain was involved in something else, and this opportunity was now open for me. I negotiated a similar spot on the sparsely occupied highway, build a similar stand and borrowed a hundred dollars from my dad who actually went with me to the local wholesalers to make sure I got a good deal. The hundred dollars was a good start, but it didn’t buy a whole season’s worth of stock, so I had to sell a bit and then go back once or twice for more. The mark-up rate was quite good, over one hundred percent, so this method worked quite well. After three weeks of decent business, including a lot of playing around with firecrackers, and paying back my dad, I was left with a similar result. I had fun, I made money, and I had enough stock left over for my own family display.
I was obviously on to a good thing. Sadly, it only happened for three weeks, once a year, but it was a very useful three weeks. I continued to do this for the next few years, each year going slightly up market and securing a better position.
By the final year, I had managed to secure a prime spot, only a couple hundred yards outside the city limits. I erected my wooden stand and emblazoned it with a hand painted sign which said “MYRDAL’S FIREWORKS” in big red letters. It only took a few hours for my father, who owned a highly respectable insurance and real estate business in town called Myrdal Company, to come straight down there and “encourage” me to change it to “JAY MYRDAL’S FIREWORKS”. I can’t say I blamed him really.
I was a great spot, but I probably could have exploited it better. Although I had improved things over the years, I wasn’t prepared for the big competition when the new Shopping Centre, a few thousand yards further out of town, opened a slick, and very well stocked fireworks operation from a big silver trailer in the parking lot of their big store. I did ok that year, but I had lost a lot of the business that I had previously enjoyed.
I didn’t attempt to sell fireworks the next year. In fact, I think it was the same year I played with real fire when I was recruited to fight a forest fire in the Kelly Creek region of Idaho (see Stories and Memoirs or click below). Oh Well! Thankfully I had pretty much grown out of fireworks anyway.
I mentioned that there were no laws controlling who was allowed to sell from these firework stands which popped up every year, all over the country during the season, and that a good number of them were run by kids like myself. As I said, I was only fourteen when I started.
The law was quickly changed a few years later following a tragic accident which happened in Polson on Flathead Lake, about seventy miles north of Missoula. As I remember it, two kids were running the stand and, just as took place around the stand I ran, a few friends were hanging around and of course, from time to time, lighting firecrackers. Most of this activity was done safely as indeed it was in my experience, but in the above accident, a firework landed in the stand, and somehow a chain reaction took place and the whole thing blew up. The two kids were killed. It was a very tragic and avoidable.
Nanny can be annoying, but sometimes she makes sense!
Click here for The Kelly Creek Fire
