50,000 people will flood into this small Kansas town on Tuesday. Here’s why

In the Pyro Crew’s planning lair — location undisclosed for security reasons — Chris Hupe produced a layout of the launch site and spread it out across a long table. He stood over the map like a general, stabbing a thick finger at various white squares.

“Each of these boxes by themselves could be a small fireworks show,” Hupe said. “We have 81 of them.”

He rattled off some more stats: a 225,000-square-foot site, 12,000 pounds of fireworks, 2,051 electronically triggered events, 800 hand-lit shells, 25 “dragons” that throw columns of flames 30 feet in the air.

On Tuesday evening, it will add up to Boomtown, a free pyrotechnic extravaganza that rockets the population of Wamego — a town otherwise best known for its Oz Museum — from 5,000 to something like 50,000 every Independence Day. Families arrive not just from neighboring towns but neighboring states to witness a 30-minute Fourth of July fireworks show that’s among the largest and most ambitious in the Midwest.

Hupe described some of the show’s signature moments, like when the crew shoots up shells that look like amber waves of grain during Ray Charles’ version of “America the Beautiful,” or how the sky lights up green, then red, then blue, then white to correlate with the lyrics of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”

Behind it all is the Pyro Crew, a tight-knit group of Wamego volunteers who have staged the event for the past two decades. They are optometrists and auto mechanics, home builders and hospital administrators. They are volunteers only in the sense that they are not paid; several members are licensed pyrotechnicians and operators, and they carry state licenses and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms certifications.

Collectively, they spend thousands of hours every year preparing the big show.

“I’ve never tried to add up how much time I personally spend on this,” Hupe said. “I think that might be kind of an ugly number.”

Fireworks show? More like a ‘pyro musical’

Though he prefers to characterize the 61-member group as a “flat” organization, Hupe, 52, is the point man. He is a gearhead and a perfectionist. But he also has an artistic streak. It’s a fireworks show, after all, and each year Boomtown is paired with a soundtrack broadcast over a country radio station in Manhattan 15 miles to the west, B104.7 FM. That calls for an added layer of choreography and creativity.

“We consider this to be something like a pyro musical,” Hupe said, “with 15 different acts inside the musical. We’re trying to choreograph a journey for the audience that takes them through intense highs into reflective periods and then pulls them back up. And we have this incredible canvas here in Wamego to do that.”

He was referring to Wamego’s recreation complex, a 37-acre park a few blocks east of downtown that since 2008 has served as the crew’s launch site.

“Most fireworks shows, you have maybe 10,000 square feet to discharge from,” Hupe said. “We have more than 225,000 square feet with which to put fireworks in the air. So it really opens up what we’re able to do. We can present this multi-dimensional, 360-degree experience.”

It was not always thus. Wamego has been celebrating Independence Day with a parade for more than 150 years, and Hupe recalls looking up to town fathers — including his own father, Norman — who helped put on the parade and the fireworks show. But by the early 1990s it had settled into a sleepy, garden-variety Fourth of July affair.

“It was basically five guys lighting mortar tubes over at City Park,” Wamego fire chief Phil Stultz recalled. “They’d light one, it’d go off, then they’d light another, and then at the end maybe they’d light all five at the same time. They’d maybe shoot off 100 shells or so.”

In 1995, the state tightened licensing regulations for fireworks, and Wamego outsourced the show to a display company. Hupe and a few other locals volunteered to help.

But they found the production uninspiring. Meanwhile, other Kansas towns seemed to be upping their fireworks game.

“We wanted the show to be something that made people want to come back for the holiday,” Hupe said. “So, after a few years, some of us looked at each other and said, ‘I think we can probably figure this out ourselves.’ We approached the chamber of commerce and the city and said, ‘If you’ll trust us, we’ll get our licenses, jump through these hoops, continue our training, and ask people in town for support to fund this show.’ And that was the turning point. 1999 was the first year we did this as an independent group.”

All of Wamego pitches in

To raise money in its early years, members of the newly formed Pyro Crew walked up and down Main Street with a ball cap asking businesses and individuals to spare $20 or $50 for the Fourth of July show. The residents were receptive. They remain so to this day. The 2023 show was funded through the generosity of 160 contributors, most of whom, Hupe said, were small donors. “It’s not a couple of businesses cutting big checks.”

Hupe said they don’t disclose the costs of the show out of respect for the companies that produce shows like theirs and need to maintain a payroll and livelihoods from it. “But it’s done for a fraction of what anyone would think,” he said.

The Pyro Crew handles everything a large pyrotechnic company would. They source the fireworks, shoot the shells, maintain licenses and storage magazines, train members, develop soundtracks. Since 2011, Hupe has programmed the show using a wireless pyrotechnic system called Cobra Firing Systems, which services 40,000 customers in 100 countries. He’s so dialed in to the company’s technological advances that he’s become friendly over the years with the CEO, Scott Smith.

“Their operation is really cutting-edge,” Smith said of the Pyro Crew. “It’s conservatively in the top 5% of Fourth of July shows I’m aware of.”

Stultz with the fire department works with them on safety and inspections — “It’s one of the safest shows I’ve ever seen, and we expect nothing less,” he said. In the days leading up to the Fourth, the 25 staff members who service Wamego’s streets, parks, water, electrical distribution and power plant come together to work full-time hours dedicated to the event. “All the lines between our jobs start to gray,” said city manager Stacie Eichem. “It becomes a total team effort.”

The high school football team, which some residents have taken to calling the Boomtown Boys, comes along on July 3 to help the graying Gen X-ers in the Pyro Crew unload mortar racks off the semis onto the launch site. They come back on the 5th to load them back in. Several other groups of students, including cheerleaders and members of the basketball and cross country teams, also work on the 5th picking up trash at the site.

“It gives them some ownership of this thing,” Hupe said. “It cultivates the volunteer spirit that people in my generation grew up with here. They watch the show and think, ‘I helped make this happen.’”

Last week, at Pyro Crew HQ, Hupe was busy planning safety meetings and technical walk-throughs. He seemed reluctant to boast about the exponential growth of Boomtown over the past two decades. Part of that was tactical: Another 50,000 visitors, and this Flint Hills town might burst at the seams. (Eichem concurred: “I don’t think anyone here is saying, ‘How can we make this event bigger?’”) But it was also, of course, good old-fashioned Midwestern modesty.

“We don’t claim to be anything incredible,” Hupe said, in between talk of fountain effects, downbeats and scoreboards used as signaling devices. “We’re just a group of guys that have been given a really special opportunity to make art in the sky.”

Wamego’s July 4 celebration

June 30-July 4: Carnival in City Park.

July 4 daytime: Car show, antique tractors, watermelon feed in City Park.

July 4 evening: 6 p.m. parade on Main Street. Fireworks at 10 p.m. at Wamego Recreation Complex.

More events and information at visitwamego.com/july4th.

Your guide to the Fourth of July around Kansas City: Fireworks, live music & more fun