Huckaby: Celebrating the Fourth of July (and doing so safely)

Darrell Huckaby, a native of Porterdale, Ga, is a double graduate of UGA and a retired educator with 40 years of classroom experience.

The big city newspaper had a headline the other day, “How to avoid tragedy on the 4th.”

It set me to thinking. I guess the best way would be don’t go by the liquor store to buy a fifth on the third, but that’s pretty elementary.

The Fourth of July is the summer’s holiday. Heavy on fun and fireworks - illuminations, as former POTUS and signer of the Declaration of Independence John Adams prophesized. Celebrations are usually short on history and long on fun - which is where the potential for tragedy might originate, I suppose.

I was looking back this week, as I am prone to do, at my childhood, thinking about how we celebrated the fourth in my hometown of Porterdale. Don’t worry about me because I look back at my childhood so often. I live life fully in the present, but when I feel like a change of pace, backward is a more pleasant place to look than the future.

Back in the fifties and early sixties, the Fourth was a mixed bag. Our degree of celebration depended entirely on the whims of the Bibb - which employed virtually everyone in the village and many who lived beyond the city limits.  Some years the Bibb shut down for the whole week, giving everyone a vacation and touching off a pilgrimage to Jacksonville Beach for my family and dozens of our friends.

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I’ll never forget the night my daddy and Goat Evans rode the Wild Mouse together at the Boardwalk, but that’s another story for another day.

Sometimes the Bibb just shut down the mills for one day. On one of those occasions, they hosted a barbecue for the entire village at the ball field down by the river. Homer Hill and the volunteer fire department cooked the food, and the Boy Scouts were enlisted to help. My job was to stir the Brunswick stew all night with a canoe paddle to make sure none of the delicious concoction stuck to the bottom of the giant black cauldron that served as a stew pot.

I wonder where that black pot is today? The stories it could tell.

Those barbeques by the river were my first efforts at staying up all night. They were tough at twelve, but good training for when I turned 16. Not being fully versed on certain statutes of limitation in Georgia, and unsure of how far gubernatorial pardons can reach, that’s all I’m going to say about that.

One memorable Independence Day, we were invited to a barbecue at the farm of Tom Brown, who was one of my daddy’s hands in the weave shop at the Osprey Mill. Tom Brown was a giant of a man with a big round face and a perpetual smile. He was also Black, and we were the only white people at the event, which mattered not one bit to us nor any of the dozens of people gathered to celebrate. My sister and I played with Mr. Tom’s children and their friends. Daddy drank white whiskey from a fruit jar with the other men and my mama helped prepare the heaping platters of pulled pork and potato salad and helped slice the red ripe watermelons that graced the long wooden tables in Mr. Tom’s backyard.

I’m afraid my children’s Independence Day memories won’t be as precious as my own, but I hope they will.  Many times, we spent the Fourth at Myrtle Beach, playing in the sand and surf, stuffing ourselves with shrimp and other seafood and watching fireworks explode over the ocean for as far as we could see in any direction up and down Crescent Beach.

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One year we decided to take in the laser and fireworks show at Stone Mountain Park.  Big mistake, because at least half the people in the Southeast made the same decision.  I remember that the Fourth was on a Saturday that year and I thought for a while that we would still be trying to get out of the parking lot when the roll was called at Sunday school the next morning.

I guess the closest we have ever come to the tragedy the big city paper warned about was the time I thought it would be a good idea to put on my own fireworks display in the backyard. A bottle rocket was the culprit. I lit it just as the wind caused the rocket to shift in the Coca-Cola bottle I was using as a launcher and the rocket flew right into my face and exploded in my eye.

I spent most of the night in the hospital emergency room, along with all the other fools who were celebrating our nation’s birthday in ways that, shall we say, were a little less than safe. They saved my eye. I only had to wear the black patch for a couple of weeks.

So happy Independence Day tomorrow. Enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness but do so safely. Take it from me and the big city newspaper. There are better places to celebrate than your local urgent care.

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Huckaby: Celebrating the Fourth of July (and doing so safely)