Mama Kat Thursday: 4th of July Memories

Wiener roasting, roasting marshmallows for S'mores & running through the dark with sparklers was what our 4th of July celebration was like in the 60's and early 70's.

We lived on heavily forested property just off a state road in Indiana, where gun-powder based fireworks are illegal. We usually just purchased the legal ones sold in the grocery stores that contained assorted large and smaller sparklers, glow worms and smoke bombs.

Our "fire pit" we used for roasting wieners was usually 6 cinder blocks stacked as an open ended rectangle and we'd build a fire in the middle.
Being made of cinder blocks, it could be moved, so our "fire pit" enjoyed being in several locations.

Since we lived in the country, sticks and branches were readily available, so we 3 girls would search along the edge of the woods, collecting armfuls.  We were experts at building fires, criss-crossing small tinder first, then adding sticks of increasing size on top.

Mother would crumple wads of newspaper, tuck them around under edges of stick pile, then light a newspaper edge with a match to get it started. Later, as we grew older, my sisters and I would do the lighting.

We had these really nice wiener roasting forks with red wood handles that could be extended to a full 36 inches and once the tinder was a nice low burning pile, we'd slide wieners onto our forks and start roasting. 

We did have a picnic table Dad built and sometimes we'd eat on that or sometimes we'd take our wieners inside to put on buns and eat---it really depended on whether the mosquitoes were a problem or not. 

Once the meal was over, out came the graham crackers, a bag of Brach's Chocolate Stars and marshmallows for making S'mores!

(Chocolate Stars melted more quickly then Hershey Bars.)

Our Mother was an expert Marshmallow roaster, able to get each marshmallow perfectly light brown on all sides, without catching it on fire. My sisters and I often enjoyed blackened marshmallows. I think was a teenager before I could imitate her skill.

Then when it got dark, we lit up the sparklers and would run about drawing shapes or writing our names in the air!
Dad would set out a metal bucket to toss the wires in, once the sparkle was done.

I do recall Dad got us cowboy style cap guns one 4th of July plus rolls of caps, so we could run around shooting those off. I was around 12 maybe.
I did that a couple of years, but eventually noticed the burnt gun-powder smell of the caps was giving me a headache and lost interest in cap guns. I think my sisters continued enjoying them for awhile.

At some point, we started driving to Martinsville for the public fireworks held at the City Park.  About an hour before dark, we'd pack up our lawn chairs, drive 30 minutes into town and find a spot with a good view. 

The fireworks were launched off the top of this huge high hill that was just behind the public pool---but isn't just fireworks shot into the sky! They had a bunch of wood-frame motion displays all the way up the hill with fireworks attached that they could set off  to entertain alternatively with the ones fired into the sky.  For example, I remember one of those displays looked like a country boy eating a watermelon. He raised the melon to his mouth, then spat an arch of "fireworks" seeds out of his mouth.

Really quite clever.

Did we have a grill, you might wander. Yes, a charcoal grill, but using it seemed a rather a big production for Dad. I recall that grill was a pretty copper color, roundish with an open front, partially enclosed back and had a warming cabinet enclosure on top. (I looked up a picture of one and it was rotisserie capable, too.) 

Dad went through an elaborate process of prepping the charcoal briquettes first by lighting and burning a stack of them in a metal bucket, then, once they were white-hot, moving them to and arranging them on a bed of fire-proof pellet material in the grill. Then cooking started.
I remember watching him do all that and I think I even remember him using the rotisserie feature at least once, but I remember roasting wieners way more often!

So, that's my Hoosier backwoods fireworks memories!

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What's your 4th of July tradition?