To me the Fourth of July is a lucky holiday. This seems fitting, since our country is also fortunate, young and optimistic. But it’s also occasionally prone to stupid mistakes, full of dreamers, daredevils and inventors - the land of opportunity for visionaries and nitwits alike.
My father in law, Stewart, has been blessed with good fortune. He survived D-Day on Normandy Beach and the Battle of the Bulge. At ninety, he has a great mind, a loving family and has written a shelf full of books.
In the 1930s, his hometown of Sidney, NY, was an iconic kind of place. At one end of Main Street there used to be a Howizter from the First World War - a small cannon with a short, 75mm barrel that pointed down the street. It had been there for as long as anyone could remember.
In 1938, when this incident took place, the Fourth of July was a very big thing. Everyone bought fireworks, and even the drug store sold firecrackers, thunderbolts and cherry bombs. There was lots of noise and almost no limit to what you could do. Some people may mourn the passing of those freewheeling days, but there were lots of terrible accidents, and even a few deaths.
Stewart and his friends had four thunderbolts, maybe 6 or 7 inches long.
They lit them -and this was really dumb - jammed the whole thing down the barrel of the Howitzer as far as they could. They topped it off with a baseball that fit so neatly it seemed like the ball and cannon had been made for each other, hand and glove.
The gleeful group marveled over this piece of kismet.
As the fuse sizzled, the boys ran for cover. It was dark, anyway, and there was plenty of activity all over town, so nobody noticed.
There was a tremendous boom, and then utter silence - until they heard glass shattering. At that, they all scattered. Later they found out the ball had gone through the window of a garage on Cartwright Avenue, a quarter of a mile away.
In a great stroke of luck, no one was hurt. They were also lucky not to be caught - but in fact, they were never even suspected. There were just so many accidents on July fourth that this simply blended in.
When Stewart got back from WW2, he met his friend Spud Kinch - one of the cannon pranksters - at a bar to celebrate their luck in having survived the war. They were both in uniform, and although the baseball episode didn’t come up, Stewart at least, was thinking about it.
The thing is, luck always runs out.
So we grow up and learn to measure risk.
Only then we can look back and wonder at our stunning stupidity and the good luck we took for granted.
