by Kevin Burton
You hear this phrase a lot: "don't judge."
Well in this case, go ahead. Be my guest. Judge, and jump in with both feet, or both wagging index fingers, if you want to. I don't care.
On our first regional beep baseball trip, to Indianapolis in late May, I saw a headline that made me buy the newspaper.
Being an old newspaper guy, I used to routinely buy local newspapers as we passed through places on the road. I had time to kill and it was fun to critique the papers and remember my time as an ink-stained wretch.
Over time I found myself buying but not reading the papers, so I stopped. But I made an exception.
A man spends a significant part of his life waiting for his wife, if he is blessed enough to have a wife. On one of our bathroom breaks at a convenience store, while I was waiting for Jeannette, my eyes fell upon the Boonville (Missouri) Daily News and the headline "Spirit of '76 Fireworks warehouse goes up in smoke."
And I laughed. And I made the purchase.
"Employees at the warehouse were able to exit the building safely and no injuries were reported," wrote reporter Laura Wax.
"We really couldn't make an aggressive interior attack (on the fire) at first with all the fireworks going off," said Boonville Fire Chief Tim Carmichael.
It took seven local fire departments 12 hours to put out the blaze. Responders were on the scene for 17 hours, the Daily News reported. Fire walls within the building kept the fire from spreading to other buildings.
Tomorrow is Independence Day. I have saved this fireworks story for such a time as this.
My little town has an ordinance that allows regular citizens to set off fireworks quite a few days before Independence Day. This gives people the right to disturb people's sleep, and spew little bits of fire-hazard litter on their properties for a solid week. We have a neighbor who is completely obnoxious in that regard.
That's why the news story made me smile.
Look, I pledge allegiance to the constitution of the United States of America and all who would defend it. But I will declare that allegiance without keeping people up all night.
I mean, when I was a teenager I used to blow up apples and potatoes with fireworks and thought it was so cool. That was in the old days. Times were different. I wasn't buying my own apples and potatoes.
I used to watch the fireworks displays. But I got over it.
Yeah, yeah, fireworks. Boom, boom, I get it.
I see those temporary tents proliferating this time of year, fireworks for sale, and I get annoyed. What I really want to see is the tents set up to sell sweet corn and other vegetables. That's a middle-America tradition I can sink my teeth into.
Sorry (not sorry), I think the fireworks store article is funny. Go ahead and judge. Nobody got hurt. The local reporter and I both put that up front in our stories.
If my neighbor is letting off fireworks at 11 p.m. and I say, "I hope they blow their heads off," I say that to get a rise out of Jeannette. I don't really mean that. I just want them to grow up, come to their senses and go to sleep.
"Laurie Little works at the Holiday Inn on Mid-America Industrial Drive near the warehouse," reported ABC television affiliate KMIZ on the day of the fire.
"Little said she was at work at the time, when she remembers hearing a 'pop,pop,pop' and seeing an 'explosion' in the sky when she looked out the window. She said she soon recognized the sound as fireworks because her family used to own a fireworks company.
"It was scary at first because I was like if somethings exploding in that building and there's the capacity to just keep exploding we're not too far away from that," Little said. "So, you know it was a little bit unnerving at first but then you know I thought at the time it's gotta be fireworks because once the initial explosion kinda cleared... right like you could see it more drifting off like firework smoke."
The fire took place May 27. Somehow the store resumed operations the next day, according to the Daily News, perhaps in a corner of the building untouched by the fire.
"If you are a customer of Spirit of '76 whose order was impacted by the fire, your account representative will be reaching out to you in the coming days," Wax wrote.
Have a happy, safe, intelligent Independence Day everybody.
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