DadAboutTown FIREWORKS
by kevin mckeever
All American
On covering Fourth of July fireworks for the local paper, the holiday scene at nearby town parks and cooing “oooh” and “aaah” as the sky is set ablaze
A
green reporter draws the worst assignments a newspaper can offer. Random person-on-the-street interviews, sewage spills and a combination of the two known better as covering the annual Fourth of July fireworks. Added bonus: bombs exploding overhead! For most of my twenties, as an ink-stained wretch of the local press, Independence Day to me meant hot, sweltering weather filled with gnats biting my ankles and ankle-biters running into my shins as I stumbled through darkened fields of half-bagged picnic trash and picnickers half in the bag. Then came the challenge of writing a story on deadline while avoiding yet another year of leading with the crowds cooing “oooh” and “aaah.” Worst of all, it meant I was working while the rest of my friends and family were partying in the same crowd. Most of those July Fourths as a reporter, 40
STAMFORDMAG.COM
Sparklers for Megan at the 2009 Binney Park Fireworks
blanket; others lit silver candelabras, sipped Chardonnay and nibbled pâté. We wore T-shirts and shorts; others sported pressed linen shorts and popped pastel Ralph Lauren collars. I kept waiting to be stampeded by polo horses. The New Canaan fireworks, as you’d expect, were incredible. Our daughter, Megan, age six at the time, loved them; our son, Calvin, then three, covered his ears and yowled and cried. Rhonda had to schlep him a mile back to the minivan less than two minutes into the show. Wisely, Megan and I did fireworks alone the next summer. A brief rainstorm sprinkled our windshield almost all the way down to Cummings Park in Shippan, ensuring us an excellent parking space and a near empty beach from which to pick our viewing spot. The skies soon cleared, and the crowds eventually joined us on the shore where we watched the sky be set ablaze while each of S us cooed “oooh” and “aaah.”
Kevin McKeever is a freelance writer and national award-winning newspaper columnist. His work has appeared in publications and landfills worldwide. You can reach him at kevin@writeonkevin.com.
PHOTOGRAPHS: McKEEVER BY ANDREW SULLIVAN; OTHERS CONTRIBUTED BY THE MCKEEVER FAMILY
Three generations of McKeevers at the 2014 Binney Park Fireworks: Grandpa Walter; sister, Denise Doria; Megan; Rhonda; and Calvin
as well as of my childhood, were spent just over the Stamford border at Old Greenwich’s Binney Park, a manicured thirty-two-acre green space created by, and named after, Crayola crayons inventor Edwin Binney. The trees there are now much taller than decades ago when my parents would load me and my sister into the Ford Country Squire station wagon to see the rockets and their many-colored glares, but the view is still pretty fine, as are the surroundings. Especially since the town just last summer dredged the latest batch of muck out of waterway that runs through it. While hauling our kids across the border is always an option, we don’t always abandon my hometown. Well, not completely. Last July, some Stamford friends who live on a property adjacent to Darien’s Woodway Country Club invited us to cut through their back lot and onto a fairway to enjoy that “private show” that we had glimpsed many times over the years from the second floor of our own house a few miles west. Best part of seeing it up close? I collected a half dozen stray Titleist Pro-V1s…only to lose them again while playing at the Sterling Farms Golf Course later in the summer. The most memorable local fireworks event for our family had to be the year we went to New Canaan and paid—paid!—to see the show among the beautiful people gathered in Waveny Park. I’m not being sarcastic. My wife, Rhonda, and I have never felt so outclassed at a function. We put out grocery-store chicken and a sixer on an old