Fourth of July 1939 in Paradise California

Fourth of July - Paradise, California 

My mom and dad and I spent the summer of 1939 in Paradise. My dad was in a wheelchair at the time as his arthritis was getting worse. We wanted to get out of the valley heat. A couple we knew moved into the house in Live Oak to take care of it.
My cat, Smokey, decided he didn’t want to move and we left him with the couple. My sister, Dorothy, who was on vacation from UC Berkeley, drove us up there and came up several times during the summer.

We rented a home at the corner of Skyway and Rocky Lane, mom hired a lady to help with housekeeping and we settled in for the summer. I enjoyed the area very much and made some friends in the nearby area. One in particular lived nearby at a dairy and we would get on our bicycles, a few times a week, to get an ice cream cone at the store in Magalia which was about 4 miles away. He later became mayor of Paradise and County Supervisor, Jack Griffin. I had a chance to see him, in 1999 when I moved to Magalia, just before he died.

As the Fourth got closer, fireworks stands sprouted around the area and I got a few packages of firecrackers. Nowadays, they wouldn’t be allowed because of the fire danger, but then it was allowed then.

I decided I wanted to make a firecracker gun. I was going to get a short length of cast iron pipe, a right angle “ell” and an end cap. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the ell or the cap so I tried something else. I made a handle out of wood and drove nails into the pine and then bent them over the top to hold the barrel in place. I pounded in a wooden plug in the place of the ell and was all ready to try in out. (See picture above for details of the “weapon”).

I lit a firecracker and dropped into the barrel and got a very nice “BANG”. After doing that several times, I got the bright idea to drop the firecracker down followed by a marble which fit in the barrel perfectly. I lit the firecracker and let fly. I could see the marble fly way off to the south.

After a couple were set off O.K., the “accident” happened. I woke up on my back in the driveway by the Skyway. My mom was screaming and I was covered with blood. The plug had been blown out the back end. Luckily, I had held the gun up against my forehead and still have a scar over my right eye. I had been knocked out but was extremely lucky that my eye hadn’t been put out.

Needless to say, that was my only experiment with a firecracker gun. The next Fourth of July in Live Oak, I was much smarter only using M 80 fire crackers to blow up watermelons!