My family used to spend the 4th of July right on lake Huron in a place called Port Austin and my brother would light off all of his fireworks on the beach near the campground, along with about 50 other drunken lunatics, its a wonder no one ever got hurt.
The next morning I would wake up early and go scavenge the beach for duds and fireworks that people would just misplace in the dark. It was an endeavor that would provide the next few days’ entertainment for me. It was there that I found my first cherry bomb. An item worth a considerable amount of money these days due to they’re being banned only a year or so earlier. Well after a few years of doing this we both became quite familiar with most of the items and were able to put packaged shows together and sell them. My brother finally grew out of this little addiction but I guess I ever did.
Several years later I stumbled across a guy in a storage unit who was stocking it with cases upon cases of fireworks, more fireworks than I had ever seen at the time. After talking with him for all of about 3 minutes I had me a nice little box of assorted fireworks and his phone number, he was $50 richer.
I then went out and found a few of my most maniacal friends and turned that $50 box of fireworks into a bigger $100 box of fireworks. This process repeated itself until the 4th of July where I had me a nice little show of my own.
Then next year while I was at a flea market I found yet another guy selling cases of fireworks. He would only sell me cases and not individual items but of course the price was considerably better. Well finally he convinced me and I bought a single case of artillery shells (thinking I could sell them the quickest) and again, I found some of my customers from the year before. Well I was back at that flea market the very next day.
Well over the years it was like rising up in a drug cartel, every year I would hook up with the connection of the guy that I did business with the year before. By 1993, I was buying straight from the distributor and spending $3000 at a pop. Oh those were good years. One year, I had 74 cases (over 1.5 tons shipping weight) stored in my 700 sq ft apartment. I had to move most of the furniture out. When you walked in all you saw was wall-to-wall fireworks. I got kicked out of that apartment for some untold reason; looking back I suppose that it might have been a fire hazard. Some landlords can be so picky.
With the money I would make in the next few years, I would buy a house and a new truck. Business was good. Then one day I found yet another source, only this time he had the BIG stuff. I'm talking about the stuff they blow up in the city shows. The professional stuff. Oh boy, talk about hooked. When you see those things go off at 50ft away, your addicted let me tell ya!!!!!
Well, needless to say, each year I put on a better show than the year before. The last 3 years in Michigan I put on shows consisting of only professional aerial shells and cakes costing anywhere from $800 to $4000 total. So much for the profit I used to make. People used to fill up parks down the street, we would have to tape off my house and my neighbor’s house, It became quite the annual event, and the strange thing is that the cops never showed up. In 1999, I put on a show in my backyard that consisted of over 90 shells ranging in size from 3 to 8" diameter, some weighing as much as 15 lbs, and costing anywhere from $10 to $120 a pop. My grand finale alone consisted of 23 shells. It was an expensive but awesome show. I also did a show the night before at a friend’s house which also was an annual event.
Well I started to get real good at putting the right shells together and making some unique effects in the air, some of my shows were bigger and better than a few of the local city shows, or so I was often told. I took pride in my meticulous shell selection and arrangements. I usually had a nice soundtrack kicking through my P.A. system, blasting out some mood music during the shows. One year I blew my $600 Cerwin Vega Speakers.
But what I was doing was highly illegal and I started to become more concerned about getting into trouble or worse yet, having someone get hurt. And if the cops came and decided to search my house, they would have found the store I had upstairs. So I decided to pursue this hobby of mine legally.
