Runaway fireworks and ice cream cones: Here are SLO County residents’ best July 4 memories
The Fourth of July is a day for celebrating the freedoms we all enjoy as U.S. citizens. It’s also a time for making priceless memories with friends and family members.
Just the thought of Independence Day launches my mental slide show about past holiday celebrations — from days at the shore to potluck parties at home.
Here are a few of my favorite July 4 memories — and those of some friends and family members.
My favorite Fourth of July memories
Growing up on the Eastern Seaboard as a youth, I remember going with my family into the next town in early July for our first frozen custard cones of the season.
The cold soft-serve dessert was so good, especially on a hot day when the creamy custard would start to melt down the side of the cone and we had to chase the trails with our tongues.
The demise of so many San Luis Obispo County soft-serve ice cream shops has been left me quivering-lower-lip melancholy and sad.
Thank heavens there’s the new Chilly Cones soft-serve ice cream shop in Arroyo Grande and the county’s sole surviving Foster’s Freeze in Morro Bay.
Today’s children need those special memories, too.
Courtesy of my grandfather’s membership, we spent many Independence Days as kids in the pool at the Manursing Island Club in Rye, New York.
Dripping wet, we’d head for the poolside bar to treat ourselves to ice cream cones to dip into chocolate sprinkles served to us in paper cups.
Then we’d dry off and futilely try to get dressed. I still remember the smell of the chlorine and the tug-back from pulling dry clothes over still-damp butts.
We’d eat dinner from a lavish buffet — my faves were the bite-sized eclairs — and then watch the fireworks explode over the Atlantic Ocean. Magic.
I have another, slightly fuzzier memory of vacationing in Colorado with Mom and her sister Kate, watching crews set off July 4 fireworks that blazed into glory across a lake and then toward those towering mountains.
It was a fairly dry year, so the sequence would go like this: Fire off a pyrotechnic that would soar into the air, exploding in a burst of color before the sparks rained down on the slope. A crew would immediately scurry up the hill to stomp out little fires sparked by the falling embers.
The fireworks crew would then wait until those blazes were out before sending up the next firework.
The unusually long show could have been “Keystone Kops” funny if the wildfire potential hadn’t been so scary to me, even as a child.
In the mid-1980s, Cambria’s Chamber of Commerce board resurrected the town’s Independence Day celebration at Shamel Park, complete with fireworks. (I was a board member at the time.) It required hard work for months, but it was such fun!
It was for that event that I urged my compatriots to launch a day-after, townwide cleanup that I eventually dubbed Squibbing Day, after Cambria historians and trash pickers Paul and Louise Squibb.
Eventually, the burgeoning July 4 event led to our family’s bakery making an annual delivery of 8-foot-long strawberry shortcakes featuring from-scratch sourdough biscuits, fresh berries and real whipped cream.
The first year, as Husband Richard and our star employee David Mercer cautiously slid the first heavy, slide-prone dessert into the back of our van, David flashed a mischievous grin and said, “Now I know what it’s like to load a hearse!”
Yeah, desserts were always high on our family holiday lists. Maybe that’s why we started the bakery.
Other Independence Day recollections
I’m not alone in having lovely memories of Independence Days gone by.
Son Brian said that some of his Fourth of July highlights include watching the fireworks at Cambria’s Shamel Park and from his oceanfront Cayucos apartment. He also remembers simultaneously watching the Morro Bay and Cayucos pyrotechnic shows from a friend’s perfectly located home.
Jill Turnbow of the Cambria Center for the Arts shared an object lesson about fireworks.
When she was growing up, My family had a boat on the lake,” she wrote.
On one Fourth of July, she recalled, “My brother and I sat on the bow shooting off bottle rockets.”
According to Turnbow, one rocket “went out over the water and made a U-turn, came right back at us, went straight through the bag of fireworks, setting off a Roman candle, then proceeded thru the open window, under the galley table (burning the seat cushions) then out the back, knocking someone’s hat off into the water!”
“That was the end of ever being allowed to have fireworks,” she recalled.
Singer Shannon Boundy remembers watching her mom, Sheri Geiger Odenwald, and Bobby Benjamin perform at an Independence Day concert on a stage built out of plywood.
“I think Steel Rose played that year also,” said Boundy, who was about 12 at the time.
When Boundy sings, I can hear tones of her late mom’s voice, which also transport me back to so many of Sheri’s Cambria performances.
Arlene Hartman has a different memory of an Independence Day celebration at Shamel Park.
She was waiting in the line for the ladies room, she said, “and it was almost dark before I got out. Someone had passed out glow sticks to everyone, and the whole park area was lit up.”
Lorienne Schwenk, who grew up in Washington, D.C., said she “figured the fireworks at the Washington Monument were for me,” because her birthday was July 9.
As a child, she imagined that the monument’s “‘big pencil’ was drawing them.”
Schwenk also remembers waiting for sunset at Shamel Park, when “a whale completely breached, its body encircled by the setting sun … Who needs fireworks after THAT?”
And Sherry Hilber sums the July 4 spirit the best as she recalls “standing up, watching the fantastic fireworks over Shamel Park years ago, with such pure happiness and joy and gratitude for the experience.”
May we all cherish our holiday memories and see memorable beauty this Independence Day weekend.
