My first Fourth of July memory
One of my earliest memories centers on the Fourth of July, and it has nothing to do with fireworks, sparklers, hot dogs or parades.
It was July 4, 1969. Just 16 days before Neil Armstrong planted his bootprints on the dusty surface of the moon, and the same month that Richard Nixon made a surprise visit to South Vietnam, the Beatles labored over “Abbey Road,” the halfpenny ceased to be legal tender in Great Britain and the $500 bill was withdrawn from circulation in the United States. I was a 3-year-old living in Toledo, Ohio, with my parents and sister.
I don’t remember any details from earlier in the day, but it was a Friday and, more than likely, we spent a good portion of the afternoon with my maternal grandparents in Woodville, Ohio, a Norman Rockwell-style village about 30 miles southeast of Toledo. It was apparently drenchingly humid that day, but that’s not unusual for July 4. A carnival came to Woodville every year for Fourth of July celebrations in a community park, and we ventured over in the evening.
I was on a merry-go-round with my mother, and I distinctly recall her saying, “The sky doesn’t look too good over there!” Almost a half-century later, I can still vividly see its deep blue and black hue, and the lightning dancing across it. A few minutes later, the merry-go-round came … to … a … halt. Other rides did the same. Then a bearded man told everyone, as calmly as possible, to leave.
There were no fireworks that night. At least none that were fired from the ground.
Apparently we walked – well, ran is probably more like it – back to my grandparents’ house a couple of blocks away. My sister says our grandmother, who was only in her early 50s, kept falling due to the blasts of wind. From there, my memories are a series of fragments: rain hammering basement windows like it was coming out of a firehose; going down our one-way street in Toledo the wrong way once we drove back due to a fallen tree, and, the next day, going back to Woodville to see the carnival scattered in soggy ruins.
It was a storm apparently so intense that it has its own Wikipedia entry – the Ohio Fireworks Derecho (“derecho” being a line of intense storms that moves across a great distance). It roared through the southern part of Michigan, the northern half of Ohio, and parts of Pennsylvania, New York and West Virginia. It was apparently one of the most deadly events of its kind, with 18 people killed in Ohio, with some meeting their end while they were in Lake Erie watching fireworks. More than 100 boats on the lake were either destroyed or flipped over. A 20-year-old from Toledo lost his life when a tree fell on him at the Cedar Point amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio.
In those days before the Internet, the Weather Channel and the sophisticated means we now have to forecast weather, the storm was apparently an unexpected interloper into many Fourth of July celebrations. Toledo’s newspaper, The Blade, reported the next day that the area’s residents “had, at most, an hour’s warning that tornadoes were approaching.” A spokesman for the National Weather Service told the newspaper the ferocity of the storm took them by surprise and “we were expecting nothing like this.”
I’ve lived through more than four decades’ worth of Fourth of July celebrations since 1969. None, however, has been as memorable as that one.