In our news-planning meeting last week, my reporters and I reminisced about childhood Fourth of July experiences. I’m at least a generation older than they are, from a time when kids went flying out the door right after breakfast, unsupervised as crazed coyotes. We gobbled lunch at whatever home was closest and might not check in with our folks again until dinner.

Firecrackers have become disreputable, somewhere in the same camp as lawn darts and asbestos-lined oven mitts. I certainly understand objections to amateur pyrotechnics on the peninsula, which has virtually become one long, skinny town from end to end, with lots of noise-sensitive people, pets and wildlife. The disruption, pollution and litter can be hard to take. This week’s edition will have loads of coverage about the long July 4 weekend. Hopefully, this news will mostly be about responsible fun rather than mayhem.

But I can’t help feeling nostalgic about boyhood summers and the ridiculous things we used to do. Here’s a column I wrote 30 years ago about that time:

Looking back to boyhood in the 1960s, the month leading up to the 4th of July ranked higher than Christmas; Christmas was a one-shot deal, whereas my friends and I usually wheedled fireworks from our parents for weeks before the actual holiday.

We all lived on and near an Indian reservation, so perhaps I have a skewed idea of just what was available back then, but the fireworks stands I remember were half-block-long Aladdin’s Cave sorts of affairs, stacked to the rafters with thousands of tissue-wrapped treasures from China. (Probably it all was from Taiwan, since we didn’t trade with the “Red” Chinese back in those ideologically pure days.) Dragons, tigers, wizards and cobras — I saw them all for the first time on fireworks packages.

There were stacks upon heaps of firecrackers of different brands and lengths, and bundles of bottle rockets ranging from dull little blobs on bamboo slivers that only zipped up 50 feet into the air, to more interesting ones that flew and exploded, to others the size of broom handles that we rarely bought because they cost an astronomical 30 cents apiece.

There were smoke bombs and Roman candles and flying saucers and booby traps that popped when your mom broke the string stretched across the doorway. There were “snakes,” little gray pellets that when ignited squirmed across the sidewalk releasing sulfur fumes and leaving stains finally erased only by winter snows.

Our fireworks were rarely a nighttime activity; we bought them for a bang, not pretty colors. My big brother Greg was a set-em-all-off-at-once kind of guy who’d hang a 500-cracker string from a tree branch, light it and run. I was more of a demolition engineer, poking individual firecrackers into ant hills to see how the ants reacted when they went off. (Maybe paying dues, as an adult I can’t even bring myself to squish a sugar ant crawling across the kitchen counter.) We were amazingly stupid. By all rights, an entire generation of men ought to be wearing eye patches and prosthetic fingers.

A kid learns lessons from everybody and everything, and I think back with considerable admiration on the patience of the men who manned fireworks stands. It can’t have been the world’s most enjoyable job dealing with scores of little kids gazing about with longing in their eyes but not enough dimes in their pockets. They were polite, and fair when we brought back our duds for a trade-in.

A weekly newspaper like ours is, in some ways, a kind of living nostalgia. We cover all the serious local news, but we also still celebrate small-town life. Find it all at www.chinookobserver.com and see a sample of our content, along with breaking news and public service announcements at www.facebook.com/ChinookObserver.

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