July 4th Brings Back Memories -- And Invites Reflection

By James C. Johnston Jr.

Having been born back in May of 1944, my memories of the birthday celebration of my beloved country are rather long. I was filled with the historical significance of the day and the celebrations of July Fourth as they were framed in the context of the national experience of men and women who fought and/or worked in war related industry during the years that this nation fought for our very lives against world domination by the forces of International Fascism. In the early 1940’s, Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, The Empire of Japan, and their minions like Admiral Horthy’s Hungary and the Nazi-German inspired Slovak State had embraced and subscribed to the filthy doctrine of racial superiority.

These people seeking national purity were willing to wipe-out whole populations of so-called “racial-inferiors” to purify the world from the scourge of “Das Untermenschen.” These up-holders of national racial purity were the Super-Man-German-inspired-and-twisted-Fascist-Master-Race who set themselves up to determine who was unworthy of life, because these people condemned by Hitler were thought to be sub-human by these Nazi-Supermen and their Fascist friends.

A Generation Faces Fate

The “Greatest Generation” who came of age in the blast-furnace of The Great Depression of the 1930’s saved the world entire in the heroic struggle to save humanity as a whole during the dark days of World War II. Any hint of racism in this day and age of 2025 disgraces the memory of the sacrifice of these heroes of that heroic era when the world teetered on the brink of totalitarianism. This was the world into which I was born. I was told, and to this day I truly believe that this is the greatest place on earth in which to live, and I for one would like to keep it that way.

The victory of the United States in World War II was very fresh in the minds of my generation. After all, we were raised by members of the Greatest Generation, and love of country was inculcated in us. When the War was ended in 1945, the short-lived feeling of relief of being saved was clearly palpable even to tiny folk like me with some slight memories of forest-like Victory Gardens and of men in uniform returning from exotic places far away from Franklin, Massachusetts where they had been fighting a war to defeat a horrible tyranny and make the world safe for democracy. Yes, as a small child, I felt very safe.

My own father, who left to go to war seven months before I was born, was getting ready to invade the Philippines in Hawaii when I came into the world. The immediate world of my early childhood was almost exclusively inhabited by women. This of course meant that I was spoiled rotten, and I dearly loved that, but that is another story for another time. Many women in my little world worked in war related industry in those years. So many men were in the service of their country, and women had to take-up the slack.

America discovered that women were equal to any challenge in the industrial world. Ann Southern as the movie heroine Rosie-the-Riveter reflected the reality of female ability and empowerment. This began a trend that has gone on to demonstrate the equality of ability of men and women in the work place. This was the beginning of another revolution in the great American workplace. My mother worked for Archer Rubber Company making barrage balloons many of which were used in the defense of England.

England, once again, proved to be a great heroic nation. They had so long stood alone against Hitler led by the island nation’s heroic Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Great Britain’s Brave King George VI, who had fought at the Battle of Jutland in World War I as a teenager and was mentioned in dispatches for his courage under fire. The King refused to relocate himself and his family to Canada for his own safety and his daughter, the late Queen Elizabeth, served in the women’s armed forces and learned to rip an engine down to its component parts and put it back together again. This was a skill for which she found uses during her long life.

In 1940, England had rescued its last significant body of trained veteran armed forces from Dunkirk on the northern coast of France just as the Germans were about to engulf and destroy this expeditionary army. Using an improvised fleet of small civilian craft, manned by civilian volunteers, ranging from 15 to 150 feet in length, the ordinary Englishmen who possessed any kind of sea-worthy craft answered the call to rescue the English troops and made sail to Dunkirk to rescue the British Army stranded in France. Between May 27 and June 4, 1940 these brave ordinary citizens, many of them not much more than children themselves and others who had been on the seas since the days of Queen Victoria rescued almost a quarter of a million men from the beaches of Dunkirk and brought them back to England to defend the brave island nation. This was indeed “The Miracle of Dunkirk!” as Prime Minister Winston Churchill was to call it.

England had stood alone against all the forces of Hitler and his war machine which bombed England after occupying most of Western Europe for more than a year. Great Britain and the British Commonwealth nations and colonies faced down Hitler’s juggernaut saving all of civilization from world-domination. For more than a year England and her Commonwealth stood alone.

When Germany rashly invaded the vastness which was the old Soviet Union, and when Japan attacked the United States Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the tide of war was irrevocably destined to change, thus sealing the fate of Hitler and his horrible Fascist allies. By 1945, Allied victory was assured by the sacrifice of Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and by brave men like my father and the fathers and mothers, and the brothers, sisters, and cousins of all America. The Greatest Generation put paid to Hitler and his obscene and sordid allies and brought the attention of the whole world to the bitter price of irrational racial hatred.

Now the millions of American heroes returned to a nation grateful to have them back, for many who answered the nation’s call to service were never to return. Their lives were given in far-away places so that many countries that citizens of this nation had never heard of were freed of the nightmare of war and oppression. Yet many of those dead heroes would forever stay entombed in the freer-earth in many of those places so far from home never to return so that we can celebrate our freedom today and hopefully hold on to it for many generations to come knowing that autocracy and other evils wait its chance to prosper when we forget what our freedom has cost to maintain.

A Unionville, Franklin Civic Celebration 

And that was the world of my earliest childhood memory in which I saw the first celebration of the 82 July Fourths of my lifetime. My first dramatic memories were of fireworks. Now, these were not the great displays of millions of dollars’ worth of pyroclastic wonders that are thrown into the air at grand venues attended by thousands and even millions of celebrants in 2025. These fireworks were a neighborhood display of pyrotechnics bought by my Uncle Lucky and launched from my from yard in the countrified Village of Unionville in the Town of Franklin by him, and my father, and anyone else who wanted to be there after a huge picnic and cook-out was held attended by half-a-hundred relatives and friends now, alas, all gone.

They live still in memory and in the loving memory of the grateful joy of the national holiday marking our nation’s birth. And these wonderful people live as well in the memory of all that wonderful food and sweets that were followed by apple pie in the celebratory holiday feast. Some of my old Yankee relatives had enjoyed the traditional dish of salmon and peas, but we exceeded this simple celebration in commemorating the “Birth of Our Nation” with glorious excess! And all of the associated goodies of holidays made this great holiday the grandest summer event of my youth.

We kids had all sorts of things to celebrate with, which would shock the safety-conscious society of politically correct, and most likely saner, contemporary Americans of 2025. We had very dangerous “Sparklers” which had some highly flammable substance coated on a metal rod which we had to light with a match to “Set-Off” this dangerous contraption. We held on these rods of shooting fire which sprayed out a swarm of sparks to light-up the night, and we ran about fields and lawns trying to tag our friends with these very dangerous things. Sometimes we even had two sparklers, one in each hand, firing off showers of sparks at the same time. How we avoided setting fire to the woods and fields was in and of itself a miracle!

At least “Roman Candles”, which shot off flaming substances with much greater generation of heat and fire-power, were by now forbidden, at least around here. Firecrackers lite–up the night and cracked-out gun-like noise, and the potent crack and simulated sound of gun-shot made by cap-guns added to the wild and militaristic cacophony of this grand and wild celebration of nationhood. It was wonderful!

My father and uncle shot-off their pistols into the air. However, they were very enlightened on this potentially dangerous activity to the point that they used “Blanks” instead of real bullets to punctuate the air with sounds of celebration. There is no doubt that such celebratory activity were a well-established tradition at least 170 years old at this time. People living on the great Western Frontier of Springfield and Albany were no strangers to such celebrations in say 1800. This fact was carefully explained to the party so that there would be no misunderstandings on that subject which was, I suppose, a polite nod to public safety.

Yes, in those days the Fourth of July meant feasting, having very noisy fun, and the seasonal consumption of watermelons, which were traditional summer treats, and very messy. Watermelons saturated little kids with sticky joy with seasonal significance, and they were a lot of fun to eat on a hot day like the Fourth of July. Watermelons were best consumed by small children out-of-doors where the children’s slimy bodies could be hosed off at the end of day before entering the civilized confines of the house.

There was no doubt that he Fourth of July meant a lot of “Flash” and wonderful explosive noise, and “The Glorious Fourth” also meant a significant number of injuries, and the occasional loss of an eye. The Fourth of July was a great excuse for expressing joyful excess. In some places alcohol also had played a large part in the celebration of the Great National Holiday.

My family was a “dry family”. Beer, whisky, gin, and wine were never consumed at any family gathering hosted in those days by my parents, but everybody seemed to have fun drinking seasonal lemonade, cider, ice-coffee, Coca Cola, and other so-called soft-drinks which had been placed in several large buckets of ice and were in themselves a sort of rare luxury for us kids who had under normal circumstances strict limits imposed on drinking such things. Milk was the drink in my house, and as children we were instructed to drink a lot of it for the sake of strong bones. Now in my eighty-second year, I can attest that the advice I was given in my youth about drinking milk seems to have been effective in producing strong bones. Are parents really always right after all?

There were a lot of games like badminton, soft-ball, base-ball, and other sports to go along with all of the pyroclastic activity that mostly took place after dark. Sometimes a large swimming pool was set-up for recreational cooling-off for the children. This was also sound practice for rinsing off watermelon, candy, mustard, and other “stuff” which seems attracted to small children. But the dangerous parts of the celebration were obviously the most seductive part of the traditional July Fourth celebrations of my extreme youth, and they mostly took place ‘After Dark” when we were usually confined to bed.

And back in those far-away days, there seemed to be millions of Fire-Flies swarming all around us. They too were “magic” on-the-wing. There don’t seem to be many of them around anymore. As kids we used to catch them and put them in jars with holes punched through the lid to allow the little creatures to breath. We wanted these natural flying illuminations to give us light in the night in our darken bedrooms. I am afraid this was not very sound conservation.

Over the years of the 1950’s, 1960’s and early 1970’s, people grew more conscious of safety involving what we so easily bought in stores for our explosive amusement. Common sense took over, and fireworks and other fun-devices became extinct. Pyrotechnic displays became a community affair handled by professionals which resulted in more dynamic displays of “Light-and-Thunder” I suppose. There was also a sharp decrease in the general injuries associated with the holiday and loss of various and sundry body-parts.

May the Fourth Still Be With Us...

A good old-fashioned July-Fourth celebration reflected the unbridled joy of freedom of a people and left us exhausted at the close of day, but all in all, there was something very re-assuring about this wonderful celebration of ourselves as a united people and a great nation. And we also had manifested an obvious public appreciation for the fact we lived in a very different kind of country where the bells of freedom really did ring out freedom, and joy seemed universal!