For the past several years, we’ve published a morning newspaper on the Fourth of July. That means that some of us find ourselves working in the newsroom on the night of July 3.

This year was different because the Fourth was on a Friday, which means some of us had to work the night of the Fourth to put out Saturday morning’s newspaper.

As a rule, I’m usually in the newspaper for our nation’s birthday and that means I miss out on the fireworks, which is not that big of deal. I’ve seen a lot of firework shows both here in Jackson County as well as Indianapolis and Louisville.

On Friday, however, we took a break from putting out Saturday’s newsaper and ventured out on to the roof of the Tribune  just prior to the fireworks show at Freeman Field. That was a good show, but before the main event there were a lot of other people putting on their own firework shows around the city.

From what I can tell people must spend a lot of money on fireworks because from our central point in downtown Seymour you could look any direction and see spectacular displays. There was a constant barrage of fireworks from points all over the city during the brief time that I and a couple of other staffers were on the roof.

The celebration reminded me of the time that my mother and I took my two older children to New York City on our nation’s 200th birthday back in 1976. That city celebrated the bicentennial in style. We stayed at my brother’s apartment in Queens, but traveled to Battery Park in lower Manhattan and wound up watching the show from a perch somewhere near the World Trade Center and not too far away from the Statute of Liberty.

It didn’t really matter where you where in the Big Apple that night, because the firework show was repeated from key spots around Manhattan and everyone had the chance to see the same show.

Our local celebration didn’t match that event, but it was a pretty good show anyway.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 8:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.