A Boy’s Long-Ago July 4

This damaged, sepia-toned photograph from the 1880s shows a Fourth of July parade on Court Street looking eastward from Dearborn Avenue. The uniformed marching group is the Corps of Cadets from the College of St. Viateur in Bourbonnais. The blurring of the moving marchers was a result of the slow films available in the early years of photography. (Kankakee County Museum Photo Archive)

By Jack Klasey

May 17, 2025

Harold W. Simmons wrote hundreds of “Up ’til Now” local history columns between 1948 and 1958. The columns, which appeared in Sunday editions of the Kankakee Daily Journal, usually dealt with such topics as early Kankakee County settlers, historic buildings, and important local events of the past.

Sometimes, however, Simmons devoted a column to his memories of local happenings. One such column appeared in the newspaper on July 6, 1952. Entitled, “Fourth of July at the Turn of the Century,” that column focused on a small boy’s celebration of the July 4 holiday in 1900 (Simmons had been ten years of age that summer).

“No self-respecting boy in those days would think of being caught in bed on the morning of the Fourth later than daybreak,” he wrote.  “If you got up before your particular pal, you had been told to go to his home and toss pebbles against his window to awaken him.…This was the day of days to really celebrate and to do it in as loud and noisy a fashion as possible—by 7 a.m., the noise would be deafening.”

The primary source of that noise was the exploding of firecrackers, which were readily available in a variety of sizes and types. Simmons noted that two- and three-inch crackers were most common. “Five- and even six-inch exploders were sometimes used by the older boys, but as these were more expensive, [they] were beyond the reach of the average small boy of 8 or 10.”

He recalled that some of the more daring boys indulged in a dangerous practice, holding the firecracker “until the very last moment and when the sputtering fuse had reached the proper moment, toss it behind an unsuspecting bystander. The result was all you could ask…however, this was no child’s play, and often resulted in torn and badly burned fingers. In fact, not to have at least one finger in a bandage was considered ‘sissy.’”

In addition to the firecrackers, Simmons and his pals employed a form of explosive called a ‘torpedo.’ This was, he noted, “a fiendish contraption about an inch in diameter. It was made of small gravel wrapped in tissue paper with a detonator cap at the bottom. When thrown with force on the sidewalk behind a crowd of girls, it always had the desired result. The gravel, forcibly released in the explosion, would sting their legs, even though they were protected to some extent by long, black lisle stockings. The older girls were not bothered in that way because their long skirts almost touched the sidewalk, but somehow, they didn’t seem to care for the noise either.”

“The Fourth was always an evil day for the family hound,” he recalled. “At the first sound of a firecracker, he would seek his favorite hiding place in the darkest corner under the front porch… and there he would stay until nightfall.”

“Of course, you had to go to town about 10:30 to see the parade. The annual Fourth of July parade was always well attended, and after the parade, speeches would be held from a stand erected in the Courthouse Square. These speeches were very long-winded, and the average small boy would drift to the outskirts of the crowd and resume the real reason, to him, for the coming again of the day: the making of more noise.

“With teams hitched to the rail surrounding the Courthouse Square,” he recalled, “there was always some skittish horse that would break away and go dashing down the street. A runaway always produced a great deal of excitement, and as the horse galloped down the dusty street, often some brave fellow would dart from the crowd and at just the proper moment fling himself at the horse’s head, grabbing for the bridle. He would hang on until the steed came to a standstill, and then more than likely would drop back into the crowd before you could learn his name. Or, if he became known, he would be followed by a crowd of small-boy hero worshippers.”

In contrast to the sound and fury of that turn-of-the century Fourth, Simmons described a much more subdued day in the year that he wrote the column: “In our immediate neighborhood,” he observed, “the Fourth of July in the year A.D. 1952, was ushered in by the explosion of a lone, single, solitary firecracker at 6:30 a.m.; at least a half hour elapsed before another explosion took place.”

Jack Klasey is a former Journal reporter and a retired publishing executive. He can be contacted at jwklasey@comcast.net.