Dick Cavett: Fireworks Way Better in the Good Ol' Days

Talk show legend Dick Cavett didn’t just like fireworks as a kid. “I loved them,” he writes in the New York Times. Not the pro displays, and definitely not “the despised ‘safe & sane’ fountains, sprinklers and snakes” that “girls and sissies liked.” No, he liked “the big stuff. The heavy ordnance." Think cherry bombs. And when he was a Nebraska kid in the '40s, you could buy as much as you pleased.

“LAY ON GROUND. LIGHT FUSE. RETIRE QUICKLY,” the directions read. “I pity anyone for whom those words were not a feature of youth.” Now the “do-gooders have legislated away everything but sparklers,” even though sparklers cause more injuries than every other kind of firework. “I long for the good old days,” he writes. “I find it hard to believe that the resonant date will pass and I won’t light a single fuse.” (More Dick Cavett stories.)