Pow! Pow! Boom! Fireworks & the Boys Who Love Them

By Rachel Belle

Listen to Pow! Boom! Fireworks & The Boys Who Love Them

What is it about little boys that make them want to blow stuff up? I asked some of my coworkers if they were childhood explosion enthusiasts, starting with Josh Kerns.

“Absolutely. Anytime, any chance I could get to blow things up. It usually started with Army men. Like, you’d strap on firecrackers, and see if you could blow off their arms and their legs. Then you graduated up to G.I. Joes, and remember in those days G.I. Joe was big so you could get total dismemberment. Oh my God, it was great.”

Luke Burbank says the foundation of his childhood was based on blowing things up.

“We would scrounge up all this pocket change and do little odd jobs and get our four or five bucks. [Then we’d] go and buy fireworks and then blow all the fireworks up in the parking lot in front of the fireworks stand at like two in the afternoon. We were so excited about it that we couldn’t even wait until it was night time.”

These guys ended up working in radio, but some little boys with big explosion dreams eventually get paid to do just that. Gary Louderback has been the head pyrotechnician at Western Display Fireworks for the past 26 years and is proud to say he still has all ten fingers in tact. He has put together the big Iver’s show in Seattle for 23 years and now runs the Tacoma 4th of July fireworks display.

“My job is to set it up, blow it up, and tear it down,” says Louderback.

His job has little boys, and grown men, drooling with jealousy.

“I get quite a few that say ‘Gee, I wish I could do that!’ until they find out how much work it is to set it up and then tear it down afterward. It’s a long day. Usually you start at eight in the morning, you shoot at ten at night, and you’re not done until two or three the next morning,” Louderback explains.

It’s not just a once or twice a year gig; Louderback says he can do up to 40 shows a year. It’s actually his part-time weekend job. He works for a utility in Pierce County 40 hours a week, but he loves fireworks so much that he’ll work seven day weeks all summer long. He says he absolutely doesn’t mind the schedule.

“I like being right there while they’re going off, it’s what I enjoy the most. It’s extremely intense. There’s nothing that pumps the adrenaline, to me, like fireworks. It takes me like two and a half hours to come down after I shoot a show,” Louderback says.

I asked Luke what makes explosions and fireworks so exciting for him.

“You need me to explain why blowing stuff up is fun and rewarding? Well, it’s really loud, which is pretty awesome. It usually smells like a fart afterwards because there’s a lot of sulfuric activity. And you have a thing that used to look like one thing and now it looks like a different thing. I mean, do I have to draw you a picture?”

It seems, for most firework enthusiasts, that need to make things explode never goes away. But being a stupid, dumb, boring adult sometimes means that you just don’t get to do that stuff anymore.

“Every time I hear some commercial we’re running [on the radio station] and the guy goes: ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’ I wanna run right out to the reservation and go buy some [fireworks],” Josh says.

So why doesn’t he?

“I have a wife. She doesn’t like that.”