Posted: Mon, 4 Jul 2011 11:52 AM - 14,653 Readers
By: Ben Wear
photography by Alberto Martínez
No red-glaring rockets. No John Philip Sousa. No booming cannons.
For the first time in a generation, and for one of the few times since at least World War II, fireworks will not light the night sky along the river downtown on the Fourth of July. And the drought that stamped out the annual pyrotechnics at Auditorium Shores (and in most Central Texas cities) likewise silenced the Austin Symphony Orchestra concert that typically precedes the bursting rockets.
Although various neighborhoods will honor this year's Independence Day with daytime parades, the holiday will go unobserved by Austin as a whole.
"I'm pretty disappointed about it," said Mike McNamera, 63 , vice commander of American Legion Post 76, who was involved with Fourth of July celebrations decades ago as an Austin Jaycee member.
His legion post normally hosts a fireworks-watching party at the lakefront near MoPac Boulevard (Loop 1).
"It feels like there was a lack of motivation on the part of some people, perhaps with the city," he said.
Fire officials in June banned all fireworks in Travis County, saying that the dry conditions and recurrently strong winds could make any fires caused by firework embers devastating.
The last time there was no Austin Fourth of July celebration of any kind on Lady Bird Lake was, oddly enough, in 1976 , the nation's bicentennial. But not for want of trying, and not because of insufficient rain.
The problem was too much of it. Steady showers all day long that July Fourth, a total of 1.67 inches in the city, turned the lakefront into a swamp and forced cancellation of 200th birthday festivities meticulously planned for two years. A parade, speeches, anthem singing and the fireworks, all gone.
"Rain snuffs Austin firecracker," the American-Statesman morosely noted in a front-page headline the next day, next to a picture of a deserted and forlorn bunting-festooned stage along the lake. The headline of an accompanying national article drove home what a downer it all was: "Elsewhere, the Fourth was great."
The late Beverly Sheffield , the City of Austin parks director and chairman of Austin's Bicentennial Committee, tried his best to find a silver lining among all the dark clouds.
"We have left a good track record for the tricentennial," he told the paper.
Rain postponed the 1988 fireworks celebration until the next day, but a Fourth of July concert put on by the Jaycees at Zilker Park managed to persevere for much of the day.
Over the decades, Austin's July Fourth festivities have moved back and forth along the river, from Lake Austin to Zilker Park to Auditorium Shores, and have included a bewildering array of pursuits: duck races, jousting matches, fiddling contests, cattle roping, long afternoons of political speeches and recitations of the Declaration of Independence.
Some noteworthy Independence Day celebrations in Austin, collected from newspaper accounts and Austin History Center documents:
1840 : Just six months into Austin's official existence, a parade culminated with speeches at the Bullock Hotel.
1845: Civic leader William Barton (namesake of the springs and the creek) hosted a celebration in his front yard, as he did in subsequent years.
1851: "80 ladies and 150 gentlemen" (a notable showing, given the 1850 official city population of 629 ) made their way to the springs on the Fourth. Surviving accounts don't mention fireworks (those would follow later that decade), but an honor guard did fire a cannon at noon before everyone tucked in for some barbecue.
1892 : Hyde Park drew 6,000 people (about 40 percent of the city's population) to a five-mile bicycle race. Later, at the lake, boat races, dancing on the steamer Ben Hur and fireworks rounded out the day.
1898: A re-enactment of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor months before.
In the mid-1930s, with the easing of the Depression, the American Legion began a decade-plus run of producing celebrations at Zilker Park, including fireworks at the springs. An estimated 50,000 turned out in 1937 , more than half the city's population.
The Jaycees took over around 1950 , hosting a variety of events during the day and then after sunset shooting fireworks out of buried mortar tubes on the south bank of Barton Springs Pool.
"I helped fire off some of those," said Moten Crockett , who's 88 now and directed the Longhorn Band in the early 1950s. "They were like bombs and would give off beautiful blues and reds."
During the politically charged summer of 1963 , a mock execution of a couple and a 9-year-old girl by "Soviet" storm troopers on Congress Avenue late in the morning on July 3 dramatized the potential for a communist takeover of Texas and was meant to pump ticket sales for an "Americanism Rally" the next night. Conservative radio commentator Paul Harvey was the featured speaker.
"Ticket sales were going slowly, at $1 a throw, until after the executions," an Austin Statesman article noted. "They perked up a good bit afterwards."
The Austin Symphony Orchestra concerts began in 1977 , and the symphony became the show's main producer about then. In the 34 years since, that tradition, with heavy sponsorship along the way from the H-E-B grocery store chain, has persevered through dry spells, poorly timed rain showers and competition from "freedom fests" at Zilker, the Beach Boys, various Willie Nelson picnics and a Farm Aid concert in the area.
Until this year. Taking into account the extreme drought and damaging Oak Hill wildfire in April , Austin and Travis County fire officials on June 9 decided to ban not only personal fireworks (possession and use of which have been illegal within the city limits since the 1960s), but also professional displays.
Symphony officials, after several days of scrambling for alternatives, decided June 15 to call off the concert as well.
Kyle and Georgetown still plan to host fireworks shows this evening, and there will be fuseless Fourth celebrations in Round Rock, Leander, Cedar Park, Taylor, San Marcos and Bastrop, among other places. In downtown Austin, though, crickets.
"It seems to me that there would have been someone who stepped up to the plate to handle the situation," said McNamera, a technical writer with the state. "They can strike up the band without lighting the fire."
