It was the Fourth of July of 1931 when I was 10 years old that I was permitted to stash my very own firecrackers in an oatmeal box. Prior to that they fell under my parents' control.

Fireworks were legally available in almost every neighborhood. There were some marketing controls, but just about everything that one could want for backyard celebrations was at hand.

The Fourth of July was intended to be a celebration of freedom, and freedom meant exactly what it meant to us in those times.

Not that there were no rules, but the best of them were made by parents not subject to the ensnaring tentacles of protective bureaucracies.

I was taught by my father that a firecracker was something to be respected for not only its loud noise, but for the power it held in its small cylinder — a force sufficient to do serious damage. They replicated the sound of battles in which brave men had given their lives for their country. That made little impact on us whose world was pretty much limited to the confines of our neighborhoods.

He had learned about personal damage the hard way when, much earlier in his own boyhood, a hand-launched sky rocket had nearly cost him an arm.

Firecrackers came in a variety of sizes from lady fingers — usually set to crackling in strips — to what we called cherry bombs, denied us as being too dangerous.

I was not much taken with lady fingers because there was nothing exciting about them. "B-r-r-r-r-r-r-p" the strip would crackle and it would be all over.

Two-inch "salutes" — an interesting name because they made a loud-enough bang to replicate rifle fire — were a luxury, but cherry bombs were the artillery best left in the hands of those old enough to respect their force.

My favorites were inch and a half firecrackers because they cost far less than the 2-inch salutes at a time when saving for a dollar's worth of firecrackers could take months of going without such delicacies as squirrel nut bars (two for a penny).

Part of our instructions included the force of explosions. An inch and half salute placed in a drilled hole in a small dried branch would blow it apart.

Much, much later, we would do the same to fell trees during the war, using dynamite to slow Nazi tanks as we once used firecrackers. So did the squirrel hunters during muzzle-loading times become the sharp-shooters of our Civil War and beyond.

Celebrations included a carnival preceding the Fourth, with the climax coming with fireworks displays and a magnificent bonfire, the assembly of which took days of stacking everything from wood of all kinds to old automobile tires towering skyward to be set ablaze as a grand finale to the day.

To describe what was once so commonplace is to invite rejection today. We have long since accepted a way of life in which regulatory authority, legal encumberments and the ever more costly armor of self-protecting insurance against this and that have become a way of life.

That is not to say that there will be no sounds of the past — a pop here and an illegal bang or two from someone's back yard, and official fireworks for those communities that can afford them.

Back when it was not illegal, my father would fire one shot from his old, double-eared shotgun into the night sky. It was done with all solemnity because freedom was and never will be a gift. Ours was dearly won, and always at risk — not only from without, but from within as well. It was his way of stating that.

The bang of fireworks is a reminder of the one threat. As for the other, there is only awareness of what we can lose by giving up too much of it on our way to all the tomorrows.

Bill Plante is former executive editor of Essex County Newspapers. His e-mail address is plantejr@comcast.net.