Old-Fashioned 4th : Brea Enjoys a Traditional Holiday in the Small-Town Style

It was the morning of the Fourth of July, the 60th that Georgene Contreras has seen in Brea, and her preparations were complete.

As usual, the huge American flag covered the picture window of the house she had helped build 40 years ago on South Randolph Avenue.

The lawn chair was in place, from which she would watch the fireworks that night as they were shot aloft from the high school football stadium a few blocks away.

She sat in the lawn chair, a bottle of beer--Dos Equis--in her hand. “Mexican beer on the Fourth of July,” she observed, wryly. Things do change.

Both Contreras and Brea have been around long enough to see a lot of change. She was born in Brea, “and until I was 6, I lived on the corner over there,” she said. “I raised my five children here. My grandchildren are going to the school I went to.”

Back when she was school age, a Fourth of July in Brea was strictly a family affair, she recalled.

“My dad owned 10 acres right behind here. He would buy those big rockets, and he’d shoot them off into the field. That was his special privilege. You could have any kind of fireworks then.

“We’d go to the park, and there’d be a softball game, horseshoes, fried chicken. It’d be just our family, relatives and friends.” That was plenty to field two softball teams, she said. “I had lots of uncles and aunts and cousins.”

‘As Big to Us as Christmas Was’

“It was just always a special day--as big to us as Christmas was.”

Now, she said, “a lot of people go away on the Fourth.” Her son and his family, who live with her, have gone to the desert for the long weekend.

And now, she said, fireworks are banned in Brea. “I think now it’s just the evening display that’s allowed. I can see them from right here.”

Which was just as well, for there were no seats left for the fireworks show at Brea High School. For the first time, the show had sold out entirely in advance. Perhaps, speculated one man who helped prepare the stadium, that was because this is the first year home fireworks have been banned in the city.

For $4--or for $6 if you wanted a folding chair on the track--you would hear the music of a 20-piece swing band, see Scottish, Mexican and American folk dancing, hear some patriotic singing, hear the mayor speak, watch 600 balloons rise into the sky, and see the 25-minute fireworks display, all under the sponsorship of the Brea Community Services Department and the Brea Firefighters Assn.

The theme of this, the 13th, show was “The Year of Liberty,” meaning, of course, the Statue of Liberty. To no one’s surprise, one of the fireworks displays was going to be a simulation of the statue. “It’s the most popular set piece this year,” said Dick Bargerding, one of the workers from Fireworks Spectacular, the Rialto fireworks firm.

A set piece is a picture drawn with bent cane on a wooden frame and studded with devices like miniature road flares. When the flares are set off, the picture emerges in dots of intense, colored light.

For two days, Bargerding’s crew had been setting up the display. Farther from the stands, others of his crew were almost finished loading the aerial fireworks into their mortars--tubes sunk into troughs of sand. One stood alone, a much larger tube based in an oil drum filled with sand. Inside was what the crew wanted most to show you, a 12-inch-diameter “aerial shell,” which, when ignited, would rise 1,200 feet into the sky before making your ribs vibrate.

‘A Big Event’

“It is a big event,” said Ted Owens of the Community Services Department.

It was noon, however, more than eight hours before the big event, and the populace was warming up with a collection of much smaller events at the Old City Hall Park downtown--the yearly July 4th Brea Country Fair.

Things had been happening there since 7 a.m., when the Kiwanis pancake breakfast began. Then came the Ministerial Assn. service, the flag ceremony conducted by the Brea Historical Society, Girl Scout Cadette Troop 272 and Boy Scout Troop 1001, the preparations for the Little American Beauty Baby Contest and the Kiddie Parade. The municipal plunge opened for free swimming, the Brea Senior Center Ding-A-Lings Kitchen Band played and the ice-cream eating contest started.

By noon, even the clowns were tired, and all five of them retired across the street to the Taco Bell. “Clowns aren’t human. You’re not supposed to see them eat,” explained Hopi. “Say we’re on a break,” suggested Coo Koo.

Georgene Contreras might have been cheered by the old-fashioned, small-town atmosphere in the park.

Brownies for a Quarter

The pizza, iced tea and dill pickle booth was being run by Job’s Daughters, Bethel 176. Brea High School’s Class of ’89 was running the coin toss booth. At the Brea Woman’s Club booth, you could buy a chocolate chip cookie for 15 cents, a brownie for a quarter.

Someone’s restored 1928 Wurlitzer Military Band Organ was playing marches you associate with carrousels. Someone had tied a calf to a tree for the kids to pet.

Scattered here and there were Cub Scout uniforms. Young men sat on bales of hay, drinking sodas and watching the girls. In the gazebo, men in straw cowboy hats and women in red ruffled blouses danced to country music.

Down in the glen, the cute baby contest was drawing to a close. The last contestants in the up-to-6-month-old category were being propped up on the folding tables for judging. “He spit up on my shoulder,” said anxious mother Robyn Naylor. “I don’t care as long as he doesn’t spit up on the judges.”

That prospect is not what makes judging so difficult, said Mayor John Sutton, who had been conscripted as a judge. The problem is that out of 140 parents (i.e., voters), only four can win. “It’s probably the worst possible job you can be assigned to,” Sutton said with a grin.

The Winners

(The potential Sutton supporters this year were Barry and Lynn Shapiro, whose 7-week-old Jacqueline won her division, and Horace and Barbara Vega, whose 10-month-old Erin won hers.)

In the hottest part of the afternoon, the weather remained unusually temperate for a Brea Fourth of July. A cooling breeze persisted.

Yet George Thornton continued to sweat it out. It didn’t look like his hamburger patties were going to last.

“I don’t know where my help’s gone,” he said, looking away from the gas grill behind the Brea Rotary Club booth. “We’re running out of hamburgers. Things get busier every year.”