ROBERT GARDNER -- The Verdict

Most of us who are enjoying (spell that enduring) various stages of

senility love to bore our audiences with stories of the Good Old Days,

which often, upon closer inspection, weren’t quite that great.

With the Fourth of July just around the corner, I have been remembering

the Fourth of July celebrations of the Good Old Days.

In Balboa, we spent the night of the Fourth trying to burn Balboa Island

to the ground by shooting skyrockets across the bay while the Balboa

Islanders did the same to us. The sight of those skyrockets passing each

other over the middle of the bay was inspiring. Meanwhile, homeowners

spent the night crouched on their roofs with garden hoses firmly in hand.

There was no limit on the explosive power of firecrackers. Some had just

a tad less punch than the bombs dropped during Desert Storm, and it

sounded much like a battlefield. And then some genius discovered that by

putting a firecracker in a tin, you could increase the “boom” factor

considerably.

The trick was to get the firecracker into the can, light it and put the

lid on without being maimed by a premature explosion. But the resulting

boom was worth the risk. Who needs all 10 fingers anyway?

All of which brings me to Balboa’s biggest boom, and Louie Dixon.

When I was a young man, a helluva long time ago, Louis Dixon was the

toughest man in town. Just what he did to earn that title I do not know.

He worked at Rodgers Boat Works, located just west of the Pavilion, and

was always polite, quiet, soft-spoken and went out of his way to be nice

to us kids.

Of course, whether he was really the toughest man in town was kind of

academic because he was an authentic, honest-to-God hero.

Louie was the skipper of the Hurricane Second, the fastest speedboat in

the world. It went almost 60 mph!

We would all crowd onto the end of the Balboa Pier and watch as Louie

crouched down in the cockpit and bounced across the waves on some

record-setting run. Of course, the craft had 16 exhaust pipes spewing

carbon monoxide back into Louie’s face, and how he lived through that I

do not know.

But Louie cemented himself into the top position in my own pantheon of

heroes when he blew up the iron pipe one Fourth of July.

Facing the alley running between Bill Ireland’s Bar and Al Rothgary’s

gambling joint was a small structure -- which from the four-inch pipe

running up its side I assume was a toilet.

On this particular Fourth of July, Louie acquired some dynamite and

conceived the idea of dropping the dynamite down the pipe, putting a lid

on the pipe and thus making the biggest boom the town had ever heard.

So Louie climbed up on the shack, fixed a detonator onto the dynamite,

lit the fuse, dropped the dynamite down the pipe, slapped an iron plate

on the top of the pipe, jumped off the shack and ran up the alley toward

Main Street.

He didn’t make it.

He only got about 20 feet from the shack when the dynamite went off.

However, instead of blowing that iron lid to Jupiter or Mars, the pipe

exploded and blew many, many pieces of iron into Louie’s back.

Dr. Gordon Grundy spent the next few hours picking all these pieces of

iron pipe out of Louie’s back. Of course, it was all worth it because

even though it didn’t go exactly as planned, it was one humongous

explosion.

And Louie had assumed the position as the toughest man in town because,

of course, he had endured Dr. Grundy’s ministrations without a whimper --

although he did move rather gingerly for a few days.

Our carefree Fourth of July days came to an end when some idiot threw a

lighted firecracker through a window of the Rendezvous into a crowd of

dancers and blew out the eye of a young girl.

All of a sudden, the traditional way of celebrating the Fourth of July in

Balboa wasn’t funny anymore.

Shortly thereafter, the city banned fireworks and the Good Old Days were

no more. No loss.

* ROBERT GARDNER is a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge. His

column appears Tuesdays.