Fourth of July Celebrants--They Reassert Freedom to Do It Their Way

It wasn’t all bunting, baby.

In Southern California, Independence Day traditions long ago sprinted past such quaintness as town fathers stuffed sweatily into ye olde Founding Fathers costumes for a parade, or real fathers sweatily barbecuing choice cuts of lower life forms for noisy family backyard picnics.

It’s the beaches, not the band shells, that draw the biggest crowds here. For every Old Glory flying inland, there is at least one beach towel flapping on the sand. And it is more often fires than fireworks that light up the night skies.

We are not alone. The Fourth of July takes on a life of its own around the country, too, in celebrations that do not always have Ben Franklin on the guest list.

‘Huckleberry Capital’

In Jay, Okla., “The Huckleberry Capital of the World,” the honoree at Thursday’s gala was the wild huckleberry.

In Hannibal, Mo., where Mark Twain grew up, the Fourth of July was the day they picked the town’s new Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, schoolchildren good-will ambassadors.

On Mackinac Island, Mich., Joseph A. Gillis, a Detroit judge, presided as commissioner at the 16th or maybe the 100-something annual Stone-Skipping Open championship.

All 2,500 people in the Alaska fishing town of Cordova know that the Fourth is reserved for the Kelp Box Derby and the Rubber Chicken Run, but a good run of salmon is postponing the event until Saturday.

The birthdays do not go by unnoticed. Louis Armstrong’s birthday is a great event in New Orleans. The advice columnist twins, Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers, were born July 4. And way down upon Florida’s Suwannee River, they celebrated the birth of songwriter Stephen Foster, whose “Old Folks at Home” has celebrated them all these years.

This is berry season in Jay, where a three-day National Huckleberry Festival celebrates the “act of nature that the huckleberries grow wild here,” boasted Juanita Fiely of the Chamber of Commerce.

Queen Crowned

They crowned the Huckleberry Queen last week, and on Thursday she rode in the parade that preceded the free ice cream, Pride of the Hills huckleberry jam and the huckleberry pie judging and auction.

The Fourth of July means a lot in Cordova, a town cut off except by sea and air. “We have to keep our town busy because we’re sort of secluded,” admitted Mike Adams, coordinator at the corporation that sponsors the event.

In summer, there’s the Kelp Box Derby, akin to the Soap Box Derby. The wooden boxes the racers use are from Cordova’s chief harvest, the kelp that they ship to gourmets in the Orient. Both the derby and the Rubber Chicken Run, a 10-kilometer jog with a rubber chicken as top prize, had to be postponed until Saturday, Adams said. The salmon fishing was too good for the fleet to stop.

Folks have been skipping stones off the rocky beach on Mackinac Island since long before there was an American Independence Day, according to Bill Rabe, whose Lake Superior State College stone-skipping club sponsors the Mackinac event.

24 Skips Is World Record

Indians skipped stones at their powwows there, pioneer women used it as a ruse to get their menfolk out of the house, Rabe said, and since 1969 as many as 500 competitors have paid their tournament entry fee, now 50 cents, for six tries at the world record--24 skips.

As the contest got bigger, Judge Gillis had to be called in, like the commissioner of any sport, to rule on whether competitors can use the sand-and-glue artificial skipping stones (no) and on the “dilly-dally rule,” how long one can take between the prop wash of ferry boats to take one’s six throws (15 minutes).

In Noblesville, Ind., the living history museum celebrated the Fourth as the original town would have back in 1836. The children played hoop-and-stick games and had their heads examined by phrenologists, who in the last century predicted personality traits by the bumps on one’s head. The Declaration of Independence is read, said spokeswoman Debbie Bahler (“the whole thing, no excerpts”), and patriotic prairie songs are sung, to lyrics like “For in this western clime/Freedom shall rise sublime.”

Satchmo Sound-Alike Contest

The music was better in New Orleans, where a Satchmo sound-alike contest sought a second Louis Armstrong. There was birthday cake for all comers, and dancers stepped out in a second line contest, “a dance only New Orleans people can know,” a city official tried to explain. It’s danced by the mourners behind the coffin at a jazz funeral.

As it has for 25 years, the folklife program in White Springs, Fla., celebrated Stephen Foster’s birthday with music, particularly Foster’s own nostalgic tunes ringing from their bell tower. Foster never saw the Suwannee River and he took liberties with its spelling, but they love him.

“We named the park in honor of the man who made it known around the world. There’s not a country you can go to where they don’t sing ‘Swanee River,’ ” arts administrator Barbara Beauchamp said.

Mark Twain dreamed him up, but they call it National Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal. Tourism director Kris Lokemoen said the Fourth is the day the new Becky and Tom are selected from Hannibal’s eighth-graders. Chosen for charm, costumes and knowledge of Twain’s prose, last year’s Becky inaugurates the new Tom with a kiss and a fishing pole and last year’s Tom hands the new Becky a schoolroom slate.

‘Still Get Excited’

“Even in the days of Madonna and Cyndi Lauper,” Lokemoen said, “they still get excited about Tom and Becky.”

If America had a lot to remember on Thursday, England had a lot to forget.

On Thursday, more than two centuries after Britain’s colonies thumbed their noses at her, the Americans rubbed new salt in old wounds, winning the first heats in the Henley Royal Regatta before a crowd of English patricians.

And in Norfolk, Va., pub owner Reggie Mitchell, descendant of Lord Cornwallis, who surrendered his forces at Yorktown to George Washington in 1781, held a Grand Losers Party. “We’ve sort of returned,” Mitchell said, “to the scene of the crime.”