Sparklers, for example.  I remember a huge variety of sparklers–there were those little foot-long sparklers that you could get for fifty cents for a box of twelve, me and my brothers used to have a ball with those, tossing them up into the air like like they were shooting stars or something.  Then there were the giant, multi-color sparklers that would last for a several minutes each!  We’d parade around the back yard with those, making like the Statue of Liberty!

It was also legal to use smoke bombs–I used to be able to buy them at the Ben Franklin Five and Ten Cent Store downtown.  They’d come in a bag, assorted colors, little round balls with fuses on them.  The color on the outside of  the smoke bomb indicated the color smoke that would come out of it.  We’d have smoke bomb wars, tossing them at each other–big fun! 

And do you remember the “snakes?”  They were little grey discs, you’d light one end of it and it would start growing into a snake-like ash-thing.  Hard to describe if you never saw it.  Those were mildly entertaining, but of course, not as much fun as a smoke bomb or sparkler.

Ah yes!  “The good ol’ days,” a much less complex time, when people could have fun at their OWN RISK!  Now of course, the lawyers have made sure that NOBODY has THAT kind of fun on the Fourth of July anymore…