Black-and-white photos of Independence Days passed line the walls of the Alpha Fire Company.
Here’s Allen Street, circa 1938, filled by game booths. There’s a College Avenue parade color guard, circa 1941.
In those days, since 1927, the Fourth of July Carnival was run by Alpha Fire Company, and its members took great pride in their work.
Alpha Fire Company Chief Keith Yocum is one of those members, but his history goes back beyond his 27 years of duty to those of his father.
Tents were set up downtown, covering Allen Street (the original carnival venue), for people to gamble, play bingo, and partake in other games and activities.
Fireworks would be set up and launched from the retention pond on Westerly Parkway while people sat and watched from the parkway’s shopping-center parking lot.
Because of his age, Yocum wasn’t allowed to handle the fireworks; instead, he would run game booths and help his father set up and clean up the event.
One Fourth of July he remembers rolling the dice for a horse-racing game. He would move the gambling contestant’s horses accordingly and the winner would get a small percentage of the ticket sales. Oh, and tickets cost a quarter.
After 50 years, demands beyond the carnival grew for Alpha Fire Company, and the torch — well, sparkler — was passed to the State College Sunrise Kiwanis, who held a modest firework display at the current Beaver Stadium site. In 1991, Dan Barker and his family took over production.
The Barker family’s show, The Great American 4th of July, made itself memorable by using computers to choreograph its fireworks to music. Soon, the show was rated one of the best in the world and became too much for one family to orchestrate.
Central Pennsylvania July 4th, Inc., an independent, non-profit, community-based organization, was formed in 2001. Its sole purpose was to carry on the Fourth of July tradition in State College.
Both the Travel Channel and the International Fireworks website have rated the firework display during 4thFest one of the best in the world, and for good reason.
The display is set to last for 45 minutes, releasing about 4.5 shells per second, about 80 per second during the finale, totaling up to nearly 16,000 throughout the show.
4thFest has continued the Barker family tradition of choreographing the fireworks to music (heard on WBUS, 93.7 FM), which makes timing pretty important.
Tuesday night, a test-firing lasted about 50 minutes; the crew tested every type of shell to the manufacturer’s specification so timing for the show would be of the utmost accuracy.
But it’s not just the fireworks show that 4thFest Executive Director Bernie Keisling wants people to be excited about. Between 5:45 p.m. and 8:45 p.m. Sunday, depending on weather conditions, spectators will hear a titanium salute – a loud boom — signaling them to look toward the sky near Beaver Stadium. The world’s largest American flag under canopy will be accompanying a skydiver down to a field near the stadium.
Last year, a record number of about 80,000 people traveled to State College to attend the daylong event, propelling it out of the small-town-atmosphere category. Fireworks this year are scheduled to begin at 9:15 p.m.
As Yocum said, ‘It’s all part of the growth and change of the town.’
