Gary came up with this little chestnut of a reminder when he
was living with me at my home on Lake Mohawk sometime in the early 1990’s, and
I had heard him repeat it more times than I care to recall. Of course, since
Gary passed away six years ago, I hadn’t heard it lately. It was a bittersweet
memory that caused my smile. When one lives at Lake Mohawk, entertaining
friends on the Fourth of July is pretty much of a foregone conclusion,
especially since the end of my dock pointed directly at the spot on the dam
where they launched the fireworks show as darkness fell. Gary always wanted to
be sure that we would have a sufficient supply of liquid libations on hand for
the party, therefore, he developed his little memory aid. Not that I ever
recall that a shortage had plagued our festivities.
The reason you needed to get your booze before the Fourth
was that Wood’s Grocery store, our local State Liquor Store franchise, closed
on the Fourth of July. The owner probably could have done a pretty good
business if he stayed open, but I don’t think he really needed the money, and
he liked a good party himself. I’m not sure if any other State Store was open
on the 4th (Ohio has some archaic liquor laws), but it didn’t really
matter. We never left the lake on the holiday because there was always a line
of cars at the gate where all guests had to check in. Also, although we tried
to go water skiing almost every day in Ohio’s short summer season, we rarely
took the boat out on the 4th because the lake was packed with
rookies who didn’t know what they were doing when it came to boats. Of course,
exceptions were made.
One year some out of town guests pleaded with us to take
them skiing, not that they actually knew how to water ski. Gary and I usually
had good success teaching people to ski, and despite choppy conditions (think
of Lake Erie on a windy day) combined with far too many boats sharing the lake,
we got our rookie up and skiing. As we approached a particularly congested
point near the north end of the lake, I noticed that our skier was beginning to
falter. Please don’t fall here, I
thought, followed closely by our skiing student doing precisely what I didn’t
want to see. I cut the engine as soon as he (or maybe she, I don’t remember)
fell, so I could turn around and slowly putt back against the flow of traffic
to retrieve him. That’s when I noticed a pontoon boat with a pilot looking the
wrong way and headed directly toward our skier, who floated calmly in the water,
buoyed by a floatation vest, and blissfully unaware of his pending doom.
Oddly enough, the driver of this pontoon boat was our new
Lake Patrol officer, experiencing his first 4th of July on the lake,
and busy yelling at some idiot who was doing something idiotic and not paying
attention to the front of his own craft, which was about to become my skier’s
personal Cuisinart. I yelled for my passengers to hang on tight then pushed the
throttle down hard, aiming for the prow of the pontoon and blasting my boat’s
horn. I noted an instant look of surprise on the face of Lake Patrol officer as
he noticed a Ski Nautique bearing down on him in what would certainly result in
a collision. In fact, I was prepared to sacrifice both my boat and his if it
would prevent the imminent demise of my skier. My passengers were shouting and
pointing at the skier directly in his path, and he quickly made the connection
concerning why I was trying to run him over. His eyes opened wide in surprise,
then he throttled back on his engine and steered safely away, while I slowed
and circled back to pluck my fallen skier from the dangerous waters.
As we got the skier back into the boat, the Lake Patrol
pulled alongside, apologizing for his near fatal mistake, and explaining that
his attention was on the idiot he was yelling at, instead of paying attention
to where he was going. I let him down easy and told him we all have to watch
out for each other on days like this. For the rest of that summer, we got a
wave and smile from the Lake Patrol every time we passed on the lake. After
that experience, we decided to return the house and skip the rest of the skiing
lessons. We all needed a bit of the “fifth on the Fourth” to calm our frayed
nerves.
There are a few things wrong with Gary’s ditty about getting
a fifth for the Fourth by the third. For starters, liquor bottles all switched
to metric sizes by 1980, with the traditionally sized one-fifth of a U.S.
Gallon, which gave the “fifth” its common name, shrinking to 750 milliliters.
Also, we never bought a fifth of liquor for our holiday parties; instead we
purchased the larger 1.5 liter size to ensure a reasonable supply. Then there
was the year when the Fourth fell on a Monday. Gary was delighted to tell us
that this year we need to buy our fifth for the Fourth by the second, since
Wood’s didn’t have a Sunday license to sell it on the third.
Most of my memories of our July 4th parties are
much less dramatic than the water skiing near-calamity. Gary had a plastic Elvis
wig from Halloween that he put on with some funky sunglasses, then lip-synched
Elvis songs playing on the stereo for the benefit of Dave and Dez’s little
girls, using a borrowed hair brush as his microphone, as the girls squealed
with delight. There was the time that I bought a huge fireworks display with
dozen of tubes and a single fuse, which I set off at the end of my dock right
before the Lake’s display started. It created a massive ball of thick smoke
that drifted back toward shore, aiming directly for my new neighbors seated on
their lawn chairs with their friends and family, in anticipation of the show.
They had to temporarily relocate until the smoke dissipated. Also, for years
after that, they scheduled out-of-town vacations during the week of the Fourth.
Some folks just don’t how to have fun.
I told my mom that “In Gary’s favorite 4th of
July saying, ‘if you need a fifth for the Fourth, you’ve got to get it by the
third’” and she laughed, saying that she had never heard him say that. But her
laughter was underpinned by the heartbreak that comes from losing two of your
children before their time. She reached out to me (the last of her brood) for a
hug, which I gladly provided, and she said that it sounded exactly like
something Gary would have said. My brother had a playful, almost childlike quality
that he maintained throughout his life, and endeared him to practically everyone
who knew him. You might not want to discuss geopolitical policies with him,
but if the subject was Steelers football, or how to shoot the biggest rooster
tail while slalom skiing, or just what to do to make the day a little more fun,
then Gary was your go-to guy. I miss him every day, even if I did sometimes
want to shove a sock in his mouth when he said for the twentieth time that week:
“If you need a fifth the Fourth, you better get it by the third.”
Gary at Lake Mohawk
