Ancestry Magazine

I learned the bare outlines of the tragedy from a distant cousin. My great-uncle Solomon Laskin was fatally injured as a child while lighting firecrackers with his brothers on the Fourth of July. Cemetery records provided the date of death, and the death certificate confirmed that the nature of the injuries was consistent with the family story. The Ellis Island website provided family ship arrival records—and revealed how brief a time the boy’s father knew his son. But these facts failed to make the story come to life.

Solomon had not even been born when his father, Louis, left Tomashpol, a tiny Russian shtetl near Odessa, to come to the United States in October 1906. Solomon’s oldest brother Abraham, then nineteen years old, followed in June of the next year. It would take five years for Louis and Abraham to earn enough money to pay for the rest of the family to join them in the United States. The Nieuw Amsterdam, a Holland-America Line steamship from Rotterdam, arrived in New York harbor on 23 September 1912, and Louis finally met his five-year-old son who was born three months after he left Russia.

Solomon’s mother, Eva, his brothers, Samuel and Morris, and his sister, Rose, were also onboard the Nieuw Amsterdam. Another brother, Isidore, immigrated on his own, also in 1912. With the arrival of Eva and the children, the family had every reason to believe that their lives as an American family were only just beginning.

What was the Fourth of July in 1914 like in Brooklyn, New York? Research in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle—the famous newspaper Walt Whitman wrote for—helped to put the accident in context. The results of that research revealed a sad irony: the City of New York, apparently unaware of Solomon Laskin’s fatal accident, had publicly congratulated itself for a fatality-free “Firecrackerless Fourth.”

On Independence Day 1914, seven-year-old Solomon celebrated the holiday in typically American style—by exploding firecrackers near his home at 198 Ashford Street, in the East New York section of Brooklyn. The day was perfect for the festivities; the weather was fair, with moderate temperatures and variable winds. It was somewhat warmer than the previous day, when the thermometer never made it out of the unseasonably cool 60s.

As he had done many times previously, Solomon lit a large firecracker and covered it with a garbage can to enhance the force of the explosion. Moving away a safe distance, he waited. But the garbage can had filled with smoke from previous blasts and starved the firecracker of the oxygen it required. When nothing happened, Solomon removed the garbage can, exposing the firecracker to the air. The force of the blast caught him in the left foot.

New York City Fire Commissioner Robert Adamson was quoted in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of 3 July 1914, proclaiming 4 July 1914 to be a “Firecrackerless Fourth” and warning that anyone violating the city’s anti-fireworks ordinance would be liable to arrest and a $5 fine for each offense. Adamson took this issue very seriously. In his pamphlet Fire Is a Great Servant But A Terrible Master, he urged banning Fourth of July fireworks and bonfires entirely, noting that “more people have been killed in recent years on the Fourth of July celebration than were killed in the whole original revolution that it celebrates. Nearly 40,000 were killed or injured in Fourth of July fires in the ten years, 1904 to 1914.”

The city tried very hard to enforce the ordinance. The 5 July 1914 Eagle reported that a local storekeeper, Isidore Schwartz, was arrested on the 4th in the Brownsville section of the borough and charged with selling fireworks to a child as well as attempting to bribe Policeman Neary by offering him $2 to look the other way.

Also on July 5th, the Eagle proclaimed Brooklyn’s “firecrackerless Fourth” to have been a complete success and the quietest Independence Day in Brooklyn’s history. The newspaper noted that there had been no holiday-related casualties, and that only ten accidents occurred, “all of which were of a minor character.” Among the victims were two children who were hurt by exploding blank cartridges and one child who was burned by a firecracker. The article does not indicate whether Solomon Laskin was one of these children.

Solomon didn’t have the benefit of penicillin in 1914 and over the next three days, his wounds became infected and festered. He was admitted to King’s County Hospital on July 7th, suffering from acute osteomyletis of the left foot and septicemia. He died on July 12th. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle apparently did not follow up on the story and never noted that its proclamation of “complete success” was premature.

Louis was to live until March 1950; Eva died four years later. I can only wonder what they felt on each of the more than 35 Independence Days they were to experience after Solomon died. As they saw and heard the annual fireworks, their thoughts must have turned to the young boy they brought to America for a life of freedom, only to lose him on the anniversary of American independence.

Sheldon H. Laskin, an attorney living in Baltimore, Maryland, has been researching his family history for the past three years. He thanks his cousin Jack Laskin for telling him Solomon’s story.