Instead, the floral names belong to some of the 600 fireworks shells Winkie will light by hand as part of the Crescent Hill Old-Fashioned Fourth of July Festival. While larger displays rely on computers to synchronize ignitions, Winkie says his one-man show offers a blast from the past for the nearly 5,000 people who gather on the six acres surrounding the Peterson-Dumesnil House.
“To me, the old-fashioned way is hand-lit, one by one,” he says. “The way we do it, I light the shell, the crowd hears the ‘WOOMP,’ they look for it and then, ‘ooh’ . . . ‘ahh.’”
Running the show came out of necessity for the 52-year-old Winkie. After learning in early 2003 that Zambelli Fireworks Internationale — the large Pennsylvania-based firm that handles waterfront shows here, including Thunder Over Louisville — had no one available that year to man the Crescent Hill event, Winkie took matters into his own hands. “I told them I’d do it,” he recalls. “They offered July 3rd, but I said it had to be July 4th.”
And so began about six months of training, paperwork and night work. “There’s lots of stuff Zambelli does around town, and I went to several of those to learn,” he says. “You can’t learn this stuff in a class.” Winkie also sets off fireworks at Bats baseball games.
The old-fashioned way: Winkie prepares an intertwined-fuse salvo.
He has a routine for the Crescent Hill shoot. While there’s still plenty of sunlight left in the day, Winkie secures the fireworks in the parking lot of
Once he gets the go-ahead from festival organizers, he ignites his own flare and wows the crowd with a 40-shell opener, made possible by intertwined fuses. Then he sets off 200 single shots, a 40-shot “mid-finale,” 200 more singles and the 120-shell finale, which Winkie likens to “a Taliban prison riot.”
Removing the fire-proof tarp from the finale shells, waiting until the anticipation has grown, then igniting the fuse is Winkie’s favorite part of his work. After 25 minutes of cautious concentration, he’s able to look up and enjoy the show. “I don’t get to see any of the (earlier) shells, but I do get to see the finale,” he says. “It’s pretty cool because I get to see it from the bottom. Everyone else sees it from the field, but I’m underneath it. It’s pretty awesome.”
