The Awakening

You remember the Dynamite Reveille, don’t you? Those heart-jarring, house-shaking blasts of dynamite that used to shock us all awake about 6 a.m. on the Fourth of July? It was like thunder, only louder. So loud that people swore they heard it at their homes in Oakley and Midway.

Of course you remember it. Local Bob Peek remembers fearing that his house, up on Empire Avenue, jacked up for renovations, would shake loose and go sliding down the mountain-side. You remember the lull in the blasting, thinking, ‘Thank God, it’s over; I can go back to sleep’—then KA-POW! It wasn’t really over. You remember that this was just the way we welcomed the Fourth of July and Labor Day in Park City.

At least we used to.

\In recent years, our holiday mornings have been silent. I wanted to find out what happened to the Dynamite Reveille, and that’s when I realized I had stumbled upon a mystery.

No one knew who was in charge of the Dynamite Reveille. It wasn’t the City; it wasn’t the Chamber. It might have been the miners or maybe ski patrol at Park City, but no one really seemed to know for sure.

Rich Martinez and Mel Fletcher have both lived in Park City many long years, and reported that the dynamite morning ritual had been going on all their lives. Both of them knew of people who set the blasts back in the ’50s, and ’60s and ’70s. Both of them participated on some mornings, but couldn’t really remember exactly when, or tell me who actually organized the fun.

It seems that anyone who’s been in Park City for more than 20 years knows of someone involved with the tradition, most colorfully Wayne “Putt-Putt” Putman, who I’m told, liked to get liquored up and toss the lit sticks of dynamite from the back of his pick-up truck.

But when was this, exactly? Who paid for it? When did this crazy tradition start, and when and why did it finally come to an end?

You wouldn’t think that something so loud and really, kind of unique (they didn’t do this in the California suburb where I grew up), would be so hard to trace. Sadly, just as the thunder of the blasts eventually echoed away over the mountains, so the facts about our Dynamite Reveille seemed to have vanished as well.

The Park City Historical Society didn’t have any records; neither did the Mine Company. Eventually, I searched the archives of The Park Record.

The Dynamite Reveille had its genesis, as best as I can tell, in 1911. The Fourth of July program listed in the paper that year didn’t specifically mention dynamite, but the plan was clearly to get up real early and make a lot of noise: “At sunrise blow the whistles and ring the bells and fire your guns.” Guns!

The Park Record of July 6, 1912 reported on the festivities from the previous Fourth: “Noise and Enthusiasm. Long before midnight Wednesday the celebration commenced. The loud and quivering explosions of giant powder and the discharge of numerous firearms announced the approach of the nation’s birthday, and during the night until after sunrise on the Fourth, these ‘reminders’ kept sleep from those less demonstrative but equally patriotic.” (This writer was either a really good sport, or was out there making noise with the rest of them.)

Later that summer they ushered in a huge Labor Day celebration by setting off at dawn “some 40 sticks of giant powder.” Parkites in 1912 evidently appreciated the noise.
In 1914 and 1915 they called it, appropriately, “The Awakening.” By the early 1920s it was the “Sunrise Salute,” but I can’t be sure that it happened with any regularity. There was no report of any celebration at all in 1925, but in 1926 a writer complained that although, “the Fourth of July was ushered in … with the firing of giant powder and the discharging of firearms, the old time noise and enthusiasm was lacking … due to the scarcity of firecrackers.”

By 1948, the tradition of waking up town with some 21 ear-splitting, house-rattling blasts seemed well established on both the Fourth of July and Labor Day. And so on it went, through the century, creating a legend as quiet as the blasts were loud and as elusive as a sound wave.

Brian Strait, formerly of the Park City Ski Patrol and now the head of the Las Vegas Ski and Snowboard Resort, was probably our last blaster. He took over the tradition sometime in the early ’80s, after Putt-Putt’s death.

For 15 or maybe 18 years, Brian would get up at 4 a.m. so that he could be up on Ski Team Ridge by six. “You know,” he told me, “it was dead quiet.” Then he chuckled. “The echo would thunder across the valley for 30 or 40 seconds.” I remember.

I asked him about the pauses in between the blasts, how we would be sure they’d done their 21 and could go back to sleep, and then KA-BOOM!

“There definitely was a time or two when we had to have a cup of coffee in between,” he said, innocently. “Part of the reason we’d pause was so we could hear what we’d triggered—the dogs barking and the car alarms. We always took that as a good sign that people wanted more.”

Brian couldn’t remember exactly when he started blasting or when he finally stopped. He wasn’t sure which year the drought stopped him, but he did remember “one Fourth of July we were throwing dynamite in the rain.”

Almost everyone I talked to thought that it was drought (and subsequent fear of forest fire) that brought the Reveille to an end, but Bill Gray, the current director of ski patrol at Park City Mountain Resort had the truth about what stopped our beloved Reveille: the events of September 11, 2001. Since that day, citizens of this country really don’t appreciate any unanticipated blasting sounds. And, The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms controls dynamite permits and the resort is only allowed to use its explosives for avalanche control anymore, not sunrise salutes.

Part of me is relieved. I remember fuming one year, jarred awake by the first thunderous blast. This was America; we weren’t supposed to be the ones lying in bed trembling because of bomb blasts. But now I think that’s part of the point—maybe part of what those Parkites back in 1911 or 1926 understood.

Those dynamite blasts really were an awakening. That morning thunder saluted what is best in us: our wild-West sense of fun as well as our willingness to stand up for our beliefs and participate in the American way.

Maybe some traditions should die. What would a tourist think of that earth-shattering roar on a summer morn-ing? Frankly, I’m glad the “discharging of firearms” part of “The Awakening” was long gone by the time I moved to town. But then again, a Reveille that reminds us of why we celebrate the Fourth of July and Labor Day seems more important than ever these days.

Like “The Awakening,” self-government can be inconvenient, noisy, even frightening. It’s all too easy to let it go, blaming the vagaries of weather and distant political events. We have other things to do besides going to the polls on Election Day, and a holiday becomes more about sleeping-in than honoring our heroes and our heritage. But if we forget our history, those obvious and important traditions might slip from our lives the way Park City’s Dynamite Reveille did, leaving us with only an old memory in our bones of something unbelievably powerful that happened on a special morning in July.