Andice fireworks show falls silent
Organizers of annual event cite age, lack of insurance, staffing.
Connie Kanetzky said ANDICE — she can still hear the crunching sound the wheels of a wagon made carrying countless gallons of homemade ice cream to sell under an oak tree.
That tree is in Andice, a small community northwest of Georgetown where people flocked for more than 40 years on July 4 to watch fireworks set off from a pasture, listen to live music and buy barbecue and homemade ice cream. Last year, the event drew about 2,000 people who filled roads, ditches and the local cemetery with their cars. The pasture will be silent Tuesday. The show was canceled this spring. Many of the organizers — including 69-year-old Kanetzky and 81-year-old Bonnie Graham — said they became too old to run it. The show also became too expensive because organizers decided for the first time they needed insurance to cover the event, which they couldn’t afford.
“It’s killing us not to have it,” Kanetzky said last week. “We are older and there are too few people to do too much work. That is the bane of existence for every small community.”
Andice has a population of about 25 people, said Kanetzky, who lives here.
The Andice Community Center board of directors, who formed a nonprofit group, sponsored the event about a year after it started in the 1970s. The fireworks were shot off in a pasture near the community center, a 1920s brick building on FM 970 that once was the area’s school.
Gary Davis, a 52-year-old center board member who ran the show for the past 10 years, said volunteers gathered donations and sold food at the event just to pay for the fireworks, which last year cost $4,000. He estimated the typical cost of the entire event is $6,000, not counting “several thousand” for the insurance.
As the crowds have grown at the show, Davis said organizers became worried because they didn’t have event insurance to cover the costs of injuries that might happen to spectators.
There also weren’t enough volunteers to help pick up the trash afterward, he said.
“It’s always tough getting the younger generations involved,” Davis said.
The board of directors voted in April not to hold the fireworks show this year. A cancellation notice posted in May got 15,000 views on the Andice Fireworks Show Facebook page, he said.
The event started as a celebration that Liberty Hill resident Tommy Schwertner threw for a few families in 1976, then became more popular as the decades passed.
“It’s hard to believe something that started small grew into a big deal later,” Schwertner said in a recent telephone interview.
Schwertner, who sells cattle in Liberty Hill, said the cancellation this year was “sad, but things change.”
Graham, who usually sold her homemade banana ice cream at the show, still remembers charging a dollar a scoop. She ended up running the event for “at least” 25 years, she said, with help from her husband and other volunteers.
“We had a family and our community was all close, and we all wanted to be together on the Fourth and have fireworks,” Graham said.
Teenage boys set off the fireworks in a ballfield in the early years of the event. Graham’s husband, Luther, stood by with a tractor that had a water tank in case there were any fires, Bonnie Graham said.
“Nobody ever got hurt,” said Luther Graham, who is now 91 and still plows his farm in Andice with his tractor. Every Fourth of July, eight to 10 volunteers, including the Grahams, usually started around 8 a.m. setting up tables and chairs for the event, and ended up working until about midnight, Bonnie Graham said.
As attendance grew, the organizers hired a professional company to set off the fireworks in a local landowner’s pasture. Other things also changed. The volunteers had to stop making homemade ice cream about four years ago because of state health regulations, Davis said.
Rebecca Tinsley of Florence, who asked on the show’s Facebook page who was going to step up and keep the event going, said she started coming to the fireworks show as a child.
“It was me and my sisters, and I remember running around sticky head to toe with homemade ice cream and having fun,” she said.
Tinsley, 37, said her family would arrive in the morning, park their flatbed trailer and then sit in lawn chairs on the trailer to watch the evening fireworks.
“It brought everybody together,” Tinsley said. “It was almost like a smalltown reunion, and I feel really sad about it not being there.
“It seems like my generation will miss it the most because we’ve been as kids, and we took our children.”
Davis said he remembers when other communities had to cancel their fireworks shows during the severe drought of 2011, but Andice still held its show. The Florence volunteer fire chief watered the field down three times, Davis said. There were a couple of misfires, but people standing around with watering cans quickly put out a few dinner-platesize fires, he said.
“You kind of forgot about the hard work when you had 1,500 people there and everybody was enjoying themselves,” he said. “It was so different than your typical city thing where you are half a mile away from the fireworks and nobody knows anybody.”