Alton H. Blackington was a photojournalist who loved New England and who was also a passionate pursuer of human interest stories. He liked the weird, the silly, the heartwarming stories people told about their heritage. (Old-fashioned parts of New England have an almost unlimited number of such anecdotes, full of ghosts and clever tricksters and silly greenhorns and extravagant exaggerations drolly passed off as undeniable fact.) And he had a knack for re-telling them. Yankee Yarns, running from 1943 to 1951, was the distillation of all these traits.
"The Fourth of July", from 1951, tells a tale of some boys from Fairhaven, Massachusetts, who decide, after the town passes a law prohibiting noise on the night of Fourth of July, that they will make a big to-do anyway. They end up causing a bit more bedlam than even they were expecting to cause....
