The men and women who take weeks to plan, hours to set up and only seconds to light large-scale fireworks shows call themselves “powder monkeys.”
One of these powder monkeys is Mitchell Weaver of Batesville. He has been around fireworks for as long as he can remember, and he is poised to take over Air Magic Fireworks Inc. when his parents, Rick and Nancy, retire.
Air Magic was started in 1991 by Rick and his boss from the chemical factory where he worked. The company began with fireworks stands and grew to include professional fireworks shows. Rick’s boss is no longer involved, and the business has stayed in the family.
Mitchell Weaver has been involved in the family business since he was a young boy. In the early days, it was all hands on deck in the summers, and this did not exclude him or his younger brother.
“Most kids on the Fourth of July were out boating on the lake or wakeboarding,” he said. “I was setting up 6-inch mortars in 110-degree heat. It’s a different way to grow up.”
It may have been a different childhood than what some of his friends experienced, but Weaver caught the fire bug early on and has never missed a season helping out with the family business.
“I’m not sure I would have been allowed to,” he said with a laugh.
Throughout his life, Weaver has been able to bring together many of his passions. Music and fireworks, for instance, naturally work symbiotically, and his love of both has helped him design shows for many seasons.
Several years before Weaver was old enough to enroll at Newark High School, the school’s band director — Billy Madison — worked with Weaver’s family to add music to fireworks shows. Then when Weaver got to high school, he was involved in the band until he graduated in 2000.
“I played drums, and I actually got to go to all-state my senior year,” he said.
Weaver’s father has always emphasized the entertainment aspect of the fireworks shows, and Weaver’s band experience gave him a perspective on how different elements could converge to make a show more than just pretty lights in the sky.
“In band, you learn about music — forte, mezzo-forte and things like that,” he said. “When you start a show, you know you have to get everyone’s attention. You start out real big, and of course, there’s always a big finale at the end. That’s what everybody wants. With fireworks, you just put shells to the music.”
When it comes to music with the fireworks, Weaver has two favorite genres: classical and rock.
“We do the ‘1812 Overture,’ and it’s a good one to shoot, too, because it’s so fast,” he said. “If you’re hand-lighting it, you have to be quick, or it will get you fast. We’ve also done a lot of newer rock music, like ‘Boom’ by P.O.D., and that’s a good one, too.”
Weaver also has favorite fireworks effects. While there are a lot of effects to choose from, he said, his favorite is called a salute.
“It’s raw,” he said. “It’s like a grenade going off, but it’s more like 10 or 20 grenades. You can shoot five things all at once, and you will hear the salute over every other one. Everybody likes the palms and the willows and the comets — I like those, too — but the salute is the one you can feel in the ground.”
It has been more than 20 years since his parents started Air Magic, and in that time, Weaver has seen a lot of changes in the way the company launches fireworks.
“Back in the day, we’d be down there with a 2,000-degree auto flare,” he said. “It wasn’t until about 2000 that we started incorporating electronics.”
Air Magic has used wired and wireless ignition methods, but Weaver said the favorite method for true powder monkeys is still lighting fireworks by hand.
“The hand-light — what we call the old-school style — is still the most fun,” he said. “You’re up close and personal. Even the guys we’ve had around for 20 years, they’ll still go back and want to do the section of the show you get to hand-light. It’s the biggest adrenaline rush. I do it every chance I get.”
Weaver has been through specific training for fireworks safety, and that knowledge will help him when he eventually takes leadership of the company.
“I have been to some training, and I have to be tested over it,” he said. Specifically, he is required to receive safety education annually, then has to take a licensing test every five years in accordance with Arkansas regulations. Then he has to file display permits and carry insurance to launch the shows. When he goes to other states to do shows, he has to follow an entirely different set of regulations.
Even when the paperwork is done, coordinating fireworks shows is more than just setting up some mortars and letting the fireworks go to the music. Weaver said it can take two weeks of preplanning to get a show worked out properly, and it can take anywhere between four hours and two days to actually set everything up on-site.
For the bigger fireworks holidays, planning can take months. In fact, it’s not even 2015 yet, and members of the Weaver family are already thinking about July Fourth. In just a couple of months, they will start to get serious about designing and supplying the shows for Independence Day.
“The preplanning for all the shells and all the mortars takes awhile,” he said. “Of course, we don’t have just one show on the Fourth of July. We’ve had up to nine shows in one day. Preplanning has to start quite a bit early.”
With countless shows under his belt, it might seem like it would be difficult for Weaver to pick a favorite. Still, one does stand out among the rest.
“It was actually at the Batesville Speedway,” he said. “We did it to the song ‘Boom,’ and I had 50 barrage units at the infield. Every time they said ‘Here comes the boom’ in the song, we’d set 10 of them off electronically. In the finale, there were 30 of them. I was standing in the middle of it, just looking around, and I thought to myself, ‘This is wicked.’”
Staff writer Angela Spencer can be reached at (501) 244-4307 or aspencer@arkansasonline.com.