This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours, send them to Our American Stories.com. They're some of our favorites.

And today we bring you a story from Joel Wegener, from Loveland, Ohio, just outside of Cincinnati.

Joel and his wife have 10 children.

And working in education, Joel has always had to find ways in the summer to make some extra

cash.

My dad was a teacher and I always remember

wild and crazy summer jobs often too. Here's Joel to tell us about one of the most

explosive businesses he was ever in.

So we ran the fireworks business for about 15 years.

It was a tent business and it was a long Highway 61 between St. Louis and

Hanable, a busy highway there. And it was a relatively small tent and we leased the the area and then we

brought in a tent every year and put fireworks in it the people that that frequent a

fireworks stand are just a little bit different and not in a bad way in fact

there was one part of me that just kind of related really well with them and so it was always a

fun time just to go and hang out with pyromaniacs. And my daughter,

my oldest daughter actually named our business Pyromaniac Paradise. And so that's what we

called the business. But yeah, we met some very interesting people. Unfortunately, many of the people that buy fireworks and many of the events around the 4th of July also involve alcohol.

And that is never a good combination of fireworks and alcohol, but that was often the case.

And I remember one evening, we were getting close to the end of the day and a guy rolled

up in his pickup truck and had obviously been drinking.

And in the back of his truck, he told us that there was a fireworks that didn't work.

And he was very upset that the fireworks was not working.

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