To the editor:

This year’s Lawrence Jaycees Fourth of July fireworks show might have been the best yet. Its inventiveness included the debut of new and dazzling mortar rounds. I appreciate the technical, dangerous work that Jaycees volunteers do, and I look forward to next year’s show.

Two suggestions I respectfully ask the Jaycees and city officials to consider:

l No music once the shooting starts. In Burcham Park, after the national anthem is, played turn off the PA system. Likewise, while the shoot is under way and before its thrilling finale, discontinue the irritating distraction of having an announcer excitedly describe – at 100 decibels over the PA – what we’re about to see. Don’t ruin the surprise.

l No “rogue” skyrocket launches. Early Tuesday evening, one Jaycees volunteer left the mortar tube array, walked to the water’s edge and fired two “aerial sky bombs” west across the river at near-flat trajectory. Both shells landed 20 feet east and barely 20 yards south of Burcham Park’s gathering crowd, detonating on the river surface with the fearsome violence of hand grenades. Minutes later he fired a third bomb southwest down river, again aiming low; that round exploded on the surface very near where I’d just paddled through in my canoe.

I sincerely hope this reckless endangerment never happens again. I get hit, I’m one guy. But ten degrees right, five degrees up and those first two bombs would have exploded amid a crowd of kids and filled LMH emergency room with casualties.

Joe Hyde,

Lawrence