HOUSTON — This was probably the worst week for Griz Smith to break his leg.

It was a week before the Fourth of July and Smith is in a walking cast. He said he hit some trash or debris while riding his motorcycle through the tunnel to Whittier and had to lay the bike down.

“I saved the bike. There ain’t a scratch on it,” Smith said.

ROBERTDeBERRY/Frontiersman Fire Art by Griz owner Griz Smith and close friend and assistant Elizabeth Burgess agree that fireworks shows are all about putting smiles on the faces of children.

Anybody else would have been happy to have the three-day holiday weekend to recuperate. But Smith is owner and operator of Fire Art by Griz. He’s sending fireworks to Fourth of July shows from Anchorage to Fairbanks, Nome to Sitka and many points in between. He orchestrates shows all year. Just about any major display one can name in Alaska likely had Smith’s stamp on it, except for Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous, a show he tried for years to get without success.

Smith likes to think of himself as the Santa Claus of explosives.

“There’s a lot of work to be done this time of year,” he said. “And this is not the time to go and break your [darn] leg.”

But he’s not letting it slow him down. On Thursday, he left for Seward, stopping to pick up a trailer in Eagle River.

Houston is Smith’s center of operations. He manufactures special shells and inventories the product he gets from China in an undisclosed location seven miles from his cabin. Possession of fireworks on the order of Smith’s by anyone other than a licensed pyrotechnician is illegal. The smallest firework Smith has is a 2.5-inch shell. The largest a fireworks stand can legally sell is less than an inch.

In his trailers, Smith has shells that range from the size of a lemon to the size of a pumpkin. His biggest is 16 inches in diameter — about the size of a 6-year-old child.

“We don’t shoot off a lot of them,” he said.

The last time Smith had a chance to fire off one of those giants was for Anchorage’s millennium celebration. The firing tube was tied to a signpost by the Ship Creek boat launch and the explosion left a divot 1.5 inches deep in the pavement.

Though he can make shells himself, Smith says the bulk of the fireworks he shoots come from China. It’s just more cost effective, but for a special show he’ll make custom shells. In one effort that took his team years to pull off was making a firework that exploded in the shape of a wooly mammoth.

“You don’t just manufacture a shell in an hour and have it go off in the shape you want,” Smith said.

That process involves a lot of testing, but somehow he managed to find the spot in Houston with the most tolerant neighbors possible, neighbors who have been known, Smith said, to call saying, “Griz, we have some people showing up Saturday. Can you test some fireworks about 9 o’clock?”

These days, Smith said he’s in the process of selling the company to Matt Brown, a man he’s worked with for years. Over a span of about eight years, Brown will buy Smith out. When it’s all done, Smith will have spent more than 30 years of his life lighting fireworks.

A knack for explosives

Smith said he’s been working with explosives all his life. His father and uncle were in the building demolition business, planning and executing implosions, rather than explosions.

Where other kids had bicycles to ride, Smith was jackhammering concrete off a steel beam, running wire and doing everything but handling the explosives. That is, until he got older.

He came to Alaska shortly after the 1964 earthquake looking for opportunity. He worked here and there and then, 25 years ago, he was asked to help out on a fireworks show in Ninilchik.

The man in charge never showed up, Smith said, so he did it alone, not really knowing what he was doing.

“After the display they said it was the best show they’d ever seen and asked if I’d do the one next year,” Smith said.

Like one of his brilliant shells, that invitation launched his career, a career he describes as the “American dream job. I can understand what it’s like to be a rock group.”

The joy he gives people with his performances is what Smith said is the best part of the job.

In 25 years, Smith can recall only one accident and he was the only one hurt. During a Fourth of July show in Anchorage firing from a barge, a shell went off under him. The concussion traveled under his shirt and his concussion suit.

“It blew me up in the air, I don’t know how far,” he said, adding he landed on the deck.

Smith said he personally lights fuses for 20 shows a year. In that time, he’s had a number of shells go off close to his head. What would ring someone else’s bell doesn’t ring his. But that concussion going up his shirt left him disoriented. He counted his crewmen three times, each time coming up one man short until he realized he wasn’t counting himself.

“A barge show is the worst show we could ever shoot, from in my opinion,” Smith said, and not just because he had a close call on a barge. The situation requires him to make a choice — wearing fire gear or a life vest. It’s not a choice he likes to make.

And in 25 years he’s had a few setbacks, the largest being the Miller’s Reach fire in 1996, which burned through 37,000 acres in Big Lake and went down in history as the most destructive wildfire Alaska has ever seen. Two of Smith’s trailers burned in that fire, along with about $333,000 in inventory.

“I will never recover from that,” he said.  

At the time, Smith was elsewhere helping fight a fire at another building in the area. His neighbors saw it, though.

“They said it was one of the best fireworks displays they’d ever seen, but it only lasted a couple of minutes,” he said.

    

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiers-man.com or 352-2270.