‘Never Imagining That a Tank Driving Down a Neighborhood Street Would Instill More Fear Than Pride’
THE MIDDAY READ. FXBG Advance, Sunday, July 5, 2026
By Drew Gallagher, ADVANCE COLUMNIST
From the Bicentennial to This
First Person
I was six years old for America’s Bicentennial in 1976. I remember not caring much for my 4-year-old brother Tommy, and my 16-year-old sister Julie hating the both of us.
We had moved to a new house in the suburbs of Reading, PA a few months before, and it came with lot of amenities that we hadn’t had at our old place—mainly a basketball court in the backyard, and a creek that ran behind the backyard and split the block in half. Time would show that we got more use out of the creek than the basketball court, mostly because using the basketball court required my brother and me to clean up the dog poop in the yard which seemed like too much trouble at the time. Tommy became a better basketball player, but all that really meant was he cleaned up a lot more than me after our dog Sherlock.
Soon after we moved into the new house, my mother decided it was safe for me and Tommy to ride our knock-off Big Wheels around the entire block without supervision. The new mortgage was a whopping 18 percent, so we had to cut back on name-brand anything.
On one of our early trips around the block, we met a freckle-faced older kid who lived down the street. He had a real Big Wheel, and his name was Mike. The kid’s name was Mike. The Big Wheel didn’t have a name. Fifty years later, we are still friends.
My first taste of hard liquor was in Mike’s kitchen a few years later while his parents were away. There is a photo somewhere of me in a white Chincoteague hoodie grimacing in Mike’s kitchen after that first taste of brown liquor. The first time I ever smoked marijuana was with Mike on a different night. He drove home extra slowly so I could hang my smoke-infested varsity jacket out the window of his Trans-Am hoping that the smell would dissipate before I got home and got grounded—even though my sister somehow got away with coming home long after everyone had gone to bed, and long after her curfew, and park her car on the curb.
The first time I had notions of being a rock star was in a guest room at Mike’s house where we convened after elementary school and played guitar on his father’s golf clubs while listening to the Bay City Rollers. Mike was the lead singer. Tommy and I contented ourselves with belting out “S-S-S-Saturday Niiiiiight!”
On July 4 of that Bicentennial year, the local parade ended at nearby Carsonia Park in a red, white, and blue splash of food and carnival games next to the tot lot where we often played. The parade featured a real live tank that turned down Emerald Avenue, the street where we lived, on its way back to the armory. The tank weighed more than our family’s Ford Granada, and left impressions in the street’s macadam that remained there for the rest of our time in Pennside. When we made new friends in the neighborhood, we would show them the tank tracks as if we had discovered the bones of a T-Rex.
I’m sure we showed those tank tracks to Robbie and Craig who lived on Mayer Street which was two streets over, but foreign to us until we started elementary school and I met Craig on the bus. I am still friends with Craig and Robbie, and I’m sure they both remember the tank tread marks in Emerald Avenue.
Our neighborhood also included girls who generally ignored or abhorred us, which was understandable given the fools we made of ourselves whenever Christine went to Antietam pool and dived into the water near us. We tried to surpass one another in showing how little we cared about Christine in a bathing suit, but I for one often lay awake dreaming of those moments at the pool. Somehow, I am still friends with Christine.
As I reflect on the Bicentennial, 50 years later, I am struck most about the boy I was back then, and the impression that my parents’ enthusiasm for America made on me. I could not grasp its full import at that age, but I understood, because of the multiple displays of fireworks and the community bathed in flags and bunting, that 1976 was something special. Men marched with fifes and drums and bandaged heads. Spectators wept and cheered and applauded. My father wrote a musical that was performed locally to mark the historic occasion.
I don’t have that same impression on this 4th of July, and I am sad about it. I am older now than my parents were at the time of the Bicentennial, but it’s not age alone that brings me to this morass. I know the root cause is a man who doesn’t share the love my parents had for the dream of our nation. I take solace in the memories of that time so long ago—a time when we rode our fake Big Wheels until the plastic tires cracked, thinking about how cool it would be at the 250th anniversary when we were adults and could drink and light fireworks.
Never imagining that a tank driving down a neighborhood street today would instill more fear than pride.
