Name: Bob Kerns
Position: Director of Sales, Melrose Pyrotechnics
Years: 12
Bob Kerns doesn’t just sell the fireworks shows that Kingsbury, Ind.-based Melrose Pyrotechnics produces. He also designs and helps install them. Behind the Scenes met up with Kerns behind the scoreboard at Comiskey Park, where he and his crew were setting up a post-game fireworks show for the White Sox, to talk about the work that goes into making viewers say oooh and aaaaah.
Q. How did you get started working in this area?
A. I started in fireworks in about 1976. I was a police officer in the city of New Buffalo, Mich., and the police department shot the fireworks. I transferred to the Berrien County [Michigan] Sheriff’s Department. I was introduced to the president of Melrose Pyrotechnics as a customer. I started working for him part time in 1990. In 1993, I retired from the sheriff’s department and went full-time with Melrose.
Q. How do you install a fireworks show?
A. For most of your larger programs, any kind of show that is choreographed to go along with music, the show is designed in the studio. Every show that we have, when the operator gets there, they get a book. It shows all the firing locations. They take this book and set up everything to look like this [he opens a binder to show a grid map of numerically coded fireworks positions]. It shows the placement of each firing module, and each effect has what we call an address. When everything’s plugged in, you turn on the computer and it tells you if you’ve done it right. It’s fairly simple to set up on site. All the work is done back in the studio.
Q. How do you design the shows?
A. The first step is developing a soundtrack; Sometimes we do that in house. We have our own recording studio and we can mix the music. Sometimes the radio stations we work with mix the music. Once we have the soundtrack, the design part can start. Through a computer program, we listen to the music and we can mark on the music, and we create what we call event positions. We tell the computer we want an effect here, here, and here. All the products are tested, so we know the flight time. It takes X amount of time for a product to fly into the air and burst. It’s time-consuming. It’s very tedious. A big program like Taste of Chicago, you may spend 40 to 80 hours of studio time picking out your event positions.
Q. How many shows do you personally design and install?
A. I participate in the execution of about 35 to 40 shows a year that I get out to myself. I design over 100 shows a year.
Q. Tell me about the different types of fireworks you use.
A. Most fireworks look like a flower, they have flower names. There’s chrysanthemums, peonies. They even come up with names like grapes over the vineyard and bumper harvest. There are shells that break, they open up in the sky and all the little arms that come out of it, as they’re burning and opening up in the sky, they’ll separate and break into four pieces, and that’s known as a crossette. The kind that really hang a long time are called kamuros. A pattern shell, instead of looking like a color of a flower, it looks like a heart or a circle or a star, when the shell opens up, it looks like a shape. They’re many different variations on all these, too. There’s so many different types of fireworks. What makes a show is all the different things put together. The White Sox show inside is almost all European style. A European style is like a comet or mine. It allows a designer to cover the sky at all different levels, so you’re covering from ground level up to 1000 feet in the sky.
Q. Do you ever run out of fireworks during a Sox game?
A. We have [fireworks for] three home runs loaded at all times, so unless there’s more than three in one inning, we don’t have to reload. We reload when the Sox are not at bat.
Q. Why do you suppose people like fireworks so much?
A. I can only answer for myself. As a child I always loved fireworks. I guess that’s how I got involved through the police department.
Q. How many fireworks shows do you do a year?
A. We do about 1,200 shows a year. A very large percentage of the business in one week a year. During the Fourth of July week last we did over 800 shows. Fourth of July is the busiest, then Labor Day. New Year’s Eve is quite busy. Sporting events keep us busy in what we call our off-season. Then you have your town festivals. We do the Nascar circuit. We do a lot of baseball teams, basketball and hockey teams. We do all the openings for the Bulls, that’s indoor fireworks. There are fireworks and firework effects for just about any type of venue. We do shows for high school football teams, small homecoming shows, and we do huge events like Taste of Chicago.
Q. It sounds as if most of your shows take place in the summer. What do you do the rest of the year?
A. This coming November, December, we’ll start building the inventory for next Fourth of July. All winter is spent testing and evaluating new products and putting all the information in our databases with the flight times. As soon as our inventory is complete, we start designing, usually in February or March. It takes a lot of people doing a lot of hard work to pull it off.
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Melrose Pyrotechnics will provide the fireworks for many Chicagoland locations for the Fourth of July, including the City of Chicago (at 9:30 p.m. on July 3), Evanston, Northbrook, Skokie, Winnetka, Arlington Racecourse, Buffalo Grove, Carol Stream, Glenview, Itasca, Medinah Country Club, Batavia, Lisle, Naperville, St. Charles, Oak Lawn, Orland Park, South Holland and Tinley Park; and the weekly displays at Navy Pier (9:30 p.m. Wednesdays and 10:15 p.m. Saturdays) through Labor Day.
