He Fills Wildwood’s Air with Fireworks

WILDWOOD – Jack Serpico, the third-generation owner of Serpico Pyrotechnics, imagines in the Wildwood sky a canvas 700 feet high and 400 feet wide.
Instead of shooting every firework straight above, he fills the left, right and center of the imagined canvas with his favorite pattern shells – Saturn ringed-balls, crescents and lilies – and sends “horse tails” and orbs higher for a layered effect.
“The idea is to keep the sky full, keep the viewers focused on what you’re doing and not have too much dead sky,” Serpico said. If more than two seconds of dead sky passes, he’ll shoot a firework to fill the gap.
“Everything is placed strategically,” he said.
Serpico has been setting off Wildwood’s Friday Night Fireworks for 20 summers, a milestone not reached anywhere else on the East Coast.
“I know for a fact that no other town on the East Coast has done (a weekly fireworks show) consistently for as long as we’ve done it,” said Patrick Rosenello, managing director of Special Improvement District (SID), the non-profit association of business owners that established the show in 1997.
The fireworks were a way to start the weekend a day early and bring extra business to town, Rosenello said. Before 1997, fireworks happened sporadically throughout the summer.
At 10 p.m. on Fridays between mid-June and Labor Day, tens of thousands of bustling people along the boardwalk stop to witness the sky fill up with eight minutes of kaleidoscopic explosions in synch with a soundtrack consisting of “The Star Spangled Banner,” the “Star Wars” theme, and “Wildwood Days.”
“The entire boardwalk, for the most part, comes to a stop, people are on the beach, they’re on the piers…on the balconies of hotels…standing outside restaurants…on sightseeing boats,” Rosenello said. “It really has become an absolute icon of the island.”
More than 500 fireworks make up an eight-minute show, 300-400 of which are for the finale, Serpico said. The cost of the fireworks alone is about $8,500, not including the cost of staff, permitting and the sound system, according to Rosenello.
Funding comes from the Greater Wildwoods Tourism Improvement and Development Authority.
“Wildwood is the perfect place to shoot fireworks,” Serpico said. “They have so much space, the safety factor is so high, and I can just shoot almost anything there that I have in my inventory, and it’ll look good.”
Summer’s Worth of Planning
No two Wildwood firework displays are exactly the same, Serpico said.
“We don’t want it to get boring,” he said.
If he fires a new smiley face or heart-shaped pattern shell, he won’t use it again the following week to prevent it from becoming routine.
In winter, Serpico sits on the empty boardwalk and gazes at the ocean as he brainstorms about the approaching summer.
He then uses a computer program that allows him to visualize potential show arrangements.
“I’ve kind of adopted Wildwood as the show that I really, really stay focused on because they’ve been with us so long,” he said.
Serpico uses the first show of the season to try out new ideas. If he doesn’t like how it looks, he makes subtle switches the following week.
“We won’t fix it if it’s not broke,” he said.
Each unique show is planned in advance, but Serpico often sends new releases – or forgotten classics – on the truck from the warehouse in Vineland to be thrown in from time to time, especially towards the end of the summer when he’s already planning the following year.
Serpico saves the shells that don’t burst from each show and sets them off as extra on the last show of the season.
“All the fireworks that are brought there are fired,” he said.
Friday Night
Friday night starts around 3 p.m. for pyrotechnicians Don Schirg and Joe Abarno.
After a stop at the Vineland warehouse, Schirg of Pennsylvania and Abarno of Toms River drive a white truck to a fenced-in section of the Wildwood beach to begin setup: loading mortar racks, wiring successive shells and hooking up the Night Hawk: the computer that lights the fuses.
It takes four and a half hours to set up for an eight-minute show.
Wildwood shows used to be hand-fired, but Serpico started using the computer to ignite the explosives about a decade ago.
“The computer gives us much more precise timing,” Serpico said, citing dampness in the air as another reason they moved towards electric fuse-lighting.
At 9:59 p.m., as Serpico gives the countdown from the boardwalk, Schirg and Abarno put on their hardhats and flip the switches on the Night Hawk that trigger the fireworks above their heads.
Fire Official Ronald Harwood stands by with a truck on premises.
Debris hits the sand after each explosion. Fifteen minutes after the show ends, Schrig and Abarno will pick up all the broken shells.
Serpico watches from the boardwalk, which allows him to critique as well as hear viewers’ reactions.
“That’s the only way you improve,” Serpico said.
When people see his T-shirt sporting the name of his Toms River-based business, they often thank him for the fireworks, he said.
“It’s very, very nice to know that people like what you do, and you give them that warm feeling, so they go home feeling good about their visit to the shore,” Serpico said.
Serpico said he gets “melancholy” removing the mortar racks from the beach in late September.
“The crowds are gone, the water’s nice and blue, you reminisce about the season, and that’s the memory that carries you to your next year,” he said.
To contact Taylor Henry, email thenry@cmcherald.com.