Propping his arm on the workbench, 9-year-old John Sorgi watches his father, Jim Sorgi, tie a knot on a 5-inch cylinder shell. The “Wizard of Ahhs” is just a boy, but he’s following Jim’s footsteps, who started by stuffing fuses in paper tubes for his father, Vincenzo Sorgi. 

Vincenzo, a third-generation pyrotechnician, immigrated from Avezzano, Italy, in 1899. The Pennsylvania Railroad then led him from Ellis Island to Hudson, a town ripe for a notch in the Fireworks Beltway. There, Vincenzo married, bought an old potato farm, honed his craft in an abandoned shack and began taking weekly trips to Pennsylvania, returning with as many as seven suitcases full of fireworks.