3, 2, 1...Blast Off!

NEA Today, Feb 2006 by Terry, Pat

Dee Gibson gets a bang out of teaching, but her vacation is a real blast.

NOT MANY TEACHERS have to tack on a safety-oriented "Kids, don't try this at home" disclaimer when they tell their students what they did over the summer. But then, not many teachers are like Gibson, a first-grade teacher in Rockford, Hlinois, who spends the summer setting off massive explosions.

As a member of a wife-and-husband-led pyrotechnics team, Gibson entertains thousands of people at air shows around the world each summer by setting off choreographed detonations. Using a carefully controlled mixture of dynamite, gasoline, and other explosives, her crew creates special effects on the ground that appear to air show viewers to be coming from the military planes flying overhead. She does everything from detonation to safety supervision while another blasting crew wows fans.

Several times Gibson helped the team break the Guinness World Record for the longest wall of fire.

Adventure has been a mainstay in Gibson's life. Raised in Milwaukee, she joined the Women's Army Corps after high school to see the world. She re-enlisted to earn enough money to fund her skydiving passion. Gibson ultimately ended up in the Army Combat Engineers, where she worked on bulldozers and blasted rocks with explosives to build roads in rural Honduras.

Once all in a day's work, the 20-year teaching veteran now shares her explosive summer vacation stories judiciously.

"When I taught second grade, I told the kids what I did and they asked, 'Can you bring in some bombs, Mrs. Gibson?' I got some interesting calls from parents," she laughs. "Now I explain it a little differently."

-PAT TERRY