His bags were packed and his ticket was in hand. Dale Eidson, his dream trip still a week away, was leaving nothing to chance.

For good reason. A football place-kicker, Eidson drew enough attention during one season at Diablo Valley College and two years at San Francisco State — where he booted a conference-record 48-yard field goal — to pique the interest of the NFL’s San Diego Chargers. They signed him to a contract and invited him to their training camp, to begin on July 10, 1971. Eidson, who grew up in Concord, anticipated the thrill of his 23-year-old life.

But first, some summer fun. The night of Fourth of July, Eidson lit fireworks at his family’s home on Edward Avenue for the amusement of his nephew, 4, and niece, 2. He used firecrackers to launch beverage cans into the air. Looking for something more dramatic, Eidson went into the garage and retrieved some old sulphur balls in a galvanized milk can. It was shortly before 9 p.m.

There are varying accounts of what happened next. Indisputable was the concussive explosion that blew Eidson several feet in the air and several feet from the blast. Gravely injured, he was rushed to nearby Concord Community Hospital in critical condition. One of the first visitors to the hospital asked the night nurse supervisor about Eidson’s condition.

“Oh, sir,” the nurse said, “there are no legs left.”

Eidson was in for the fight of his life. Both legs were amputated below the knee. His thumb and two fingers on his right hand were removed as well. He was in the hospital for 60 days, during which he had seven surgeries.

Wire services picked up on the news, and Eidson’s story ran in newspapers, including the New York Times, across the country. Locally, the mood was one of disbelief.

“He was a most dedicated kid,” San Francisco State coach Vic Rowen said. “It took him this long to convince anybody to give him a chance.”

“God, what a shame,” Chargers coach Sid Gilman said. “Football is nothing compared to an accident like this.”

But as he recovered in the hospital, Eidson began rewriting the narrative of his ordeal. For starters, he had no interest in playing the victim.

“I used reverse psychology on the doctors,” he told the Oakland Tribune’s Dave Newhouse on the one-year anniversary of his accident. “I’d start asking them how they were. When they’d ask me, I’d say, ‘Fine doc. Never better.’ They couldn’t believe it.”

“He had a lot of bravado,” Newhouse said, looking back on that interview. “Dale had the perfect temperament to deal with this, that inner fire you need in moments of crisis. He had an abundance of that.”

He put it to good use, leaving the hospital for the first time on Aug. 30 for “Dale Eidson Day” in Concord. A benefit golf tournament was held at the Concord Municipal Course (now Diablo Creek Golf Course), followed by a dinner at the Concord Inn (since razed). Several prominent Bay Area athletes attended. An AP Wirephoto shows Eidson, seated behind a table, handing none other than Joe DiMaggio an award for being closest to the hole.

Eidson set a goal for himself. Within one year of the explosion, he wanted to be able to resume driving, live on his own, dance, resume playing the drums with his band the Hytones, and hold down a job. He overachieved. He held three jobs.

Jay Bedecarre worked with Eidson at KWUN, an AM radio station in Concord.

“It was a daylight station,” Bedecarre said. “It went off the air at sunset. We did high school football games at night and played them the next morning. Dale did some games there. He was training himself to be a sports announcer.”

Eidson’s relentless positivity impressed Bedecarre.

“See him down? No,” Bedecarre said. “I wasn’t with him 24/7, in nonwork-type situations. But to me, he never came off as self-conscious. I never saw that.”

Eidson’s accident lived on because he wanted it that way. For years, it was part of the summer soundtrack in central Contra Costa County. For more than 10 years, on July 4, he would swim one mile for every year it had been since the accident. He took pledges and donated the money to charitable causes.

He spoke to school kids, taking them through that fateful night. “I said, ‘OK, my legs are gone, but there’s nothing I can do about it,'” he told students at Pleasant Hill Middle School in 1999. “I wasn’t going to lie around feeling sorry for myself.”

He enrolled in a baseball umpire school and embarked on a career that had him on the road 250 days some years. He married twice and divorced twice. The second marriage produced a son. What little documented frustration Eidson felt about his lot in life was expressed to Newhouse in a 1996 interview.

“There are times when I have self-anger,” he said. “My life is slow motion. A normal guy gets dressed in five minutes. It takes me an hour.”

Eidson moved to Penn Valley in Northern California. He died on Oct. 25, 2008, and is buried in Sierra Memorial Lawn Cemetery in Nevada City, California.

“There usually is going to be a moment in everyone’s life that defines the rest of their life,” Newhouse said. “We don’t know what would have happened to Dale Eidson if he went down to the Chargers camp. He was a reputable kicker. It might have led to an NFL career. But it defined his life.”

Eidson said more than once, “I made one mistake, and I didn’t get away with it.”

Looking at the bigger picture, at the people he reached, amazed and inspired, perhaps he did.