A Nation in Step With Parades

Garden Grove’s annual Strawberry Festival parade was on its last legs, a 47-year tradition threatened by the rising cost of security and insurance.

But because America loves its parades -- just take a look around on July Fourth -- the community stepped forward.

A car dealership donated $10,000 plus a small fleet of vehicles bearing the company’s name. Several other businesses, including a supermarket and dermatology clinic, pitched in and, soon enough, nearly $44,000 was raised. The parade, a remnant of bygone days when the city lay cloaked in strawberry fields, was saved.

Thousands of people lined Garden Grove Boulevard that day in May to watch high school marching bands with uniformed clarinet players and girls in feathered boots. The town’s mayor passed in a vintage Chevrolet waving to the crowd. Beauty queens strutted their stuff and Shriners rode fire engines. Moms and dads cheered loudly as kids wearing Scout uniforms sauntered by.

“I love the music,” gushed Richard Gould, 42, amid vendors circling the crowd selling cotton candy and an announcer addressing marchers by name. “I like seeing people I know.”

Rodney Smith, relaxing in a folding chair on the sidewalk, shared those sentiments. “It’s lots of fun to watch,” he said. “The kids get a kick out of it. This brings people together.”

It’s a scene played out across the country, from Villa Park to New York City: the historic and steady public affection for hometown parades.

It’s unclear how many parades are held annually in Southern California. In Los Angeles, about 80 parade permits were issued last year, compared with about 50 in 2000, according to information supplied by the Los Angeles Police Department.

Nicaraguans are planning a parade near MacArthur Park to honor their homeland, said Bill Lomas, president and CEO of Pageantry Productions, a Lynwood company that produces and manages parades statewide.

In Stanton, Lomas said, residents plan a parade in October to commemorate the anniversary of cityhood. In Long Beach, a state firefighters association is planning a parade for October 2006 to recognize firefighters, especially those killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Last year, parades were born in San Fernando (for Veterans Day), Lynwood (Cinco de Mayo) and Van Nuys (promoting sobriety).

In recent years, various Los Angeles neighborhoods have held parades celebrating Buddha’s birthday, black history and police officers.

New suburban communities are quick to put parades on their civic agendas.

“When they build these new subdivisions,” Lomas said, “they don’t build downtowns anymore. There are new communities all over Southern California, but they’re putting up mega-malls and there’s no sense of community in that. Parades bring a sense of community.”

Sylvia Allen, a parade consultant from Aitkin, Minn., where the Fish House parade features town elders festooned with tree branches (which provide shelter for ice fishermen) knows what it takes for a successful parade.

“It has to be interesting -- music, dancing, floats, kids -- and you have to involve the entire community,” she said. “You have to have the military, the fire trucks, the VFW -- and you have to pace it.”

“You don’t put all the fire truck guys up front; it has to be noise, interesting, quiet, noise, interesting, quiet. High school marching bands, high-step dancers, Boy Scout Troop 109. You want to have successful events, so you put kids in them because kids come with parents.”

Ceremonial group processions are believed to be among the oldest forms of organized human celebration. As far back as 3000 BC, historians say, people marched along prescribed paths in religious observances.

The Romans were fond of staging imperial processions into the city with triumphant soldiers returning from foreign conquests. Their purpose, according to Jack Santino, a professor of popular culture at Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, was “to reinforce the [emperor] and the government.”

“The Roman parades,” he said, “were to demonstrate the victory, but also to show [off] the ruling power.”

Such displays of vanity by the rulers were adopted far and wide, easily adapted in the United States beginning with military reviews during the Revolutionary War and extending through today’s presidential inaugurals, as well as parades celebrating Armed Forces Day and Independence Day.

Ethnic and special-interest parades also evolved, such as those for St. Patrick’s Day and Cinco de Mayo, and most major U.S. cities today have annual gay pride parades.

Then there are parades spawned by parades. Pasadena’s Rose Parade is parodied by the satirical Doo Dah Parade, also in Pasadena -- which has itself inspired other anti-parade parades.

The annual July 4th Doo Dah Parade in Columbus, Ohio, urges spectators and participants to “throw everything you ever knew about political correctness, social norms or decency out the window. Eccentrics, protesters, the sexually unrestrained and just plain wack-jobs come out of the woodwork to attain new levels of free expression.”

Based on information that comes to his website, Hometown Parades of America, Minneapolis-based parade promoter Daniel Prins estimates there are more than 50,000 parades nationwide every year -- and they don’t want for themes.

They include the Lighted Farm Implement Parade in Sunnyside, Wash.; the Fall Popcorn Festival Parade in Marion, Ohio; the Golf Cart Parade in Palm Desert; the Fiesta Pooch (think costumed dogs) and Fiesta Flambeau (imagine torches) parades in San Antonio; the Chocolate Fest Parade in Burlington, Wis.; the Pickle Parade in St. Joe, Ind.; the Butter & Egg Day Parade in Petaluma, Calif.; and the Defeat of Jesse James Days Parade in Northfield, Minn.

“Each town has something to celebrate,” said Lynn Ziegler, chairwoman of the Jesse James event, commemorating the day in 1876 when a local banker refused to open his vault for the infamous gang, resulting in his murder and an uprising of local citizens who killed two gang members and drove the rest out of town. “This is the big event of the year.”

Among its most enthusiastic participants, Ziegler said, are those portraying the historic gangsters who, in reenacting the attempted robbery and its aftermath, “are the only ones permitted to shoot. They like to make a ruckus and run around on their horses,” she said. “That’s a big highlight for the kids.”

Her most memorable failure: a man in a gorilla suit riding on roller blades while playing an accordion.

“That wasn’t such a big hit,” Ziegler recalled. “I didn’t bring him back again.”

Further in the realm of whimsy and closer to home, consider the parade of boats held annually in the Orange County community of Villa Park, 20 miles from the Pacific. It’s the Great Villa Park Inland Yacht Parade, touted as the nation’s only boat parade on land, now in its eighth year and growing.

“It’s the kind of thing you do in a small town,” said Karen Holthe, who has served as the event’s chairwoman.

Some parades are on the ropes, in part because of added insurance and security costs spawned by 9/11 or because of government cutbacks. Others thrive, in part because corporations frequently see parade sponsorships as an effective form of advertising.

This year the Seaside Lions Club of Seal Beach, overwhelmed by the expense, said it would pull the plug on its 25-year-old Springfest parade.

“It was just getting to be too much,” Jackie Maloney, the event’s coordinator, said. “There’ve been so many cuts in the city’s budget that we ended up having to pay for street closures, toilets, barriers and setting up the stages all by ourselves. We’d been doing it for three years under duress; this year we just said no more.”

But city officials intervened, promising to co-sponsor the parade next year.

“It’s kind of a hometown thing,” Seal Beach City Manager John Bahorski explained. “The parade is so unifying. Everyone can get behind a parade.”

Similarly, when the Snow Festival parade in Tahoe City was jeopardized because the California Highway Patrol, for the first time in 24 years, decided to charge for its services, the community rallied with donations and saved the event, said Ruth Schnabel, the event’s executive director.

Garden Grove’s Strawberry Festival parade was salvaged when the local Nissan dealership stepped forward with a large donation and was allowed to provide many of the parade’s vehicles.

And so it came to pass that Sam Klein, general manager of the Nissan dealership, found himself driving one of the parade cars, sandwiched somewhere between a waving politician and a group of marching clowns.

“I’m so glad that the city is still doing this,” said Susan Arnold, 47, who’s been attending the spectacle since childhood. “I just love a parade.”