Don't overlook how special our Christmas parade is
11/18/04
Keith Lawrence, Commentary
Messenger-Inquirer
Sometimes, we get so used to things that we forget just how special they are.
Take Owensboro's Christmas parade, for instance.
It steps off from Ninth and Frederica streets at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, winding its way through downtown for the 68th consecutive year. This year's theme is "Christmas in Toyland."
Unless there's a toddler in the family, anxiously awaiting the arrival of Santa Claus at the end of the 108-unit parade, it's easy to forget just how special this parade is. But the Kentucky Tourism Council recently named Owensboro's Christmas parade -- and the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art's Holiday Forest -- as two of the state's Top 10 winter/holiday events. And the Southeast Tourism Society named the Christmas parade to its Top 20 events for November -- out of more than 1,000 entries across the Southeastern United States.
Those are major accolades.
The Christmas parade drew an estimated 10,000 people on a warm Saturday afternoon last year.
Organizers call it Kentucky's largest Christmas parade. And they say it's the state's second-largest parade of the year, behind only Louisville's Kentucky Derby parade.
Wonder if the folks who planned the city's first Christmas parade -- on Thursday, Dec. 2, 1937 -- could have imagined that it would still be marching in the 21st century? And getting such recognition?
The nation was just beginning to pull itself out of the Great Depression. And World War II was just a nagging fear on the horizon.
The Owensboro Retail Association decided to kick off the 1937 shopping season with an extravaganza downtown. There were no shopping centers then.
That first parade started at 7:30 p.m. And people started lining the darkened streets at 6 p.m.
At 6:30, Santa flew over in a "brilliantly illuminated aircraft," landed at the airport (which was then on Daniels Lane) and hurried downtown to climb aboard the city's new aerial fire truck to lead the parade.
At 7:30, as the parade -- with more than 100 units -- began rolling west on Second Street, switches were thrown and all the Christmas lights came on simultaneously. They hadn't been turned on until then. They also illuminated all the decorated storefronts downtown at the same time.
Remember when stores still created elaborate Christmas displays in their windows?
Every factory whistle in the city sounded to mark the beginning of that first parade.
They didn't estimate the crowd that year. But more than 2,000 children brought letters to hand to Santa's helpers. And you have to figure that they brought parents and grandparents too.
In 1960, when Owensboro's population was 42,471, the crowd at the Christmas parade was estimated at between 30,000 and 40,000 people. Santa rode a gold-splattered rocket ship that year.
There were two close calls to the parade's streak of never missing a year. In 1958, a snowstorm postponed the parade a few days. And in 1965, organizers announced that it was being canceled in favor of something called "Santa's Rocket Ship." But an outcry from concerned parents and children brought Jaycees to the rescue, with a hastily organized parade with 30 to 40 units. Nobody has dared suggest ending the tradition since.
In 1961, the parade moved to Saturday mornings. But it returned to dusk in 1990 because people prefer lighted floats.
A lot of people have put a lot of time and effort through the years into making this parade one of America's treasures.
And from someone who once watched the parade through the eyes of a small child, thanks for all you've done.