"Web of the Local Parades"

WEB OF THE LOCAL PARADES

August 2006

     When I was a little guy, my experiences of viewing people march

festively down city streets were limited to watching the Macy's Parade on

Thanksgiving Day or the Rose Bowl Parade at New Year's on our

black-and-white television with my parents. My mother, especially, wanted

to watch these parades, usually while enduring the tedium of preparing

large holiday meals, and usually instead of the cartoons I craved, or even

instead of the televised football games that I was beginning to enjoy. She

had about as much appreciation for the NFL and for Space Ghost and Secret

Squirrel, I suppose, as I did for the giant Snoopy balloon or the moving

floats garlanded with thousands of roses and carnations, and bedecked with

dozens of smiling, perfect young people, lively kings and queens, or even

gnarled, bent old grand marshals who had earned their place in the action

through good works and the long passage of time.

     I could never see the attraction, frankly, and my mother's interest in

these events filled me with wonder as to why, if she loved parades so

fervently, she didn't take me and my siblings to Kenai's Fourth of July

parade or to Soldotna's Progress Days parade. Mom claimed that she didn't

want to deal with the traffic; once you parked for one of those things,

she said, it might take forever to get out because they clogged up the

whole main street. Dad claimed he didn't like all of the press of humanity,

although he worked on people's mouths five days a week, and although the

entire population of Kenai and Soldotna (and all the outlying areas)

combined, in those early days, equaled maybe 2,000 souls. Still, local

parades were not something the Fair family partook of. In fact, if memory

serves me correctly, the first parade I ever personally attended was one

in Missoula, Montana. I went, camera in hand, to try to get some interesting shots

for my Advanced Photography class at the University of Montana. I remember that it was

cold and that it either rained during the parade or had rained just before it.

The participants and the parade watchers were dressed warmly. And I

remember thinking, Hmm. Is this IT? What's everybody so excited about?

     Then, once I became a reporter for the Peninsula Clarion newspaper here at

home, I got my first parade assignment: Go get some usable photos from the

Fourth of July parade in Kenai. As a photo-journalist that day, I actually

enjoyed the parade. Lots of happy people, sunshine, good expressions, nice

angles, weird costumes--my photographic options were many. I had a good

enough time that I could almost ignore the myriad politicians stumping for

my vote, the clusters of Shriners and Lions Club members and Elks Club

members and VFW men in uniform and ladies auxiliaries ... and the relative

brevity and the lack of grandeur when compared to those television

extravaganzas I had endured as a child.

     Parades, I came to realize over time, are celebrations of

ourselves--reflections of ourselves--the way the Academy Awards banquet is a

celebration by Hollywood, for Hollywood, and about Hollywood, a chance for

big celebrities to slap each other on the backs and say congratulations, while also

entertaining the world with their glamour and humor, and

boosting ticket sales. But since parades

are reflections as well as celebrations, small-town parades are not filled

with the same type of glitter and glitz that the Hollywood productions

are, with all of their red carpets, flashing photo bulbs, well-insured

smiles, and million-dollar gowns and jewelry. No, they're filled with real

people, doing the best they can, driving the cars and making the floats

and waving the waves that reflect themselves. If our parades turn out a

little hokey, fairly brief, and jam-packed with ordinary people, it's

because that's who we are--the residents of small towns doing the best we

know how.

     These days, we take our kids to both parades. Sometimes we both

go along. Other times just one of us goes, and we go mostly because our

kids want to go. And our kids want to go mostly because there's candy

involved. Sometimes LOTS of candy. And our children scramble after it by the

handful and tote it home by the bagful, like having Trick or Treat in the middle

of a sunny summer afternoon.

     But we also go because, in part, we actually want to be there, too--at

least a little bit. We know people in these things. The mayor of Soldotna

is a friend of mine; I taught with him for nearly 20 years. The Skyview

cheerleaders represent my school. Karen's been teaching kids in Kenai for

more than a decade. I used to work in Kenai. And on and on. The connections

are abundant. Last year's Grand Marshal of the Soldotna Days parade, for

instance, was Marge Mullen, who is in her mid-80s and is still spry, who

homesteaded here in 1947, and who worked as a receptionist for my father

for about a decade. I have spent a lot of money in her daughter Peggy's

stores. I have taught her son Frank's daughter, Ashley. My mother and I

used to wash and dry our clothes in her ex-husband's humid Laundromat. I

worked briefly with her youngest daughter, Mary, while I was employed at

the newspaper. My father has worked on the teeth of every member of

Marge's immediate family. But it doesn't stop there. My history in this

place is long enough to become entangled with almost any histories of similar or

longer duration.

     For example: The other day, I made an enlargement of a photograph that my

father took when he and Mom drove through Soldotna in 1959, when fewer than 300

people lived in the area. (I was a year old, and my dad was still

stationed at the Army base in Whittier on the eastern side of the Kenai

Peninsula. He and Mom were taking one of their numerous exploratory

Drives--and probably got off the main track. Less than two years later,

however, they would move to this place.) The photograph shows a wooden

structure, a post-and-wire fence (part of what appears to be a corral),

several cars of clearly 1950s vintage (two of which appear to be driving

away from the log structure), a man walking in the same direction as the

departing cars, a pole bearing the American flag, and a long Quonset-style

building in the background. The wooden structure had been Soldotna's first post office. The

Quonset was owned by a man named George Denison, whose then-wife,

Shirley, would much later become my high school chemistry teacher. The

Quonset itself became Soldotna's first movie theater (its only one ever,

really) and later its main drug store. A few years later, the Postal

Service set up shop in a newer, more central location, and the wood building

was purchased by Justin Maile, who was the town mayor when I worked at the

newspaper, whose wife, Zilla, opened The Yarn Shop in the front part of

their home, and whose son, Larry, was one of my best friends for most of

my childhood.

     And, yes, all of this (and plenty more) was brought to my mind recently by

the advent of another Soldotna Progress Days parade. "Progress," to be

sure, but not without strands of the great web that reach back and back

and back.