Have The Sirens Stopped Screaming, Clarice? The Stow 4th Of July Parade Sponsored By Beltone
Transcript
00:00Have the sirens stopped screaming, Clarice?
00:03The Stowe Fourth of July Parade, sponsored by Beltone
00:07The Victorians essentially perfected the Christmas holiday season,
00:10and the Puritans put a clear thumbprint on the celebration we now call Thanksgiving.
00:15However, the city of Stowe owned the Fourth of July.
00:18The competition was, and still is, for second place.
00:22Other cities may think they can assemble an acceptable bevy of Shriner midget cars,
00:27high school bands, beauty queens, and themed floats.
00:31But when I was a child in the early 1970s,
00:33the Stowe, Ohio Fourth of July Parade operated on a completely different plane of existence.
00:40Route 59 through town became the epicenter of a three-hour tribute to the civic duty gods.
00:46The parade started assembling at the Stowe-Kent Shopping Center,
00:50which was really the only location on that end of the street
00:53capable of supporting so many parade entrants.
00:57The parade route was one street running east to west,
01:00terminating at a review stand several miles away in the so-called downtown section of Stowe.
01:05The mayor and other dignitaries would congregate at that review stand,
01:09but most of us regular folk would find a spot along Kent Road,
01:13pull out an old-school lawn chair, and wait for clear signs of an impending parade.
01:20We usually didn't have to wait long.
01:22A few police officers on motorcycles would clear the stragglers off the street,
01:26just before the largest peacetime armada of emergency vehicles
01:30ever assembled started the festivities.
01:34In the annals of historically bad ideas, one immediately springs to mind.
01:39Assembling a collection of firetrucks and ambulances from a three-county area
01:43and having them drive single file down the same stretch of densely populated highway.
01:49The concept of seeing a fleet of shiny firetrucks driving down our street
01:53sounded promising indeed to a six-year-old.
01:57However, the execution was a completely different story.
02:01As part of the parade ritual, all of these emergency vehicles decided to turn on their
02:05lights and sirens at the same time and for the same duration, which is to say forever.
02:11The cumulative effect of all of those outside voices was mind-numbing deafness,
02:16which lingered for the rest of the now-silent parade.
02:19To add audio insult to sonic injury, some of those fire engines also blew their diesel horns,
02:25which entered our bodies at the ear canal and exited out of places we forgot we had.
02:31After the Beltone-sponsored parade of emergency vehicles passed by,
02:36life along the sidelines got a little easier.
02:38The American Field Service volunteers would walk up and down the parade route,
02:43hawking very small American flags that we would dutifully wave at the parade participants.
02:49For us kids, this was all leading up to the most important part of the parade, the candy toss.
02:54This was no small thing.
02:56Someone on a passing float would toss a handful of candy in our direction
03:00and a sugar-fueled feeding frenzy would begin.
03:04Every once in a while, an errant pitch would send the bulk of the candy in one direction
03:08and one direction only, mine.
03:12Before I could pack up all of that bubble-yum or tootsie-roll booty, however,
03:15my mom would remind me of my gallant tendencies
03:18and I'd end up redistributing it to the less fortunate.
03:21Darn the less fortunate.
03:24One group that both scared and excited me was the Shriners,
03:28or as I thought of them, the old guys with the funny hats.
03:32At one point, their stunt vehicles of choice were Honda minibikes,
03:36which they would ride in intricate formations at different points along the route.
03:42Before going into their routine, however,
03:44a few of the flying monkey men would zip across the sidelines
03:48to make sure no groundlings were in the path of the minibikes.
03:52That little safety maneuver scared me to death
03:54since I was often too busy picking up stray candy
03:57to notice a Shriner barreling down on top of me with 50 cc's of raw power behind him.
04:04The Shriners later switched to those miniature clown cars,
04:07which seemed to ratchet back the drama of non-athletic competition,
04:12in my younger opinion.
04:14You could only do so much damage in a clown car
04:16and if these men thought riding minibikes designed for eight-year-olds
04:19made them look like dorks on parade,
04:22the cars were not exactly babe wagons either.
04:25What happened next could only be described as an object lesson in terminal whiteness.
04:31The area high school bands would all march down the parade route
04:34in a stupefyingly predictable order.
04:36Majorettes, banner, drum major, band, band directors.
04:40Majorettes, banner, drum major, band, band directors.
04:44The upper funk limit for most of these bands was Stevie Wonder's Sir Duke.
04:50Bands from Tallmadge, Hudson, Cuyahoga Falls, Kent, and most notably Stowe
04:55would take turns performing these squeaky tight
04:57Marvin the Martian arrangements of traditional march music and fight songs.
05:01Stowe's fight song was the same as Ohio State's,
05:04across the field, alternative lyrics not included.
05:07Precision was the underlying theme
05:09and for the most part we appreciated the homage to discipline and order.
05:14We were still Midwesterners after all.
05:16But nothing, nothing prepared us for the volunteer drum corps from Akron.
05:23They wore purple and black uniforms and clearly brought the funk from the county seat.
05:28No clarinets, no flutes, no saxophones, just trumpets and a boatload of drums.
05:33These guys didn't march in hyper straight formations.
05:36They didn't really march at all.
05:38They eased on down the road with a solid boom chaka laka,
05:41boom chaka laka backbeat driving them the whole way.
05:46As a young frightened Caucasian I had read the forbidden texts concerning funk
05:50but during the Stowe 4th of July parade I actually had a chance to experience it in person.
05:56I liked it. I really liked it.
06:00One of the more interesting and one would think least innocent bystander friendly
06:04participants in the parade were the stunt shooters from Akron.
06:09At regular intervals along the route a volunteer sitting in the back of an open bed truck
06:13would hold out a balloon and shout, fire!
06:17At this point the three trick shooters walking behind the truck would
06:20whip out their six shooters and shoot the balloon dead.
06:24These people were lightning fast and extremely accurate.
06:27Two qualities I admired in stunt shooters walking down a crowded street with live ammunition.
06:33I found out later that they only shot wax bullets
06:36which would disintegrate on contact with the balloon.
06:40The version inside my eight-year-old mind was much better.
06:44The floats were almost always from the Red White and Blaine School of Civic Pride
06:49and it was always interesting to see someone I knew from school or church strapped to one
06:53but I noticed that some of my friends couldn't handle the pressures of sudden float fame.
07:00They would bogart the candy for one thing.
07:03After all we had been through from kindergarten to July 3rd of that year.
07:08The least a buddy on a Stowe Lions Club float could do
07:11was hook a brother up with that sweet, sweet Tootsie Roll action.
07:16Ingrates.
07:17Perhaps nothing explains the Stowe Billy Psyche better
07:20than the ignoble end of all 4th of July parades.
07:24The parade participants who routinely gathered the most applause and adulation from the crowd
07:29weren't the high school bands,
07:30the gleaming and historical emergency vehicles,
07:33or the local civic leaders.
07:36We saved our loudest cheers for the rows of street cleaners with their cheerfully waving drivers
07:40who closed out the parade in style.
07:43Well, except for those of us who watched our last shot at Bazooka Joe
07:47and dum-dums get swept away forever.