Parade Cancellation Dismays Watchers and Marchers : It Was Day of Cold Disappointment

For this East Coast center of pomp and pride, Monday was the day that nearly 500,000 revelers celebrating President Reagan’s inauguration were supposed to see the best picture-postcard face that the city could offer. What they got was a panorama of brine-coated streets, barren bleachers and frozen traffic lights.

Record-shattering cold--the mercury dived to 4 degrees below zero around dawn--shut down outdoor Washington on Monday. And with it vanished the plans of 140,000 select citizens who held tickets for Reagan’s swearing-in at the Capitol as well as another 350,000 who had hoped to view a three-mile parade after the ceremonies.

It was a disaster for the President’s inaugural committee, which spent $1 million on bleachers and a White House reviewing stand where Reagan would have watched the 112-unit parade. The committee will refund about $800,000 in parade ticket sales.

And the cold was only slightly less dismaying for the 12,000 or so parade participants, a sprinkling of whom performed for the President and First Lady Nancy Reagan on Monday afternoon in a hastily arranged concert in a suburban Maryland sports complex.

“This was our last big chance. That’s it for us,” said Daryl Simon, 17, a tenor saxophone player whose Pascagoula (Miss.) High School band sat idle while four others played at the Capital Centre arena. “Now we’re just all trying to have a lot of fun.”

American taxpayers did not make out so well either, having given the capital’s 320,000 federal workers a day off--at a cost of $40 million--to ease what turned out to be a non-existent traffic jam.

“It looks like a ghost town,” said Maria Valente of Grosse Pointe, Mich., who came with her husband for the inaugural festivities but spent part of the morning reading tourist brochures in a hotel lobby.

The arctic air that whipped down Washington’s broad streets turned the Pennsylvania Avenue parade corridor into an empty, shrieking wind tunnel and swept all but the hardiest Reagan watchers inside.

It was 7 degrees, with a windchill factor of 11 below zero, when Reagan’s motorcade sped by knots of placard-waving sightseers and protesters and into the Capitol grounds, where the President delivered his Inaugural Address to about 1,000 VIPs jammed into the Capitol Rotunda. Two women waved a sign reading, “Shell, Wyoming, Population 50.”

“Was that the President?” one woman asked her shivering escort. “That was the President,” he replied.

The disappointment was as bitter as the cold for some. Wendy Larsen of New Port Richey, Fla., broke a three-year perfect attendance record at her elementary school to see the inauguration. Her mother, Carole Larsen, called it “an expensive one-day trip.”

Leo, Irene and Phyllis Wong flew from Hong Kong to witness their first inauguration. They wound up pacing outside the frigid Capitol grounds in a futile bid to enter the Rotunda for Reagan’s speech.

Those who were denied a chance to parade before the President, including thousands of high school and college students, fared better during a post-inaugural celebration at the Capital Centre.

In a three-hour ceremony, a handful of the bands, singers and marching units performed for the Reagans and each other before a huge American flag that had been part of a parade float. The Reagans held hands and tapped their feet as a band played “Seventy-Six Trombones” and “The America Song” while the crowd clapped and waved wildly.

The 150 musicians from Glen A. Wilson High School--one of four prep bands allowed to play Monday--spent $110,000 to travel from Hacienda Heights, Calif., to Washington. Their reward was a chance to play a 2 1/2-minute rendition of the “Purple Carnival March.”

Short as it was, band director Gil Adams said, it was better than the “heart-rending agony” that his students felt when word of the parade cancellation came Sunday. Adams had spent $200 on cold-weather gear, including clear fingernail polish that he painted on mouthpieces to keep players’ lips from sticking to their instruments.

But the instruments froze anyway in a Sunday practice session, and some band members had suffered mild frostbite.

The Princeton (Minn.) Marching Tigers, on the other hand, were unfazed.

“This is just like being at home,” said Ellen Thronson, a color guard member. The band would have marched down a deserted Pennsylvania Avenue “as long as the President was there,” she said.

The President assured the players that he also missed the parade.

“I had a pair of long johns,” he said. “The last time I wore them was the 1980 primary campaign in New Hampshire. . . . It would have been a magical moment to tuck away and cherish with your loved ones. But it was not to be.”

Washington’s corps of power brokers and the city’s hoteliers and caterers--few of whom would have celebrated on the street anyway--heaved sighs of regret and continued to party indoors.

The swank J.W. Marriott Hotel commandeered bands from the canceled parade to serenade guests in its Art Deco atrium lobby. A few blocks away, officials of the Proprietary Assn., a trade group of over-the-counter drug makers, doggedly entertained visitors in a seventh-floor office with a spectacular view of the parade reviewing stands where Reagan was to sit. Deprived of a parade, the group set up television sets so guests could view festivities on a screen instead of through a window.

The cold also robbed Washington’s horde of souvenir vendors of one of the year’s most lucrative selling days for buttons, ribbons and other regalia. “I’m not expecting much business. People don’t come out in the cold weather,” said one discouraged peddler at 14th Street and Constitution Avenue.

Some had little choice, however. Officer C.A. Eaton of the Capitol Police spent Inauguration Day trudging outside the Capitol, taking breaks every half hour to keep from freezing. “This is the first time in 15 years I’ve had ice in my mustache,” he said.

Times Staff Writers Marlene Cimons, Paul Houston, Robert L. Jackson, Zack Nauth, Penny Pagano and Don Shannon contributed to this story.