Seal Beach Easter Parade Unfolds for 1,000 Viewers

“Ladies, would you please listen to me!” shouted Evelyn Hawkins to her group of elementary school-age baton twirlers, squeezed onto a small parking lot with all the other parade participants.

In a few minutes, the Anaheim Discovery Christian School Baton Corps would be marching down Main Street in Seal Beach, and Hawkins wanted her little girls to be in sync on a tricky, spinning maneuver.

“Now it’s right hand, right shoulder, left hand,” said Hawkins. The girls tried to follow. “The baton should be in your left hand.” Some were, some weren’t, and Hawkins told the girls to forget the fancy move, it was too late to learn it. “They’re doing great as it is,” she said to an onlooker.

Besides, small-town charm, not polish, was the attraction at Sunday’s eighth annual Seal Beach Easter Parade, held a week before Easter, on Palm Sunday. Drill team leaders pulled wagons blaring marching music for their charges; antique and classic cars and an old-fashioned fire engine motored down Main Street carrying senior citizens.

Baby With Bunny Ears

Clowns waddled along, and a 9-month-old baby with bunny ears in an Easter basket somehow managed to make it through the parade without crying.

About 1,000 people lined Main Street to watch the parade go by. It took barely half an hour.

The parade also featured some small-town politics. One of the Model T’s carried members of SPRING (Seal Beach Preservation Initiative Group), a slow-growth group sponsoring an initiative that proponents say would protect the city’s little remaining open space, Measure A on Tuesday’s local election ballot.

Proponents of the ballot initiative handed out hundreds of yellow balloons that said “Yes on A” before the parade; a man on a 10-speed bicycle, who cruised up and down Main Street for almost an hour before the parade, began cajoling people not to be taken in by pretty balloons. “Don’t be fooled, vote no on A,” he shouted.

“We’re pretty low-key here, very informal,” said Philip Pipher, a local realtor and member of the Seal Beach Business Assn., which sponsored the event. “We try to make it easy for everybody.”