If anyone missed it, the parade turned around at the end of the street and came back.

Whatever the Labrador Street Independence Day Parade lacked in quantity, it more than made up for in convenience, intimacy and repetition.

The residents of a 2-block-long stretch of the street in Chatsworth had no parking problems; they could stand in their front yards. Perhaps the parade had no movie stars or dancing elephants, but it did have participants they knew, mostly their own children.

And if anyone missed it the first time it passed, well, the parade turned around at the end of the street and came back. And then back again a few more times.

There were about 50 people, more participants than there were onlookers. Parents pushed tots in strollers, and little kids in bathing suits strode solemnly along. There were bigger kids on bicycles, and a skateboard and a motor scooter and a go-kart, all bristling with flags and dripping with red, white and blue crepe paper.

Bringing up the rear were Kenny and Diane Newland’s dogs: Junior, a black and white border collie, Sam the beagle and Sir Winston, a fluffy little ball of a silky terrier.

Junior and Sir Winston wore red neckerchiefs, Sam a blue one.

The whole street was decked in red, white and blue for the first Labrador Street block party, which residents said took about three months’ planning. They may have needed the time to strike just the right balance between Big Deal and Down Home.

Labrador Street, in the two blocks eastward from Oakdale Avenue to a cul-de-sac, looks less like the San Fernando Valley than a good suburb of some Midwestern city, say Minneapolis or Cleveland. The three dozen houses are large but not grand. Big, mature trees roof the street in green and soften the sunlight into a dappled shade.

One garage has a set of deer antlers over the door.

Most of the houses had been hung with flags and draped with balloons and bunting.

After the parade, the crowd gathered around Jerry and Dell Goodman’s lawn, party central for the day.

There was a popcorn cart and an old-fashioned ice cream peddler’s three-wheeled cycle, its cold chest stuffed with Popsicles.

Watermelons were piled on the lawn, some of them anchoring balloons bearing the words “Happy Fourth of July.”

A long orange extension cord snaked from the Goodman’s house to power a TV set and VCR, used by the newly organized neighborhood watch to show crime prevention and earthquake advice videotapes. A police car dropped by, and the officers split a Popsicle and answered questions about the neighborhood watch.

Mary Murray sold $6 raffle chances for dinners at local restaurants, donated by the owners, to raise the $250 the organizers needed to pay for the $65 permit to block off the street, and odds and ends such as crepe paper and helium for the balloons.

She pointed out that even Oscar, a young rooster belonging to her 7-year-old granddaughter, Erika, had his cage decorated for the day. She joked about Oscar’s imminent transformation into a sandwich, but had to add, “No, Noooo, Erika, grandma was just kidding; there, there, sweetie.”

Children in bathing suits scampered everywhere, while the adults stood around sipping beers. The crowd was mostly white, but there was a black face or two, a number of Latinos, some Orientals.

“There are so many kids on this street, and they all play together and through them all the families know each other,” said Tom Somers. “And almost all the adults are the same age, in their 30s or early 40s.”

Somers, who refinishes furniture and rents props to movie and advertising companies, is Chatsworth’s answer to Tom Swift. The air was filled with the bouncy music of what sounded like a ragtime saloon orchestra. It came from the “orchestrion,” a one-machine band that Somers built around the skeleton of a player piano, adding a couple of drums, tambourine, glockenspiel, marimba, a stained-glass case and a few other things.

The machine pounded out the hit parade of 1919 or thereabouts, numbers like “I’m just a Vagabond Lover” and “Pagan Love Song.”

While the children were herded away for swimming pool games, Somers and Gil Suiza, who wore a blue “Old Ironsides” T-shirt, and several other men worked for hours to set up 80 feet of miniature railroad track, circling the cul-de-sac. On it they placed a 4-foot-long, knee-high locomotive Somers built, machining many of the parts himself.

After a few derailments on the trial runs, Somers put on his striped engineer overalls and hauled groups of children on the small cars. He sat behind the little engine, dwarfing it, fed marshmallow-sized lumps of coal into the little boiler with leather-gauntleted hands and tweaked the itty-bitty throttle.

Some of the kids were more attracted by the crime prevention videos, but the male adults of Labrador Street were as impressed as they could be, standing in T-shirts, arms folded, beers half-drunk, to watch Somers chug around the circle, tooting his steam whistle.

A fire engine stopped by, responding to a request from the organizers backed by City Councilman Hal Bernson. The kids got to climb on it and try on the firemen’s bulky coats.

As the sun went down, the five charcoal grills in front of the Goodmans were lighted. Up and down the block, women appeared toting the one-dish contribution requested for the community potluck supper. Fathers began ladling out hamburgers and hot dogs.

At the entrance to the cul-de-sac stands a traffic sign that once said “not a through street,” which vandals have changed to “a rough street.”

In the long, sorry history of vandals, there must be few who were dumber than these.