Friends of Bellflower Help City Celebrate 31st Birthday

The Friendly City is celebrating its birthday.

Since last weekend, the city of Bellflower has been staging “Liberty Week,” featuring a variety of community activities that will include a Saturday morning parade of local celebrities.

The 2-hour downtown “Celebration of Flags” parade and patriotic fireworks display afterward will culminate what for more than two decades has been an annual commemoration of Bellflower’s incorporation in 1957.

This year’s effort is the most ambitious since the city began sponsoring the celebration in 1967, officials said. More than 10,000 residents are expected to attend the 20 or so events. There is a beauty pageant, a community carnival, a sky-diving show and a cake-cutting ceremony, among other things. Delegates from Bellflower’s sister city, Los Mochis, Mexico, have traveled here to participate.

Bellflower has budgeted about $40,000 to sponsor the various events. Officials said they expect to recoup some of that money through registration fees but officials declined to speculate how much money the city will collect by the end of the week.

Last Saturday morning, a prayer breakfast with community leaders featured Jerry Levin, the former Cable News Network reporter who was kidnapped in Beirut in 1984 and released a year later.

Residents and local business owners also participated in 5-K and 10-K races and a tricycle race down Bellflower Boulevard. Entry fees for the tricycle race will be turned over to KABC’s Dr. George Fischbeck, who sponsors a yearly Toys for Porterville Christmas gift-giving effort.

During the week, Jill K. Ferris, 17, was chosen from 14 contestants to represent Bellflower in next year’s Miss California Pageant. The newly crowned Miss Bellflower will be among 139 equestrian teams, floats, bands and other groups participating in Saturday’s parade.

The parade will begin at 11 a.m. at Bellflower and Walnut Street and travel north through the downtown business district to Jefferson Street. Peter R. Ellis of Pete Ellis Ford is grand marshal.

The week will end with a sky-diving exhibit Saturday at 1:30 p.m., a cake-cutting ceremony at T. Mayne Thompson Park Saturday night at 6 and a fireworks display at 6:30.