New York Readies Ticker Tape for Troops

The city readied 200 miles of ticker tape, 10,000 pounds of confetti, a million yellow ribbons and enough balloons to fill a six-story building for today’s parade honoring veterans of Operation Desert Storm.

“Operation Welcome Home,” the biggest ticker-tape parade in the city’s history, is a four-hour march through the skyscraper-lined “Canyon of Heroes” by 24,000 people, more than half of the military personnel who served in the Persian Gulf War.

“We’re 99.9% ready,” Eric Andruss, the parade spokesman, said Sunday.

The parade will have three grand marshals: Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a Bronx native; Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of Operation Desert Storm, of Trenton, N.J., and Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.

The marshals are to ride in separate convertibles, followed by veterans from the 50 states and from 17 nations, celebrities such as Brooke Shields, Bo Diddley and Tony Orlando, and New Yorkers in the ethnic attire of 20 nations.

More than a million people are expected to turn out for the parade, starting at 11:30 a.m. from Battery Park at the tip of lower Manhattan and moving northward for a mile along Broadway through the financial district, past City Hall and up to Worth Street.

Military hardware on display will include several tanks, a jet fighter and a Patriot missile. A fireworks exhibition tonight is expected to feature simulation of a Patriot missile intercepting a Scud missile.

To cover parade costs, a private sponsoring group raised more than $5 million. Donors ranged from corporations to fourth-graders in Briarcliff, N.Y., who raised $800 selling hot dogs.

Several protest demonstrations are planned, and police said they would have 3,000 officers on duty in case trouble should develop.

Meanwhile, representatives of the four branches of the armed forces on Sunday dropped into the Hudson River more than 300 roses--one for each American killed in the Persian Gulf War--during a memorial service on the deck of the carrier Intrepid.