VENTURA COUNTY FAIR : Keeping Step With the Fair : Parade Through Town Warms Up Spectators for String of Activities

It may be fun to watch a parade, but it can be sheer hell to march in one.

Ask Shaun Yen. The 15-year-old band member from Thousand Oaks High School blew his tuba and marched for about 2 1/2 hours--the time it took for the Ventura County Fair Parade to crawl down a two-mile stretch of Main Street on Saturday.

“It takes all the air out of you,” said Yen, who was quaffing a soda across the street from San Buenaventura Mission after the parade. “When you’re marching and playing at the same time, you get really out of breath.”

John Pak, a 20-year-old martial arts student from Ventura, wasn’t exactly rested either after marching through Ventura with the Way of Orient sports club.

“We have to do demonstrations--kicking and punching and breaking boards,” said Pak, as he recuperated under the shade of a palm tree. “We’re pretty exhausted.”

Parade first-timer Andrew Reynolds survived perhaps the most trying experience of them all. The 10-year-old from Camarillo stamped through town in the roasting noonday sun playing the bagpipes and wearing a kilt.

“The blowing is difficult because you have to blow very hard to get the sound out of it,” said the youngest member of the Los Angeles District Pipe Band. “And you have to keep in step, which is hard.”

But the spectators lining the resurfaced streets of Ventura’s downtown appeared to appreciate everyone’s efforts.

The applause thundered when the 150-piece Thousand Oaks High School band rolled down the street like a musical tank. The spectators whistled when Jesse Gutierrez, a 12-year-old Oxnard boy dressed in cowboy garb, jumped in and out of his twirling lasso. And they hooted when employees from the Lucy in the Sky hair salon in Ventura motored by in a 1963 Ford Galaxy studded with more than 40 Garfield stuffed animals.

“Yeah, moms,” said Traci Maniaci, a 34-year-old homemaker from Orange County, as the members of the Moms Club of Ventura rolled by atop a flatbed truck.

“I’m a mom,” Maniaci said, pumping her fist in the air. “The job is not easy and it does not pay well at all.”

But Maniaci’s enthusiasm receded somewhat when a Miss Teen “Somewhere” floated by in a convertible.

“I want to know why it’s always a blonde,” she said.

Not every parade entry set out to showboat local talent or advertise a local business or politician. Ventura resident Raul Caballero drifted by the crowd imprisoned in a bamboo cage to spotlight a different cause altogether.

“People need to know that there are still prisoners of war in Asia,” said Caballero, a 47-year-old Vietnam veteran. “Sometimes showing them is a lot better than just telling them.”

As the parade petered out shortly before 1 p.m., hundreds of spectators migrated across the Ventura Freeway to experience Day 4 of the Ventura County Fair. And gamely pushing baby strollers, dozens of moms and dads swarmed a small stage at the fairgrounds to enter their babies in walking and crawling races called the Diaper Derby.

They begged. They screamed. They banged their fists on the stage.

But for some luckless parents, all the cotton candy in the world wouldn’t persuade their little ones to begin crawling toward the finish line.

Sierra Smith, a 9-month-old blue-eyed blonde from Ventura, surprised even her mother Fran when she won the trophy after beating out the competition in two separate crawling heats.

“Yes, I guess she does show promise after all,” said Smith, 41, who entered her daughter on a lark. “She’s going to be a long-distance runner.”

Derek Stern’s parents fed their 13-month-old toddler power meals of bacon and pizza to prepare him for the afternoon’s walking race. But Steve Stern was already confident of his son’s potential before Derek trotted first across the finish lane into his mother’s open arms.

“He loves to walk,” said the 40-year-old Simi Valley resident. “He runs good on a full stomach.”

Stern celebrated the victory by hoisting tiny Derek into the air.

“I’m ecstatic,” Stern said. “I knew he could do it, but he just blew by everybody.”

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