Marching On : Parades and Parade-Goers Celebrate the Holiday With Small-Town Style and Old-Fashioned Fun

They may live in the long shadow of a megalopolis, but when it comes to celebrating America’s biggest holiday, the residents of Mayflower Village have only one thing in mind on July 4:

Keep it small.

So on Thursday, as millions in Southern California flocked to beaches and parks, the folks of Mayflower joined in a parade that began nine years ago when Liz Randel and her two children marched alone through their tree-lined neighborhood near Monrovia with noisemakers and hats.

The annual Mayflower Village parade was one of a dozen throughout the region Thursday that harked back to a time when America saw itself as a big nation of small towns--and when Fourth of July celebrations were as simple and bright as sparklers.

From Santa Catalina Island, where residents kicked off their event with dinghy races, to Sierra Madre, which featured 100 unrehearsed musicians calling themselves the Sierra Madre City College marching band, the Fourth of July parades represented a mix of the sublime and the purposely ridiculous.

“I’m Jorge Washington,” Jim Aguirre, dressed as Gen. George Washington, said from under a lawn umbrella at the Mayflower Village parade.

The hourlong event, which began and ended in front of Randel’s home on Atara Street, featured as homespun a celebration as any depicted in a Norman Rockwell painting: a fire engine, baton twirlers, a Dixieland band and scores of kids on bikes, skates, even scooters.

“It’s hometown America. Like back in the ‘50s,” Ned Kuehnle said as he carried his young son, Blake, along Atara Street.

“Anybody can participate,” Joe Maltese, 41, said as he and wife and son watched the event. “You can bring your pets and dress them up, you can ride a bike, you can roller-blade.

“It’s basically anything you want to do,” said Maltese, who last year outfitted the family’s pit bull, Patches, with bows and Old Glory. “It’s not a big deal, but it’s fun.”

So determined are the residents to keep their event small that they have resisted using Monrovia’s sedate main street, Myrtle Avenue, for the parade.

“You don’t get any more Podunk than that,” joked Milan Ubovich, the parade’s official announcer.

In Sunland-Tujunga, the high-arching spray from city fire trucks was welcomed on a hot afternoon by some of the thousands who lined its parade route.

Five-year-old Jaime Pickard jumped with delight in the refreshing mist, and her 8-year-old brother Jason waved from the cab of a firetruck. How did Jason get to ride there? “He just asked,” said mom Peggy Pickard.

Parade organizer Ted Mertz, 80, said the 14th annual parade drew 79 entries--from the usual small bands, horses, motorcyclists and drill teams to Ormly Gumfudgin, who claims to be the world’s only player of the bazooka, a horn made of two gas pipes and a whiskey funnel.

In South Pasadena, several thousand people lined historic Mission Street for that city’s 15th annual holiday parade--one that eclipsed many other July 4 celebrations in size but still had the flavor of an old, small-town celebration.

“It’s like a time warp,” parade volunteer Gabe Gutierrez said as he watched the antique cars and rows of marching children make their way down Mission, a street where many of the red brick buildings date to the 1920s.

“This is small-town. And we want to keep it that way,” said Joseph Banales, another volunteer and, like Gutierrez, a longtime resident of the town of 25,000.

South Pasadena’s event, officially dubbed the Festival of Balloons Parade, traveled a mile and a half through the city’s downtown and included several large floats, among them one built by plumbing contractor David Margrave, one of the event’s co-founders.

“When we first started this, there were like three people in it. [Now] it looks like there are more people in it than watching it,” said Margrave, scanning lines of parade participants that included everything from square-dancing adults to children towing inflatable alligators.

Back in Mayflower Village, as its parade ended, scores of children rushed to get their free ice cream for participating. And Grand Marshal Lida Stone, 102, just beamed as she sat watching the small crowd of spectators.

“It’s very old-fashioned,” announcer Ubovich said of the event.

And that’s the way residents want it, everyone agreed.

But next year will be the parade’s 10th anniversary, Ubovich and others noted on the lawn of Virginia Mullen, whose sister, Randel, founded the event.

“We ought to do something special next year,” Ubovich said. “Maybe . . . we should have hot dogs.”