Last Independence Day, I mowed my lawn. We don’t generally do much with on the holiday. But last year, while mowing the lawn, I heard the radio station on location at the Marshfield, Missouri, Independence Day Parade, billed as the oldest continuously running July 4th parade west of the Mississippi. And I thought it might be an interesting thing to go to an Independence Day parade. For we hadn’t been to one since… what, 2009?
When I was a kid in Milwaukee, it was just a thing. A small neighborhood parade went past my grandparents’ house on 33rd Street and ended in Smith Park, so we did that all the time at least a couple of years so I thought of it as “all the time.” The parade was chock full of marching bands, veterans’ groups, and neighborhood kids on their bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. When the parade had passed, the neighborhood fell in and followed them to Smith Park for little ice cream cups with wooden spoons.
After my parents divorced, we came to Missouri, and… Nothing happening down here, parade-wise, but a lot of times where we kids convinced, easily-because-they-wanted-the-money, operators of the fireworks stand up the hill from the trailer park that we were 13, and so we did that instead. Many summers, though, we spent in Wisconsin with my father, and his new neighborhood might have had a parade–but I know think that they had a festival, with ice cream and wooden spoons and all, up there. But a quick search indicates that those parks no longer have events, probably to save money and probably because neighborhoods are temporary these days, so who would go to a neighborhood event? Also, they’re probably not very safe these days anyway (say, why isn’t this footage being seen on stateside news outlets?).
After that, what, 1994 ish?–I didn’t go to parades, Independence Day or otherwise, very much. We went to the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in St. Louis around the turn of the century, downtown whilst we were living in Casinoport. That was at the invitation of one of my beautiful wife’s co-workers, although we never saw him there.
After we had a baby (and moved to Old Trees), we could walk down to the Old Trees parade, and we did in 2007 and, maybe? 2009. It was the first of the modern parades: Light on bands and marching and elaborate floats, and heavy on cars–the Corvette club, the Mustang club, the old cars club. They had a good representation of old military vehicles, jeeps, two ton trucks, and whatnot. Political candidates and local organizations and probably youngsters from the high school vying for a crown of some sort. I rather enjoyed it, and it made me feel like a dad in a family, for sure.
But when we moved to Nogglestead, we’re a bit afield of parades. I don’t think Battlefield, the closest town has one, nor to my knowledge does Republic. So we went through another long draught, for sure, broken by attendance at a Christmas parade in Springfield the year after we arrived (where my oldest saw a girl in his class in one of the Corvettes, so he really thought Springfield was a small town) and one or two in Republic, including one that a couple when the oldest marched with the high school band (the youngest was supposed to his only year in the marching band, but he turned up at the parade without his band shoes and was kept out). It doesn’t help that many of the parades are time-shifted–the Independence Day will come on a Saturday before or after July 4, the Christmas parades are sometime in the beginning of December.
But this year, ah, we would make the trip. Marshfield is not so very far–although it does seem a long ways from home when we are coming back from St. Louis, and Marshfield is almost home but not just minutes away–but our trip to an estate sale last year (already?) put it into its rightful orbit around Nogglestead: A little under an hour by car, so as close as Aurora or Crane, but it seems further because we have to swing out and around Springfield to get there. We left a little after 8 to get to Marshfield, leaving plenty of time to find parking and to walk–which turned out to be just the right amount of time because by the time I hit the head and we walked the (crowded) parade route to find a spot which turned out to be a curb right outside the city courthouse (not the federal courthouse on the corner to the west or the county courthouse on the corner to the east). Right outside…. Well, that’s another story.
The parade itself was two hours long, but: Only one marching band, the high school band. A couple of veterans’ groups on flatbed trucks or trailers–with very few veterans from the mid-20th century wars left. Not depicted: Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Iraq II, or Afghanistan.
But depicted: The Sons of Confederate Veterans:
With a confederate flag and all. Wikipedia unhelpfully sermonizes:
The Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) is an American neo-Confederate[1] nonprofit organization of male descendants of Confederate soldiers[2]: 6–9 that commemorates these ancestors, funds and dedicates monuments to them, and promotes the pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy.
The SCV was founded on July 1, 1896, in Richmond, Virginia, by R. E. Lee Camp, No. 1 of the Confederate Veterans.[3][4] Its headquarters is at Elm Springs in Columbia, Tennessee.[2]: 29
In recent decades, governors, legislators, courts, corporations, and anti-racism activists have emphasized the increasingly controversial public display of Confederate symbols—especially after the 2014 Ferguson unrest, the 2015 Charleston church shooting, and the 2020 murder of George Floyd. SCV has responded with its coordinated display of larger and more prominent public displays of the battle flag, some in directly defiant counter-protest.
Some of that is undoubtedly true. But not all of it.
At any rate, again, it was heavily motorized–the marching band might have been the only marchers in it. The Springfield Shriners were in heavy rotation, with a variety of motorized vehicles including little trucks, barrels on wheels, motorbikes, and motor trikes spaced throughout the parade. A number of candidate presentations, but few actual candidates. And, at the very end, a number of horses and carriages, mostly promoting a local cowboy church–but nobody scooping horse poop, which was unfortunate. One of the early horses left a deposit right by us, and the rest of the horses decided that was the official horsebox and started going in the same place. Within minutes, our spot smelled like a barn, and if they hadn’t been at the end of the parade, we would have left anyway.
But, in addition to the normalcy of the stars-and-bars: So. I was gorging on the thrown candy that came our way (except the suckers), and I tucked the wrappers in my shirt pocket. I took a couple of photos and stuck the camera in my shirt pocket. I sent my youngest looking for cold drinks with a couple of Jacksons, and when he came back with free cold water, I stuck the money in the shirt pocket. When I was going for candy, the phone fell out of my pocket, so I put it back into my pants pocket. And when the parade was over, I went to a trash can to empty the pocket, and I mindlessly tossed the money into the trash. Fortunately, another guy was throwing something away, and fortunately (by design), we’re in southwest Missouri where people are generally good, and he said, “Someone’s throwing away money.” So I was able to recover the cash. I mean, he could have just grabbed them himself, but he did not. So I’ll trade having to see “evidence of pseudohistorical Lost Cause ideology and corresponding white supremacy”–just the celebration of regional heritage, and if you know your regional history, you’ll know it was not homogeneous and it was awfully bloody–for honest people.
But: Having been, we will probably not go next year. It was a whole family excursion, and I think my oldest is coming to realize how few of those we have left now that he’s looking, at a distance but in sight, at moving out.
But: I see on the local news sites stories about a local neighborhood Independence Day parade with kids on bedecked bicycles and Big Wheels. Maybe that’s where the real action is. Maybe next year.
